Easter Island statues may have been built by small independent groups

The monumental stone statues of Easter Island may have been created through a decentralized artistic and spiritual tradition, with many different communities making their own carved stone giants, rather than a unified effort coordinated by powerful rulers. It is the result of an attempt to definitively map the island’s main stone quarry.

Also known as Rapa Nui, Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean is believed to have been inhabited by Polynesian sailors since around 1200 AD.

Archaeological evidence suggests that the Rapa Nui people were not politically unified, but there is debate over whether the hundreds of stone statues known as moai were coordinated by a centralized authority.

The island had only one quarry supplying the volcanic rock from which the statues were carved, a site called Rano Raraku.

Carl Lipo of Binghamton University in New York and his colleagues used drones and high-tech mapping equipment to create the first 3D map of the quarry, which contains many unfinished moai. Previous studies have reached varying conclusions about the number of moai remaining in the quarry, Lipo says.

Lipo and his colleagues recorded 426 features depicting moai in various stages of completion, 341 trenches dug to outline blocks for carving, 133 quarried voids where statues were successfully removed, and five markers that likely served as anchor points to lower moai down slopes.

They also discovered that the quarry was divided into 30 work areas that each appeared distinct from the others and featured different carving techniques, Lipo says.

Combined with previous evidence showing that small teams could have moved the moai and that groups marked off separate territories at freshwater springs, Lipo says it appears the statue’s carving was not the result of centralized political authority.

“Monumentality represents competition between communities of peers rather than top-down mobilization,” he says.

There has been debate among historians over the supposed decline of the Rapa Nui people, with some arguing that overexploitation of resources led to devastating societal collapse, but others questioning this narrative.

Lipo says the collapse story assumes that centralized rulers directed the construction of the monuments, which led to deforestation and societal failure. “But if monumentality were decentralized, and this resulted from community-level competition rather than primary aggrandizement, then the island’s deforestation could not be blamed on megalomaniacal leadership,” Lipo says.

However, other researchers are not sure whether this interpretation is correct. Dale Simpson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign agrees that there was no single supreme leader like there was in other Polynesian cultures like Hawaii or Tonga. But, he said, the clans were not as separate and decentralized as Lipo and his colleagues claimed, and there had to be collaboration between the groups.

“I just wonder if they’re drinking a little too much Kool-Aid and not really thinking about the limiting factors in a small place like Rapa Nui where stone is king and if you don’t interact and share that stone, you can’t carve moai just within one clan,” he says.

Jo Anne Van Tilburg of the University of California, Los Angeles, says further research is underway to clarify how the Rapa Nui used Rano Raraku and that Lipo’s team’s conclusions are “premature and exaggerated.”

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