What do the heads on Easter Island represent?

What do moais represent? Moais with full bodies visible at Ahu Tongariki. Moai statues were built to honor chieftain or other important people who had passed away. They were placed on rectangular stone platforms called ahu, which are tombs for the people that the statues represented.

What are the statues on Easter Island said to represent?

They stand with their backs to the sea and are believed by most archaeologists to represent the spirits of ancestors, chiefs, or other high-ranking males who held important positions in the history of Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, the name given by the indigenous people to their island in the 1860s.

What is mysterious about Stonehenge and Easter Island?

Out of all the mysterious structures in the world, the Easter Island Moai and the large slabs of Stonehenge are perhaps the most famous. Stonehenge is extremely old — radiocarbon dating suggest the stones were raised sometime in 2400 and 2200 BC, but another theory places the construction all the way back at 3000 BC.

How did the heads get on Easter Island?

Easter Island – The Statues and Rock Art of Rapa Nui. Using basalt stone picks, the Easter Island Moai were carved from the solidified volcanic ash of Rano Raraku volcano. Once completed, the statues were then moved from the quarry to their intended site and erected on an ‘ahu’.

Why were the Easter Island heads created?

In the Rapa Nui language, the Easter Island statues are called Moai Aringa Ora, which means “the living face of our ancestors”. The most common interpretation is that these statues were created in order to preserve the energy of the natives after death.

How did the stone heads get on Easter Island?

Who put the heads on Easter Island?

Rapa Nui people
The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people.

Who made the Easter Island heads?

The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people. In 1995, UNESCO named Easter Island a World Heritage Site, with much of the island protected within Rapa Nui National Park.