Easter Island statues may have been built by small independent groups

The monumental stone statues of Easter Island may have been created as a result of a decentralized artistic and spiritual tradition, with many different communities creating their own carved stone giants, rather than a cooperative effort coordinated by powerful rulers. This is the result of an attempt to accurately map the island's main quarry.

Also known as Rapa Nui, Easter Island in the Pacific Ocean is believed to have been settled by Polynesian seafarers from around 1200 AD.

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

There was only one quarry on the island that supplied the volcanic rock from which the statues were carved, a place called Rano Raraku.

Carl Lipo from Binghamton University in New York and his colleagues used drones and high-tech mapping equipment to create the first 3D map of a quarry containing many unfinished moai. According to Lipo, previous studies have come to different conclusions about the number of moai remaining in the quarry.

Lipo and his colleagues recorded 426 elements depicting moai in various stages of completion, 341 trenches cut into carving blocks, 133 excavated quarry voids from which statues were successfully removed, and five pillars that likely served as anchor points for the moai to be carried down the slopes.

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

Combined with previous evidence showing that small groups were able to move the moai and that groups marked out separate territories near fresh water sources, Lipo says the carving of the statue was not the result of centralized political authority.

“Monumentality is a competitive display between peer communities rather than a top-down mobilization,” he says.

There is debate among historians about Rapa Nui's supposed population decline, with some arguing that overexploitation of resources led to a devastating social collapse. but others question this narrative.

Lipo says the story of the collapse suggests that construction of the monuments was directed by centralized leaders, leading to deforestation and social crisis. “But if monumentality were decentralized and a result of community-based competition rather than primarily expansion, then deforestation on the island could not be blamed on megalomaniacal management,” Lipo says.

However, other researchers are not so sure about the correctness of this interpretation. Dale Simpson from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign agrees that there was not one overarching chief, as there was in other Polynesian cultures such as Hawaii or Tonga. But, he said, the clans were not as separate and decentralized as Lipo and his colleagues suggest, and there must have been cooperation between the groups.

“I just wonder if they're drinking too much of the Kool-Aid and not thinking about the limiting factors in a small place like Rapa Nui, where the 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 Ann Van Tilburg UCLA says further research is being done to find out how the Rapa Nui people used Rano Raraku, and Lipo's team's conclusions are “premature and exaggerated.”

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