A 2012 experiment showed proof of principle, so why is Lipo coming back to it now? “I always felt that [original] The experiment was somewhat unrelated to theory—we didn't have any particular expectations about the number of people, the speed of traffic, the grade of the road to walk on, and so on,” Lipo told Ars. There were also time constraints because the attempt was being filmed for a NOVA documentary.
“This experiment was essentially a test to see if we could do it or not,” he explained. “Luckily we did it and our joy at it was pretty well expressed in our hoots and hollers as he started working with such limited effort. Some limitations in work were due to the nature of television. [The film crew] I just wanted us – in just a day and a half – to try to do it. It was 4:30 on the last day when it finally worked, so we didn't have much time to study the variability. We also didn't have any specific predictions that could be tested.”
An example of a road moai that fell and was abandoned after an attempt was made to restore it by excavating underneath its base, resulting in it being partially buried at an angle.
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This time, “we wanted to explore a little physics: to show that what we were doing was fairly easy to predict from the physical properties of the moai—its shape, size, height, number of people on the ropes, etc.—and that our success in terms of team size and walking speed was as predicted,” Lipo said. “This allows us to answer one of the central criticisms that always comes up: 'Well, you did it with the 5-ton version that was 10 feet tall, but it will never work with the 30-foot version that weighs 30 tons or more.'
Everything about this base
You can have ahu (platforms) without moai (statues) and moai without ahu, usually along the roads leading to the ahu; they were probably transported and never made it to their destination. Lipo and Hunt compiled a database of 962 moai across the island, compiled from field research and photogrammetric documentation. Of particular interest to them were 62 statues located along ancient transport roads, which seemed to have been abandoned where they fell.
