700-Year-Old Statues Reveal a Vanished Society | BBC Timestamp
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On Easter Island, hundreds of massive stone statues, or moai, were carved from volcanic rock as part of a sacred tradition. Many were left unfinished, abandoned on hillsides, or toppled from their ceremonial platforms, leaving archaeologists to wonder what caused the abrupt end of this practice. These striking monuments offer a glimpse into the beliefs and stories of a society that has captivated historians for centuries.
The Moai are believed to represent the souls of dead ancestors
and face inwards towards the island, protecting their descendants.
And here's a Moai lying on its back. It must have been on its way to the
sacred platform over there. The stone, the figure, was carved not here, not in situ, not at the
site in which it was to be erected, but where the stone was quarried. And that is over there,
that broken volcanic peak in front of me.
It's a mystery why so few of Easter Island's 900 Moai are mounted on their sacred platforms.
This is extraordinary. There are dozens of Moai loitering around here on the slope leading up
to the quarry, facing all different directions, some out to sea, some inland. I suppose this is
like a storage area for the Moai. They've been carved in the quarry right up there.
And here I can begin to see the little recesses where they've been cut out
and I guess slid down here and then stored in these pits. And here you see the key characteristics
of the Moai. The jutting chin, the pouting lips, the great extended nose, slightly concave,
the beetling brow. There are an amazing 400 Moai still in the Rano Raraku quarry,
almost half the total ever carved. Crikey, this is the crater of the volcano that spewed out the stone
called tuff, from which the Moai are carved. And over there, more Moai standing looking
into the crater itself. I suppose they're, again, they're in storage.
Here you can see very clearly how the Moai was made, how it was quarried from the volcano face.
This end is still attached to the to the rock, there we are,
being cut round, being freed from its bed, bird nesting underneath it. Here's the arm,
the torso here, and here, incredible head-taking shape, the nose, and here is the mouth and chin.
Now this stuff, called tuff, was shaped using a bit of harder rock, like this basalt. Basalt's
hard in this compacted volcanic ash called tuff, and the mason was simply chip away, chip away,
chip away. But what happened here one day, this particular mason downed two and walked away,
leaving it never to be completed. Clearly something dramatic happened,
and very rapidly, a sacred tradition suddenly stopped, was abandoned. Normally, after completion
in the quarry, the Moai would have been dragged using ropes and log rollers down to their
platforms by the sea. Here, the finishing touches would have been applied. When the Moai had been
placed on its ahu, eyes made of obsidian, which is a volcanic rock, and coral were put in place,
and those eyes, it is said, brought the Moai to life. But the Moai did not live forever.
Long ago, in the mists of time, the cult appears to have been ended by some cataclysmic event.
There are eight Moai here. Each one has been toppled face down. You see their faces buried
in the ahu, in the ground. Now, this could have been a great wave, a tsunami, but that wouldn't
have had quite this effect. No, these have been toppled by men. These Moai have been murdered,
have been killed ritualistically. They have been robbed of their power and made meaningless.
Some have even had their necks broken, their heads crushed, and I guess their eyes gouged out.
What this tells us, of course, is that something terrible happened on this island many years ago.
Something that led people to fight, to turn on themselves, and to murder their own gods.