The moai are the monolithic stone figures carved by the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island (Rapa Nui), a Chilean island in the south-eastern Pacific, mostly between about 1250 and 1500. Some 887 were inventoried in the classic surveys and more than 900 are known today; about 95% were cut from the volcanic tuff of the Rano Raraku crater. The statues represent deified ancestors and were set on stone platforms called ahu. The average moai stands about 4 metres tall and weighs around 12.5 tonnes; the tallest ever raised, Paro, was almost 10 metres. They lie within Rapa Nui National Park, inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995.
Counting the Moai: 887, More Than 900, or 962?
The number most often quoted, 887, is the total of monolithic stone statues inventoried on the island and in museum collections. Surveys since then have found more, and statues were still being uncovered in 2023, so current counts exceed 900. A 2025 study of statue transport by Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo surveyed 962. The figure changes because a moai can be a finished statue on a platform, a half-carved figure still joined to the quarry wall, or a broken torso lying beside an old road.
Where they ended up matters as much as how many there are. Nearly half never left Rano Raraku, where 394 statues in varying states of completion are still visible. Only about a quarter were installed on ahu. The rest lie scattered across the island, most of them apparently on their way to a platform when the statue-building era ended. Of the 313 known ahu, 125 carried moai, usually only one.
Rano Raraku: Where 95 Percent of the Statues Were Cut
Rano Raraku is a crater of consolidated volcanic ash, or tuff, on the lower slopes of Terevaka, inside Rapa Nui National Park. It served as a quarry for about 500 years, until the early 18th century. Tuff is soft enough to carve with stone tools: the carvers used chisels called toki, mostly of basalt, which still lie all over the quarry, and sharpened them by chipping off a fresh edge. Water was splashed on the rock to soften it. One account has a team of five or six men taking about a year to finish a single statue.
The figure was first outlined in the rock wall and then chipped free, and the finished surface was rubbed smooth with pumice. Only 53 of the known statues are made of anything else, among them 13 of basalt, 22 of trachyte and 17 of fragile red scoria.
The statues standing on the outer slope are the source of the “Easter Island heads” image. They are buried to the shoulders or chest in spoil from the quarry, which is why many people assume the moai have no bodies. Excavated examples show full torsos, with carved markings that burial protected from erosion. These quarry statues differ from the platform moai: their eye sockets were never hollowed out, they have no topknots, and they were not thrown down in the island’s conflicts. One of them, Tukuturi, is unique: a bearded figure kneeling on bent legs. It may be linked to the later birdman cult, which would make it among the last moai made.
Paro, Tongariki and the Unfinished Giant: Sizing Up the Statues
Nearly every moai follows the same rules. The head is oversized, about three-eighths of the whole figure, with a heavy brow, a long nose with a fish-hook curl at the nostrils, thin pouting lips and elongated ears. The arms are carved in low relief, with long fingers resting on the hips and meeting at a loincloth. Apart from the kneeling Tukuturi, none has clearly visible legs. The average statue is about 4 metres tall and 1.6 metres wide at the base.
The tallest moai ever erected, Paro, measures 9.89 metres and weighs about 82 tonnes. Several other statues of similar weight were hauled to platforms on the north and south coasts. The heaviest statue ever raised is shorter and squatter: an 86-tonne moai at Ahu Tongariki. Still attached to the rock at Rano Raraku lies an unfinished figure of about 21 metres, almost twice the height of any completed moai. Estimates of what it would have weighed range from about 145 tonnes to 270 tonnes, many times more than any statue the islanders moved.
Ahu Tongariki, Puna Pau Topknots and Coral Eyes
A moai was not finished when it left the quarry. On its ahu it faced inland, over the clan’s land and settlements, with its back to the sea. The main exception is Ahu Akivi, an inland platform whose seven moai look towards the ocean; the American archaeologist William Mulloy restored it in 1960.
The largest platform is Ahu Tongariki, about 220 metres long, on the southern coast near Poike and 1 kilometre from Rano Raraku. It was the centre of the Hotu-iti clan. Its statues were toppled during the island’s civil wars, and in 1960 a tsunami triggered by the great earthquake off Chile swept the platform and its broken moai inland. A five-year restoration in the 1990s, led by the archaeologists Claudio Cristino and Patricia Vargas Casanova under an agreement between the Chilean government, the University of Chile and the Japanese crane maker Tadano, put 15 moai back in a row. They face the sunset at the winter solstice.
Some of the later moai wore a pukao, a cylinder of red stone representing the topknot of a chief; local tradition held that mana was kept in the hair. Every pukao was carved from the red scoria of Puna Pau, a small cinder cone on the edge of Hanga Roa and the only source of that stone. Unfinished and abandoned pukao still lie around its quarry, which a UK team excavated between 2009 and 2013.
The platform statues also had eyes. In 1979 the Rapa Nui archaeologist Sergio Rapu Haoa and his team reassembled fragments of white coral found at the ahu and showed that the deep eye sockets once held coral eyes with pupils of black obsidian or red scoria. Pieces already in the island’s museum were then recognised as eye fragments. Only moai set up on platforms seem to have been given carved sockets.
Making Statues Walk: Sledges, Rollers and the 2012 Rocking Test
How the statues crossed the island was a puzzle for centuries, made sharper by the fact that Europeans found the island almost treeless. Pollen and charcoal from the crater lakes show the original forest was cleared gradually, between about 800 and 1200 and again in the centuries before 1700. Rapa Nui oral tradition gives a simpler answer: the statues walked, commanded by mana.
Most early researchers assumed the moai were dragged lying down on wooden sledges or rolled on logs. Moving the largest erected statue that way was estimated to need about 1,500 people. In 1999 Jo Anne Van Tilburg had 60 people tow a nine-tonne replica on an A-frame sledge over rollers; the first attempt failed when the rollers jammed, and the second worked once tracks were set into the ground. Charles Love found rocking too unstable over more than a few hundred yards, but that 25 men could move a 10-tonne replica, standing upright on sled runners over log rollers, 46 metres in two minutes.
The upright idea goes back to 1986, when Pavel Pavel, Thor Heyerdahl and the Kon-Tiki Museum “walked” five- and nine-tonne moai with ropes, though chipping to the bases ended that trial early. In 2012 Terry Hunt, Carl Lipo and Sergio Rapu Haoa published a paper arguing that the statues travelled upright, rocked from side to side by teams pulling ropes on either side. To test it they made a 4.35-tonne concrete replica of a road moai, and 18 people moved it 100 metres in 40 minutes. A 2025 follow-up examined 62 statues abandoned along the island’s ancient roads and found that they share wide, D-shaped bases and a forward lean of about 6 to 15 degrees, features suited to rocking. Critics such as Sue Hamilton of University College London accept that the method works but say it does not prove it was the one used.
Toppled by 1868, and Hoa Hakananai’a in London
When the Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen arrived in 1722, the statues still stood. In the years that followed, every moai erected on an ahu was toppled. The French naval officer Abel Aubert du Petit-Thouars still reported some standing in 1838; by 1868 none remained except the half-buried figures at Rano Raraku. Oral histories describe a clan pushing over a statue at night, others speak of the earth shaking, and some statues may have fallen in earthquakes. Some fell forward, hiding their faces, and many broke at the neck. About 50 have been re-erected in modern times, the first at Ahu Ature Huke on Anakena beach in 1956, raised by traditional methods during Heyerdahl’s expedition.
At least ten moai have left the island, including statues now in the Louvre and the British Museum. The best known is Hoa Hakananai’a, a 2.42-metre, 4.2-tonne statue of dark flow lava that stood partly buried inside a stone house at the ceremonial village of Orongo. The crew of HMS Topaze took it in 1868, and it reached Plymouth on 16 August 1869. Queen Victoria passed it to the British Museum. Its back is carved with birdmen, ceremonial paddles and a sooty tern, carvings linked to the birdman cult that followed the statue era.
The Rapa Nui regard the statue as stolen. In November 2018 the island’s governor, Laura Rapu, asked the British Museum to return it; the museum agreed to discuss a loan, and its keeper for Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Lissant Bolton, visited the island in June 2019. The statue remains in London.
The moai left on the island face their own risks. Tuff weathers easily, which is why the clearest surface carving survives on basalt statues or on those protected by burial. In 2008 a Finnish tourist broke a piece off a moai’s ear, and in 2020 a runaway truck destroyed a statue. In October 2022, two months after the island reopened to visitors following its COVID-19 closure, a wildfire swept Rano Raraku, burning somewhere between 60 and 100 hectares by differing reports. The mayor, Pedro Edmunds Paoa, said it was started deliberately, and some of the damage to the quarry statues is described as irreparable. Protecting them now falls to the indigenous Ma’u Henua community, which has run Rapa Nui National Park since December 2017. For the island beyond its statues, from its volcanoes to its people today, see our Easter Island guide, the Rapa Nui World Heritage listing, and the wider picture of the country that governs it in our guide to Chile.