Easter Island in the South Pacific is well-known for its numerous moai, the stone statues located along its coastline. Which country does the island belong to?
"the jaw bone of a horse, upaupa, an accordion, and stones, which are clapped together for percussive effect. Due to ongoing contacts with Chile and elsewhere in South America, Latin American music has had influences on the music of Easter Island. Tango, for example, has spawned an Easter Island style called tango Rapanui, characterized by a simple guitar accompaniment instead of the frenetic bandoneon. The first music school on the island was opened in 2012 by Mahani Teave, and teachers piano, cello, ukulele, and violin. Music of Easter Island Easter Island is located in the Pacific Ocean. Though its earliest"
"Easter Island Easter Island (, ) is a Chilean island in the southeastern Pacific Ocean, at the southeasternmost point of the Polynesian Triangle in Oceania. Easter Island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called ""moai"", 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. It is believed that Easter Island's Polynesian inhabitants arrived on Easter Island sometime near 1200 AD. They created a thriving and industrious culture, as evidenced by the island's numerous enormous stone ""moai"" and"
"Easter Island but looks distinct. This has caused inconsistent drawings to be adopted for this emoji by various companies with proprietary emoji images. Moai Moai , or mo‘ai, are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads three-eighths the size of the whole statue. The moai are chiefly the living faces (""aringa"
"warmer than in the summer, requires more than a bit of fortitude. Chilean territory extends as far west as Polynesia. The best known of Chile's Pacific Islands is Easter Island (Isla de Pascua, also known by its Polynesian name of Rapa Nui), with a population of 2,800 people. Located west of Chile's mainland port of Caldera, just below the Tropic of Capricorn, Easter Island provides Chile a gateway to the Pacific. It is noted for its 867 monoliths (moais), which are huge (up to twenty meters high) and mysterious, expressionless faces sculpted of volcanic stone. The Juan Fernández Islands, located"
"Moai Moai , or mo‘ai, are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island in eastern Polynesia between the years 1250 and 1500. Nearly half are still at Rano Raraku, the main moai quarry, but hundreds were transported from there and set on stone platforms called ahu around the island's perimeter. Almost all moai have overly large heads three-eighths the size of the whole statue. The moai are chiefly the living faces (""aringa ora"") of deified ancestors (""aringa ora ata tepuna""). The statues still gazed inland across their clan lands when Europeans first visited the island"
"exploration of Easter Island (1914) recorded that the indigenous population strongly rejected allegations that they or their ancestors had been cannibals. The most important myths are: The Rapa Nui people had a Stone Age culture and made extensive use of local stone: The large stone statues, or ""moai"", for which Easter Island is famous, were carved in the period 1100–1680 AD (rectified radio-carbon dates). A total of 887 monolithic stone statues have been inventoried on the island and in museum collections. Although often identified as ""Easter Island heads"", the statues have torsos, most of them ending at the top of"
"number of moai, some of which are partially buried to their shoulders in the spoil from the quarry. They are distinctive in that their eyes were not hollowed out, they do not have pukao and they were not cast down in the island's civil wars. For this last reason, they supplied some of the most famous images of the island. Tukuturi is an unusual moai. Its beard and kneeling posture distinguish it from standard moai. The peculiar posture of this statue is well known on Easter Island and is called ""tuku turi"" or simply ""tuku."" It was the posture used"
"Hoa Hakananai'a Hoa Hakananai'a is a ""moai"" (Easter Island statue) housed in the British Museum in London. It was taken from ‘Orongo, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in November 1868 by the crew of the British ship , and arrived in England in August 1869. Though relatively small, it is considered to be typical of the island’s statue form, but distinguished by carvings added to the back, associated with the island birdman cult. It has been described as a ""masterpiece"" and ""without a doubt, the finest example of Easter Island sculpture"". The statue was identified as Hoa Hakananai'a by islanders at"
"1500 CE and transported throughout Easter Island. The moai were believed to be the living faces of ancestors and had all been toppled by 1868. The moai rest on large stone platforms called ""ahu"", the most famous of which are Ahu Tongariki, the largest ahu, and Ahu Vinapu. Some moai have hats of red volcanic stone known as ""Pukao"". Currently, the Rapa Nui and the Chilean government are focused on preserving and restoring the statues, including denoting an area that includes many of the statues, Rapa Nui National Park, as a World Heritage site. The Rapa Nui have historically made"
"of the island has been declared as Rapa Nui National Park which, on 22 March 1996, UNESCO designated a World Heritage Site under cultural criteria (i), (iii), & (v). The park is under the administrative control of the Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF), which provides legal protection to the total area of the island. As Easter Island has insufficient resources for conserving its natural heritage, the Government of Chile and the National Council of Monuments have provided financial support for the conservation efforts. Geographically isolated, the island forms the eastern geographic and cultural boundary of Polynesia. It is west of Chile,"
"one kneeling moai, the statues do not have clearly visible legs. Though moai are whole-body statues, they are erroneously referred to as ""Easter Island heads"" in some popular literature. This is partly because of the disproportionate size of most moai heads, and partly because many of the iconic images for the island showing upright moai are the statues on the slopes of Rano Raraku, many of which are buried to their shoulders. Some of the ""heads"" at Rano Raraku have been excavated and their bodies seen, and observed to have markings that had been protected from erosion by their burial."
"of 2018 Tarita Alarcon Rapu, the Governor of Easter Island, asked the British Museum to return the statue. The Rapa Nui people have recently gained administration over their ancestral lands on Easter Island. The museum agreed to discuss the statue with representatives of the Rapa Nui people . The museum does not list the statue as a gift in its digital archives, it is recorded as a collected artifact. Hoa Hakananai'a Hoa Hakananai'a is a ""moai"" (Easter Island statue) housed in the British Museum in London. It was taken from ‘Orongo, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in November 1868 by the"
"The average height of the moai is about , with the average width at the base around . These massive creations usually weigh around 12.5 tonnes (13.8 tons) each. All but 53 of the more than 900 moai known to date were carved from tuff (a compressed volcanic ash) from Rano Raraku, where 394 moai in varying states of completion are still visible today. There are also 13 moai carved from basalt, 22 from trachyte and 17 from fragile red scoria. At the end of carving, the builders would rub the statue with pumice. Easter Island statues are known for"
"in Oceania. Starting around 1100 AD, the people of Easter Island would begin construction of nearly 900 moai (large stone statues). At about 1200 AD, the people of Pohnpei, a Micronesian island, would embark on another megalithic construction, building Nan Madol, a city of artificial islands and a system of canals. Hawaiian art includes wood carvings, feather work, petroglyphs, bark cloth (called kapa in Hawaiian and tapa elsewhere in the Pacific) and tattoos. Native Hawaiians had neither metal nor woven cloth. Rugby union is one of the region's most prominent sports, and is the national sport of New Zealand, Samoa,"
"and starting 600 BC, works of the Dongson culture of Vietnam, known for their bronze working, can be found in Oceania, and their imagery has a strong influence on the indigenous artistic tradition. Records to 1000 AD continue to be few, however most artistic tradition are continued to this point, such as New Guinea sculpture and Australian rock art, although the period is characterized by increasing trade and interaction as well as new areas being settled, including Hawaii, Easter Island, Tahiti, and New Zealand. Starting around 1100 AD, the people of Easter Island would begin construction of nearly 900 moai"
"the French schooner ""Tamara"", with the salvaged ""Kon-Tiki"" in tow. Heyerdahl believed that the original inhabitants of Easter Island were migrants from Peru. He argued that the monumental statues known as moai resembled sculptures more typical of pre-Columbian Peru than any Polynesian designs. He believed that the Easter Island myth of a power struggle between two peoples called the Hanau epe and Hanau momoko was a memory of conflicts between the original inhabitants of the island and a later wave of Native Americans from the Northwest coast, eventually leading to the annihilation of the Hanau epe and the destruction of"
"has the Desventuradas Islands and the Juan Fernández Islands, also located in the Eastern Pacific and to the East of Easter Island. Akin to Clipperton, these are nominally associated with South America. The United States of America controls numerous territories in Oceania, including the state of Hawaii and the territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa. The Malay Archipelago is usually divided between Asia and Australasia, most commonly along the anthropologic Melanesian line or Weber's Line. Indonesia controls the western half of New Guinea, geographically part of Australasia. The eastern half of the island is part of"
"Tahiti, and Easter Island, had only relatively recently been settled by indigenous peoples. The most famous Polynesian art forms are the Moai (statues) of Rapa Nui/Easter Island. Polynesian art is characteristically ornate, and often meant to contain supernatural power or mana. Polynesian works of art were thought to contain spiritual power and could affect change in the world. However the period beyond 1600 AD had seen intense interaction with European explorers, in addition to continuing earlier cultural traditions. The collections of European explorers during the period show that classical Polynesian art was indeed flourishing. In the 19th century, depopulation of"
"mostly on the coast, where they are distributed fairly evenly except on the western slopes of Mount Terevaka and the Rano Kau and Poike headlands. These are the three areas with the least low-lying coastal land, and apart from Poike the furthest areas from Rano Raraku. One ahu with several moai was recorded on the cliffs at Rano Kau in the 1880s but had fallen to the beach before the Routledge expedition. One of the highest-quality examples of Easter Island stone masonry is the rear wall of the ahu at Vinapu. Made without mortar by shaping hard basalt rocks of"
"boats was able to reach Easter Island from Mangareva in 19 days. According to oral traditions recorded by missionaries in the 1860s, the island originally had a strong class system, with an ""ariki"", or high chief, wielding great power over nine other clans and their respective chiefs. The high chief was the eldest descendant through first-born lines of the island's legendary founder, Hotu Matu'a. The most visible element in the culture was the production of massive moai statues that some believe represented deified ancestors. According to ""National Geographic"", ""Most scholars suspect that the moai were created to honor ancestors, chiefs,"
"Relocation of moai objects Since the removal of the first moai Hoa Hakananai'a from Easter Island in 1868 by the crew of HMS ""Topaze"", 79 complete moai, heads, torsos, pukao, and moai figurines are also known to have been removed from their original sites, and transferred to either private collections, the collections of museums (including the Museo Arqueological Padre Sebastian Englert on Easter Island), or, most recently to the university grounds of the American University, Washington D.C. in 2000. Some of the moai have been further transferred between museums and private collections, for reasons such as the moais' preservation, academic"
"the resulting epidemics, so that the tablets had become more widely distributed by Eyraud's day. Orliac points out that Tablet C would appear to predate the Spanish visit by at least a century. Easter Island has the richest assortment of petroglyphs in Polynesia. Nearly every suitable surface has been carved, including the stone walls of some houses and a few of the famous ""mo‘ai"" statues and their fallen topknots. Around one thousand sites with over four thousand glyphs have been catalogued, some in bas- or sunken-relief, and some painted red and white. Designs include a concentration of chimeric bird-man figures"
"also have been regarded as the embodiment of powerful living or former chiefs and important lineage status symbols. Each moai presented a status: ""The larger the statue placed upon an ahu, the more mana the chief who commissioned it had."" The competition for grandest statue was ever prevalent in the culture of the Easter Islanders. The proof stems from the varying sizes of moai. Completed statues were moved to ahu mostly on the coast, then erected, sometimes with red stone cylinders (pukao) on their heads. Moai must have been extremely expensive to craft and transport; not only would the actual"
"the installation plays off of the moai, large, monolithic human figures carved between 1250 and 1500 A.D. on Easter Island in the southeastern Pacific Island. Israel says that he was inspired when he found four giant replicas of the sculptures at a prop house in Hollywood a few years earlier. The first of his video series, produced in 2010, invites viewers to “watch and follow the lives of jaded young adults as they navigate the golden light and melancholic shadows of life in the magical dreamscape of Los Angeles.” The dialogue-free series is composed of a trailer and ten clips"
"to the ""Encyclopædia Britannica"", the Pacific islands consist of three regions: The islands are scattered across a triangle covering the east-central region of the Pacific Ocean. The triangle is bound by the Hawaiian Islands in the north, New Zealand in the west, and Easter Island in the east. The rest of Polynesia includes the Samoan islands (American Samoa and Western Samoa), the Cook Islands, French Polynesia (Tahiti and The Society Islands, Marquesas Islands, Austral Islands and the Tuamotu Archipelago), Niue Island, Tokelau and Tuvalu, Tonga, Wallis and Futuna, Rotuma Island and Pitcairn Island. The island of New Guinea, the Bismarck"
"Sebastian Englert and Chilean researchers. The EISP (Easter Island Statue Project) conducted research and documentation on many of the moai on Rapa Nui and the artifacts held in museums overseas. The purpose of the project is to understand the figures' original use, context, and meaning, with the results being provided to the Rapa Nui families and the island's public agencies that are responsible for conservation and preservation of the moai. Other studies include work by Britton Shepardson and Terry L. Hunt and Carl P. Lipo. In 2008, a Finnish tourist chipped a piece off the ear of one moai. The"
"Ahu Tongariki Ahu Tongariki is the largest ahu on Easter Island. Its moai were toppled during the island's civil wars and in the twentieth century the ahu was swept inland by a tsunami. It has since been restored and has fifteen moai including an 86 tonne moai that was the heaviest ever erected on the island. Ahu Tongariki is one kilometer from Rano Raraku and Poike in the Hotu-iti area of Rapa Nui National Park. All the moai here face sunset during Summer Solstice. ""Ahu Tongariki"" was the main centre and capital of the Hotu Iti, the eastern confederation of"
"Typical of Easter Island ""moai"", Hoa Hakananai'a features a heavy brow, blocky face with prominent nose and jutting chin, nipples, thin, lightly angled arms down the sides and hands reaching towards the stomach, which is near the base. It has a raised Y-shape in the centre of the chin, eyes hollowed out in a way characteristic of statues erected elsewhere on the island on ceremonial ""ahu"" platforms, and long, rectangular stylised ears. A line around the base of the neck is interpreted as representing the clavicles; there is a semi-circular hollow for the suprasternal notch. In its original form, the"
"History of Easter Island Geologically one of the youngest inhabited territories on Earth, Easter Island, located in the mid-Pacific Ocean, was, for most of its history, one of the most isolated. Its inhabitants, the Rapa Nui, have endured famines, epidemics of disease and cannibalism, civil war, environmental collapse, slave raids, various colonial contacts, and have seen their population crash on more than one occasion. The ensuing cultural legacy has brought the island notoriety out of proportion to the number of its inhabitants. Early European visitors to Easter Island recorded the local oral traditions about the original settlers. In these traditions,"
"the 1996 census there were 364 people living on the island. Mouli Island Mouli Island (sometimes also spelled Mouly Island; also known as Hwakaiö) is one of the Loyalty Islands, in the archipelago of New Caledonia, an overseas territory of France in the Pacific Ocean. The island is part of the commune (municipality) of Ouvéa, in the Loyalty Islands Province of New Caledonia. Mouli Island lies in the atoll of Ouvéa, separated from Ouvéa Island by a pass about 200 yards wide. A bridge opened to car traffic spans the pass between the two islands and offers very scenic views"
"deceased never were without coins, the bereaved offered a drachma coin made of silver. A very obscure mortuary cult was fostered by the natives of the Easter Islands. Because almost no inscription survived from the height of the Easter Island culture and attempts to translate the ominous Rongorongo language were undertaken for a long time, the only knowledge about the mortuary cult of the Easter Islands is based on reconstructions. The only remains of the mortuary cults are the most famous at the same time: giant statues made of volcanic stone, called ""Moai"", were placed on flat platforms, bedighted with"
"pure Rapa Nui blood died out. Annexation with Chile brought new influences, and today there are only a few individuals left with ties to the original population."" Eleven or more moai have been removed from the island and transported to locations around the world, including six out of the thirteen moai that were carved from basalt. From 1955 through 1978, an American archaeologist, William Mulloy, undertook extensive investigation of the production, transportation and erection of Easter Island's monumental statuary. Mulloy's Rapa Nui projects include the investigation of the Akivi-Vaiteka Complex and the physical restoration of Ahu Akivi (1960); the investigation"
"Polynesian Triangle The Polynesian Triangle is a region of the Pacific Ocean with three island groups at its corners: Hawaii (formerly ""the Sandwich Islands""), Easter Island (""Rapa Nui"") and New Zealand (""Aotearoa""). It is often used as a simple way to define Polynesia. Outside the triangle, there are traces of Polynesian settlement as far north as Necker Island (""Mokumanamana""), as far east as Salas y Gómez Island (""Motu Motiro Hiva""), and as far south as Enderby Island (""Motu Maha""). There was also once Polynesian settlement on Norfolk Island and Kermadec Island (""Rangitahua""). However, by the time the Europeans first arrived,"