Explorers have long known there was more to the 887 statues on Easter Island—some 2,000 miles west of Chile—than just the statue heads made famous in photographs. When most people think of the ...

For decades, the global image of Rapa Nui — Easter Island — has been reduced to giant stone heads rising from the earth, as if the moai were incomplete sculptures missing their bodies. But this ...

Scholars have long debated how the massive stone figures of Rapa Nui got to where they stand today. A new study offers one possible explanation. The Rapa Nui moai, the monolithic stone figures of ...

Easter Island is famous for its giant monumental statues, called moai, built some 800 years ago. The volcanic rock used for the moai came from a quarry site called Rano Raraku. Archaeologists have ...