Easter Island

I look up at the stone towering above me. Black against the bright blue sky and shining sun, I can't make out any of the face's features. We are on Easter Island, and today we visited a bunch of the Moi. It's really strange, how many sizes of the statues there are. Some are only three or four meters tall, and others are 20. The largest one we saw was still in the rock cliff, the face had been carved, but not cut out of the ground. When I looked at the giant statue, I couldn't imagine anyone moving it. Even with today's technology, it would be incredibly difficult to move such a large piece of stone. Yet way back then, as little as 500 years ago, they could do it. With no machines to help them with the job, the ancient people managed to carve, transport, and erect hundreds of the iconic stone heads. Our guide's personal theory on how they managed it was wheels. Before the Europeans and Chileans came to the island all of the statues had big round stones on top of them, similar to turbans. Since they look like great big wheels it is feasible that they were used to transport the heads. Another theory is using rope to move the pieces of stone. A group of university students spent days trying to figure out how the ancient people would have moved the statues. Finally, the students came up with tying rope to the top of the head, and slowly making the head "walk." As for my theory, I'm not sure. It is still completely unfashionable to me that such large beaches of stone could have been moved without machinery. The island used to be bare of trees, so making ramps like the Egyptians would have been incredibly unlikely. Maybe they had giants living on the island that could pick up the statues as easily as one picks up a small pebble.

Maya