How huge statues ‘walked’ 900 years ago

Living on a remote, barren isle bestowed with few resources, the Rapanui needed to combine ingenious design with flawless sculpting to move the massive moai without any machinery.

The coastal winds whipped across my face as I craned my neck to see the 15 moai before me. Standing up to two storeys tall and with their backs to the choppy Pacific Ocean, the statues’ empty eye sockets, once embellished with white coral and red scoria, gazed perennially across Easter Island. Their bodies were etched with enigmatic symbols, and their faces, with prominent brows and elongated noses, seemed both comfortingly human and formidably divine.

There are 887 moai scattered across Easter Island, or Rapa Nui as the islanders call it, and these 15 were standing on the Ahu Tongariki plinth, the largest ceremonial structure on the remote Chilean isle. Looking up at the overly large heads and legless torsos, I found it hard to imagine how these giant monolithic figures – which weigh up to 88 tons and were built at least 900 years ago – could have even got here. But it wasn’t just me who was confounded: researchers have long puzzled over how these weighty moai were manually transported across the island.

Several theories have been proposed, including using logs to roll the statues and even the far-fetched belief of extra-terrestrial help. However, it seems that the secret lies in the marriage of ingenious design and flawless sculpting, which enabled these humanlike statues to stand upright and rock forward from side-to-side while being guided by ropes, granting the statues the ability to “walk”.

The movement would have been similar to the shuffle of a refrigerator being moved in a standing position, with each side inching forward one at a time. “But the Rapanui [the Polynesian peoples indigenous to Rapa Nui] went beyond that and actually carved the base of the statues and added certain angles in so that it was a better version for moving,” explained Carl Lipo, an archaeologist specialising in the moai and lead author of a 2013 study into how the statues moved.

This was the first study that successfully “walked” a five-ton replica, and the walking theory it proposed “melds oral history and science”, according to Ellen Caldwell, art history professor at Mt San Antonio College in California who has expertise in ancient Oceanic art.

She notes that walking statues are a part of Rapanui oral traditions, with the word “neke neke” in the Rapanui language translating to “walking without legs”; and says that it is this phrase and such oral histories that Rapanui elders and descendants recall when answering how the moai were moved across vast distances without any machinery. Rapanui childhood nursery rhymes also tell stories about the statues walking; and legends say that a chief with mana, or supernatural power, helped the moai to walk.

“The oral tradition of the island talks about the moai walking from the place where they were made to their final destination on top of the alters,” said Patricia Ramirez, who has lived on Rapa Nui since she was five and now works there as a tour guide. “Traditionally, the only way history was passed down on the island was through songs, through chants, through games and through poetry. There are plenty of ancestral songs and stories that talk about the moais walking.”

BBC