In this study, the scientist focused on figuring out where on the island the basalt came from. Previous excavations led by Tilburg revealed that the moai were created from basalt tools. Van Tilburg and her team say that understanding how these families interacted with the craftsmen who made the tools that helped create the giant statues is indicative of how different parts of Rapa Nui society interacted.Įaster Island statues, or moai. She tells Inverse that “visibility, when linked to geography, tells us something about how Rapa Nui, like all other traditional Polynesian societies, is built on family identity.” Study co-author and director of the Easter Island Statue Project Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D., is focused on measuring the visibility, number, size, and location of the moai. Their research was published Monday in the Journal of Pacific Archaeology. Scientists hailing from UCLA, the University of Queensland, and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago believe that, much like Stonehenge, the process by which these monoliths were created is indicative of a collaborative society. There are almost a thousand of them, and the largest is over 70 feet tall. The iconic “Easter Island heads,” or moai, are actually full-bodied but often partially buried statues that cover the island. Scientists contend in a new study that the island’s most iconic features are also the best evidence that ancient Rapa Nui society was more sophisticated than previously thought, and the biggest clue lies in the island’s most iconic features. He later published Collapse, a book hypothesizing that infighting and an overexploiting of resources led to a societal “ecocide.” However, a growing body of evidence contradicts this popular story of a warring, wasteful culture. In 1995, science writer Jared Diamond popularized the “collapse theory” in a Discover magazine story about why the Easter Island population was so small when European explorers arrived in 1722. Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is a 63-square-mile spot of land in the Pacific Ocean.

Jared diamond theory