So how can an island that is known to have giant stone faces still surprise the archaeologists? Rapa Nui aka Easter Island has always appeared to the outside world as a riddle that is solved: this is some distant point in the Pacific Ocean, the statues of monuments are visible on the naked eye. But a newly reported moai came out of a very unlikely location, a dried lakebed, to remind researchers that even heavily investigated sceneries keep their own books. This discovery was not important in that it rewrote the whole history of moai, but that it was found where no previous record of them existed and that it came by subtraction water and reeds giving way not by a fresh excavation trench.
The statue was discovered in the Rapa Nui National Park which is an isolated landscape UNESCO refers to as one of the most isolated inhabited islands on earth. The park contains the key archaeological identifiers of the island: ceremonial platforms (ahu), quarries, rock art and thousands of other related structures that used to sustain agriculture, housing, and ritual existence. Pieces in that bigger system, moai are the icons of the globe, yet they never existed as singularities, they were designed to engage platforms, sightlines and space of community.
Archeologist Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona summed up the fundamental surprise as follows: There are no moai to be found in the dry bed or where a lake once existed and so, it is a first. This line drops with additional emphasis on an island where decades of statues have been cataloged, charted, and photographed. There is a moai in a lakebed pointing to another form of inventory problem, the problem of missing settings rather than to the problem of missing numbers.
Another issue that Hunt highlighted was the reason the lakebed was important to the next one: “In the dry conditions under which we now find ourselves, we may discover more.” Practically that would be influenced by two realities that overlap. In the first place, stone forms may be covered by reeds and sediments and become unnoticed by the untrained surveyor, particularly in basins where vegetation has been so thick for a long time. Second, the process of drying can alter the surface appearances, exposing temporarily what was likely hidden on the surface without much disruption, an ethical and logistical quandary in a World Heritage landscape where conservation is an issue on a regular basis.
The statue has been recently recorded as smaller than most of the more famous figures in it, which serves to explain how it might go unnoticed: a short figure is easier lost in a taller reed and an irregular ground. Nevertheless, it is not impossible to find tips in the construction of moai. They were mostly sculpted out of the volcanic tuff, workable stone made of ash and dust which prevails in the corpus of statues on the island, a few being made out of the harder basalt. The materials story is also expressed by tools: UNESCO reports that moai were carved with simple picks (toki) cut out of hard basalt, an aspect that constitutes the statues as the result of consistent, expert influences instead of a one-time act of creation.
The wider issue raised by what the lakebed moai reawaken is that of “finished” knowledge. The quarries of Rapa Nui, and Rano Raraku in particular, retain moai in various degrees of completion: half-finished, half-finished, half-finished, or left half-complete. The landscape can serve as a combination of a hundred-hour-old workshop, and each statue is a portrait of the planning, carving, transportation, and installation. The fact that moai were said to walk is preserved by the fact that even now such motion does not seem likely, especially with a few moai of exceedingly large size; the tallest is about 32 feet in stature, and the weight is about 86 tons, although the majority are significantly smaller.
The shock is not abstract to local custodians. Salvador Atan Hito, the vice president of the Ma’u Henua, the community organization in charge of managing the national park, highlighted how intense the omission was: It lies in the lake and no one knows that it exists… not even the ancestors, our grandparents do not know about that one. There is the actual engineering marvel of Rapa Nui, not merely the statues, but a cultural topography expansive enough, and stratified enough, to hide a stone face until the ground itself chooses to give it, away.
