El Gigante, Awakening the Giant

Of Easter Island’s nearly thousand “moai,” the large stone statues for which the island is famous, the largest ever erected in antiquity is today called “Paro,” and weighed about 82 tons. Atop it’s head, an 11.5-ton “pukao,” or hat, for lack of a better description, once sat increasing the monument’s overall height to nearly 12 meters (38 feet). For decades, researchers have pondered the methods that the “Rapanui” islanders might have used to extract such enormous stones from the quarry beneath the volcanic cone of Rano Raraku, transport them as much as 20 kilometers (12 miles) across the island and erect them facing inland from atop raised seacoast platforms called “Ahus.”

All of the standing moai were thrown down during native unrest centuries ago, but a few have since been re-erected by archaeologists using modern methods. Various theories have been advanced proposing possible ancient techniques to accomplish the same end, and a few have been successfully demonstrated using relatively small (10-ton +/-) replicas. Until now, however, no one has tackled by far the most daunting challenge on the island: “El Gigante,” The Giant. Although still attached to bedrock in the quarry, this fully-formed statue would have been the largest ever erected, standing 20 meters (66 feet) tall, and likely crowned by a 40-ton pukao. It’s weight is estimated to be at least 270 tons, more than three times that of Paro. How the Giant might have been extracted, moved and erected using rudimentary methods is the subject of this study.

Also available in the “Rapa Nui Journal,” Vol. 26, No. 2, October 2012, published by the Easter Island Foundation.

Take a look inside this publication