The Stone Giants Beneath the Earth: The Mystery of the Moai

“The meaning of the moai to me, as an outsider to this island and to this culture, is ancestor. It’s the link with the past.” - Jo Anne Van Tilburg

In one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth stand hundreds of enormous stone faces staring silently across a volcanic landscape. They have elongated noses, heavy brows, compressed lips and heads so disproportionately large that for generations photographs made them appear to be nothing more than gigantic heads protruding from the ground. This image became so familiar that many people were genuinely shocked when archaeological photographs began circulating online showing excavators standing beside enormous torsos extending several metres beneath the soil. The famous Easter Island heads, it turned out, have bodies. They always did. The more interesting question is how so much of those bodies ended up underground.

The island is properly known as Rapa Nui and lies more than 3,500 kilometres west of South America in the Pacific Ocean. Polynesian voyagers settled the island centuries before Europeans arrived, and over the following generations the Rapanui developed one of the most distinctive monumental cultures anywhere in the world. The statues they created are called moai and are generally understood as representations of important ancestors. They were not simply decorations. Many were erected on ceremonial platforms called ahu and faced inland towards settlements, watching over the communities associated with them rather than staring mysteriously out to sea as is sometimes assumed.

Even determining exactly how many moai exist is more complicated than it sounds. UNESCO commonly gives a figure of around 900 statues, while archaeological studies based on detailed inventories have worked with totals in the region of 960. The Easter Island Statue Project has gone further and recorded approximately 1,300 monolithic sculptural objects when complete statues, incomplete statues, heads, torsos, fragments and shaped blocks are all included. Therefore, when someone says there are 887, 900, 1,000 or 1,300 moai, they may not necessarily be contradicting each other. They are often counting different things.

Most were carved at Rano Raraku, a volcanic crater that effectively became an enormous open-air statue factory. Around 95 per cent of the known moai were produced from the relatively soft volcanic tuff found there, using harder basalt tools called toki. Hundreds remain in and around the quarry in various stages of production. Some were completed and erected, some were apparently abandoned during transportation, while others remain attached to the bedrock from which they were being carved. Walking around Rano Raraku today is therefore less like visiting a finished monument and more like entering a workshop whose workers suddenly put down their tools centuries ago.

The largest unfinished example makes the entire enterprise appear even more extraordinary. Known as El Gigante, it remains attached to the quarry and would have stood approximately 21.6 metres high had it ever been completed. Estimates place its weight somewhere around 160 to 180 metric tonnes. The largest moai known to have actually been transported and erected, called Paro, stood about 9.8 metres tall and weighed approximately 74 tonnes. The average statue was considerably smaller, but even an average moai weighed around 12 to 14 tonnes. Whoever created them was not merely carving large rocks. They had developed a system for repeatedly manufacturing, moving and erecting multi-ton human figures across difficult volcanic terrain.

The bodies themselves were never really a secret. Early explorers and archaeologists knew that many moai were full figures. Their arms run down their sides and their enormous hands meet across the lower abdomen. Some possess detailed carvings across their backs. Statues standing on ahu around the island clearly display their torsos, while excavations at Rano Raraku exposed buried bodies long before the internet rediscovered them. Katherine Routledge excavated around statues during her 1914 to 1915 expedition, Thor Heyerdahl's team exposed others during the 1950s and the Easter Island Statue Project later conducted carefully controlled excavations of two roughly seven-metre-tall examples.

The confusion largely exists because around 150 statues stand upright on the interior and exterior slopes of Rano Raraku and many are buried to such a depth that only their heads and shoulders remain visible. When early photographs of these statues became famous, the world began calling them the Easter Island heads. Excavation reveals something considerably more impressive beneath the surface. Some of the buried torsos descend several metres into the earth, complete with arms, hands and carvings that had been hidden from daylight for centuries.

This brings us to one of the most interesting theories surrounding them. Were these statues deliberately buried, or did something happen to the landscape after they were erected?

There is an element of truth behind the second idea, although not in the catastrophic form sometimes presented online. Excavation at Rano Raraku has shown that at least some of the upright quarry statues were erected on prepared stone surfaces and were originally considerably more exposed than they are today. Over centuries, soil, weathered volcanic material and quarry debris moved down the slopes and accumulated around them. Archaeologists describe this process as colluvial deposition. In simpler terms, gravity, rain and erosion slowly moved earth downhill and buried increasingly large sections of the statues. Research on excavated moai specifically describes them as having become partially buried by colluvium after they were already standing.

Earlier archaeological interpretation also suggested that some standing quarry statues had been intentionally backfilled or stabilised, possibly allowing them to remain upright for ritual purposes. The archaeological picture therefore appears more complicated than either extreme. Humans erected the statues and in some circumstances manipulated the ground around them, but natural sediment accumulation undoubtedly buried substantial portions over the centuries. What the evidence does not currently show is a single enormous earthquake, tsunami, volcanic eruption or worldwide cataclysm suddenly covering a civilisation and leaving only the heads visible.

That has not stopped the theory becoming enormously popular. One version claims that the moai were originally standing completely exposed across an ancient landscape until an enormous flood or other catastrophic event buried them. Their deeply buried torsos are then presented as evidence that they must be far older than conventional archaeology suggests. The theory sometimes becomes attached to ideas about a lost advanced civilisation destroyed during a prehistoric global catastrophe, with Rapa Nui portrayed as one surviving fragment of that forgotten world.

The island has attracted theories of lost civilisations for more than a century. The occult writer Helena Blavatsky connected Easter Island with Lemuria, an imaginary lost continent supposedly inhabited by an ancient race of giants. Others suggested that the statues were constructed by survivors of Atlantis. Thor Heyerdahl later proposed a much more serious, although still disputed, theory involving migrants from South America contributing significantly to the culture of Rapa Nui. More recent versions introduce everything from ancient Egyptians to extraterrestrials. There is something about several hundred enormous stone men standing on one of the most remote islands in the world that seems almost designed to encourage speculation.

Modern evidence, however, makes a vanished pre-Rapanui civilisation unnecessary. Ancient DNA research published in Nature in 2024 confirmed the Polynesian ancestry of ancient Rapanui individuals and their close relationship with modern Rapanui people. Interestingly, the same research found evidence of pre-European contact between Polynesians and Native Americans, showing that these supposedly isolated populations were capable of extraordinary long-distance voyages. This makes the real history more interesting rather than less. The people carving the moai were descendants of some of the greatest navigators the world has ever produced.

The question of how they moved the statues has created almost as many theories as their origins. Logs, rollers, sledges and enormous teams of workers have all been proposed. Rapanui oral tradition maintained that the statues “walked”, something European researchers once regarded as mythology. Experimental archaeologists subsequently discovered that this description may have been remarkably accurate. By attaching ropes to a correctly shaped upright replica and rocking it alternately from side to side, teams have successfully made multi-ton statues move forward in a walking motion. A 2025 study analysing 962 moai found that statues abandoned along ancient roads possessed features such as broad D-shaped bases and forward leans particularly suited to this method. Eighteen people successfully moved a 4.35-tonne replica 100 metres in around 40 minutes. The ancestors may have been telling the truth all along.

There is another reason that counting the original moai is almost impossible. Not every statue survived intact. Some broke during carving or transportation and remain beside ancient roads. Others were toppled during later periods and statue fragments were sometimes incorporated into rebuilt ceremonial structures. Archaeological evidence demonstrates that pieces of damaged moai were reused in ahu both before and after European contact. Europeans also physically removed statues from the island. In 1868 the crew of HMS Topaze excavated and removed Hoa Hakananai'a and Moai Hava, which eventually entered the British Museum. There is therefore no reliable way of calculating exactly how many statues were ever attempted, completed or destroyed.

Could more still be underground? Almost certainly more fragments, abandoned carvings and archaeological material remain undiscovered because Rapa Nui contains thousands of archaeological features and much of the quarry landscape has accumulated centuries of soil and debris. What archaeologists do not currently possess is credible evidence that hundreds or thousands of complete unknown moai are sitting vertically beneath metres of soil waiting to be discovered. The Easter Island Statue Project has spent decades systematically locating, measuring and cataloguing the island's sculpture, which is why its count expands beyond the familiar figure of 900 by including partial and fragmentary pieces rather than simply guessing how many might remain hidden.

The moai therefore occupy an interesting position between genuine mystery and manufactured mystery. We know who their cultural descendants are. We know where almost all of the statues were carved. We have found their tools, quarrying areas, transport roads, ceremonial platforms and unfinished examples. We can even make replicas walk using ropes and human labour. None of this requires giants, aliens or a vanished technologically advanced civilisation.

Yet there are still mysteries. We do not know the names of most of the people represented by the statues. We cannot reconstruct every ceremony associated with them. We cannot say precisely why production eventually stopped or exactly how every individual statue was transported. We also cannot know how many additional fragments have disappeared through erosion, reuse or simple destruction during the centuries since the last sculptors left Rano Raraku.

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Easter Island is that the archaeological explanation is already remarkable enough. A relatively small Polynesian population crossed thousands of kilometres of open ocean, established itself on one of the world's most isolated islands and then created hundreds upon hundreds of enormous ancestral figures using stone tools. They moved statues weighing tens of tonnes across kilometres of uneven ground and raised them without cranes, engines or metal machinery.

Then time slowly changed the landscape around them. Statues fell, others broke, stone was reused and earth gradually accumulated around those left standing at the quarry. Eventually some of the greatest sculptures ever made by a Polynesian civilisation looked like nothing more than enormous heads emerging mysteriously from the ground.

The conspiracy says that the buried bodies prove somebody has hidden a forgotten civilisation beneath Easter Island. The archaeology suggests something rather more human. The civilisation was never really lost. Its descendants are still there, and the bodies were beneath the heads the entire time.