12
ARTICLE
ARTICLE
Amazing Discovery Found Underneath The Easter Island’s Moai
The grand mystery of the heads of Easter Island
has just deepened…literally! Archeologists have
excavated around the heads and guess what
they found? The heads have full bodies! The
bodies are covered in ancient, and as of yet indecipherable writings, called petroglyphs.
Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited islands in the world, located over 2,000 miles
off the coast of Chile. The statues, called Moai,
were carved by the Rapu Nai people sometime
between 1250 and 1500 CE. According to Wikipedia, the tallest of the 887 Moai is over 30 feet
tall and weighs 82 tons. Another, if completed,
would have been almost 70 feet tall and would
have weighed 270 tons! Incredibly, many of
these enormous statues were moved to various
places around the island. The faces represent
ancestors that are seen as deities.
The world was shocked to discover the famous
Easter Island heads actually had bodies attached. Now new pictures have emerged showing their previously hidden torsos are covered
with intricate tattoos.
These include crescents carved on the backs of
the towering monoliths, which academics say
represent the canoes of the Polynesians who
made them. T
he first photographs of the hidden torsos
emerged in 2012, two years after Jo Anne Van
Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Proj-
ect , began excavating the monoliths with the
help of local Rapa Nui people.
She said: “The reason people think they are (only)
heads is there are about 150 statues buried up to
the shoulders on the slope of a volcano, and these
are the most famous, most beautiful and most photographed of all the Easter Island statues. This suggested to people who had not seen photos of (other
unearthed statues) that they are heads only.”
Archaeologists have studied the statues on the
island for about a century, and have actually
known about the hidden bodies since the earliest excavations in 1914.
The 887 giant statues - which are up to 10 met