What are the stone heads on Easter Island for?
Moai statues were built to honor chieftain or other important people who had passed away. They were placed on rectangular stone platforms called ahu, which are tombs for the people that the statues represented.
What is the story behind the Easter Island heads?
Easter Island is famous for its stone statues of human figures, known as moai (meaning “statue”). The island is known to its inhabitants as Rapa Nui. The moai were probably carved to commemorate important ancestors and were made from around 1000 C.E. until the second half of the seventeenth century.
What are the heads called on Easter Island?
Moai
The Easter Island heads are known as Moai by the Rapa Nui people who carved the figures in the tropical South Pacific directly west of Chile.
Are Easter Island heads good luck?
Built to honour a chieftain or important people the natives believed the spirit of the person would forever watch over the tribe and bring good fortune. This is why the statues are called Moai: the word comes from Rapa Nui (the Polynesian language of Easter Island) and means “so that he can exist”.
What is the meaning of moai?
noun plural moai. any of the gigantic carved stone figures found on Easter Island (Rapa Nui)
What did the statues mean represent?
ancestors
Archaeologists believe that the statues were a representation of the ancient Polynesians’ ancestors. The moai statues face away from the ocean and towards the villages as if to watch over the people.
Which culture created the Easter Island heads?
The island is most famous for its nearly 1,000 extant monumental statues, called moai, which were created by the early Rapa Nui people.
What does moai mean?
What is the mystery of the Easter Island statues?
What purpose do the statues of Easter island Have? Archaeologists suggest that the statues were a representation of the Polynesian people’s ancestors. The Moai statues face away from the sea and towards the villages, by way of watching over the people.
Who made the heads on Easter Island?
The Easter Island is located at the southeastern Pacific Ocean, 3512 kilometers away from the nearest continental point in Chile. It is inhabited by the Rapa Nui people, whose ancestors in around 1250-1500 AD built the famous Easter Island Moai–large stone statues averagely weighed 14 tons and measured 4 meters high.
What do the statues represent?
They represent what people in the Past chose to celebrate and memorialise, they do not represent history. Indeed, teaching history is almost never the reason why they are erected. Instead, statues in public spaces since Antiquity have most typically been used to represent power and authority.