David Buley's holidays and business trips: Easter Island

Easter Island is essentially an ex-volcanic island and has strewn around it hundred of lava-induced boulders. That doesn't explain the big heads, the Moai of course. Rapa Nui’s moai statues stand in silence but speak volumes about the achievements of their creators. The stone blocks, carved into head-and-torso figures, average 4 metres tall and weigh about 14 tons. They were all made at the Ronu Raraku quarry, and moved to the various parts of the island. The effort to construct these monuments and move them around the island must have been considerable—but no one knows exactly why (or indeed how) the Rapa Nui people undertook such a task although most scholars suspect that they were created to honour ancestors or chiefs. However, no written or oral history exists on the island, so it’s impossible to be certain. Books written on the subject seem to conflict.

How did they get here? Somehow a tribe of islanders navigated a fleet of wooden outrigger canoes southeast to this tiny speck in the vast Pacific Ocean, 3,700 kilometers west of South America and 1,770 kilometers from the nearest neighboring island (Tahiti?), The unique architectural culture reached its zenith during the tenth to 16th centuries, during which the Rapa Nui carved and erected the 900 moai across the island (and yes I think I photographed them all).

It’s not clear when the islands were first settled; estimates range from A.D. 800 to 1200. It’s also not known how the Rapa Nui died out either, some suggest explorers brought disease.