Easter Island Heads Have Bodies: The Buried Moai of Rano Raraku

Yes, the famous "Easter Island heads" have bodies. The statues that appear as giant heads poking out of the grass stand on the slopes of Rano Raraku, the volcanic quarry where most moai were carved, and over centuries soil washing down the hill buried them up to their shoulders or chins. When archaeologists dig around them, they find full torsos with arms, long hands resting on the belly and, on some, carvings across the back.

This was not a sudden discovery. Torsos at Rano Raraku had been exposed in excavations as early as 1914, but photographs from the Easter Island Statue Project, widely shared from 2012 onwards, surprised millions of people who had only seen the heads. The pictures below show those digs, the quarry where the statues stand, and what the carvings on their backs mean.

An Amazing Discovery Found Underneath The Easter Island Heads!

This popular image is a digital illustration, not a photograph: it imagines two heads above ground with their bodies revealed in cross-section beneath the turf. The real statues are more weathered, but the idea is accurate. Arms are carved in low relief along the sides, with the hands meeting across the stomach.

Rapa Nui, a long way from anywhere

Easter Island, called Rapa Nui by its people, is a small volcanic island in the southeastern Pacific, about 3,500 kilometres (some 2,200 miles) west of mainland Chile, which annexed it in 1888. It is one of the most isolated inhabited places on Earth. Polynesian voyagers settled it centuries before Europeans arrived in 1722.

The moai are monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people, mostly between about 1250 and 1500 CE. They are generally understood to represent deified ancestors, and most of those that were moved from the quarry were set on stone platforms called ahu, facing inland over the villages. Rapa Nui National Park, which protects them, has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1995.

Rano Raraku: the quarry where the heads stand

Rano Raraku is an extinct volcanic crater made of compacted volcanic ash, or tuff, with a reed-fringed lake inside. Almost all moai were carved from this stone; only 53 of the more than 900 known statues came from elsewhere. Look closely at the lower slopes in this photo and you can see dozens of upright figures dotting the hillside.

Hundreds of statues remain in and around the quarry in different stages of completion, and roughly 150 stand upright on its slopes. They were raised in place, and over time earth and rubble from the carving work above slid down and buried them to varying depths. That is why visitors see "heads" here, while the statues on the coastal platforms show their full bodies.

This composite places an excavated statue, a visitor beside a half-buried figure, and one of the familiar heads side by side. Seen together, they show how much of each figure the ground has been hiding. The head and neck that tourists photograph are often less than half of the statue's height.

Inside the excavations

The Easter Island Statue Project (EISP), directed by archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg of UCLA working with Rapa Nui colleagues, has studied and catalogued the island's statues for decades. Its excavations at Rano Raraku exposed the torsos of two statues, catalogued as RR-001-156 and RR-001-157, each about 7 metres tall.

Team members work at the bottom of a deep, stepped trench beside one of the statues. The layers in the trench walls record centuries of soil and quarry debris washing down the slope. Careful recording of those layers helps date when the statue was raised and how quickly it was buried.

With the trench dug almost to its base, a tall moai rises from the pit while one person stands on its head and others work below. Photos like this one show the true proportions of the statues, with a long trunk beneath the oversized head.

Excavators and local helpers celebrate around an exposed statue. The project has relied heavily on Rapa Nui workers and families, and the island's community is closely involved in decisions about its heritage.

Front and back views of an excavated moai at Rano Raraku. In the photo on the left, the flat face and heavy brow are visible above a slender body; on the right, the back of the head and the long smooth back stand clear of the trench. The project's credit line is visible on the images.

On the left, researchers and visitors gather at the edge of a trench with ladders and tarps in place; on the right, half-buried statues stand on the slope above the crater lake. Rano Raraku remains an active research site as well as one of the island's most visited places.

Members of the excavation team pose in front of a partly exposed statue, with a second head just behind. Group portraits like this are a reminder that the fieldwork is slow and collaborative, carried out season after season with islanders and visiting specialists working side by side.

A team member stands in the trench beside a broad stone body while a colleague clears soil with a shovel. Excavation here is done mostly by hand, so that tools and small finds in the fill are not destroyed. Among the finds were stone carving tools and large quantities of red pigment, which may have been used to paint the statues.

This widely shared photograph shows a tall statue with a crowd of men standing in and around its pit, and it is older than the EISP work. Statues on these slopes were also dug out by earlier expeditions, including Katherine and William Routledge's in 1914–15 and Thor Heyerdahl's Norwegian expedition in the mid-1950s; this image is often attributed to the latter, though the exact source is unconfirmed.

The carvings on their backs

Clearing soil from behind a statue reveals carved designs on its back. These are petroglyphs, images cut into the stone surface. The EISP reports that the backs of both excavated statues are covered with them, many showing a crescent shape.

On this excavated back, curved and ring-shaped designs stand out clearly in the low sunlight. According to the project, the crescents represent canoes, called vaka, and a single stone carved with the same symbol was found in the pavement under one statue. Van Tilburg has suggested the symbol may be linked to the carver or the family group that owned the statue.

Some articles described these markings as "undeciphered writing". That mixes up two different things. Petroglyphs are pictures and symbols. Rapa Nui did have a separate, genuinely undeciphered script called rongorongo, but it survives on wooden tablets, not on the bodies of the moai.

Moai facts, and a few myths corrected

How many are there? More than 900 moai are known. An often-quoted older figure is 887.
The tallest standing statue, known as Paro, is almost 10 metres (33 feet) tall and weighs about 82 tonnes. The heaviest ever erected, at Ahu Tongariki, weighed about 86 tonnes.
The unfinished giant in the quarry would have stood about 21 metres (69 feet). Older articles often give its weight as 270 tons, but current estimates are closer to 145–165 tonnes.
They were not built as heads. Every moai was carved as a full figure. The "head only" look at Rano Raraku is the result of burial, not design.
Not all of them fell. Most statues on the ahu platforms were toppled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but the half-buried statues at Rano Raraku stayed upright, held in place by the earth around them.
Some wore "hats". Red cylinders called pukao, carved from scoria at the Puna Pau quarry, were placed on some later statues, and some had inlaid eyes of white coral.

Easter Island's statues have attracted wild theories for a century, from lost continents to visitors from space. The reality is more impressive: a Polynesian society on a tiny, remote island quarried, carved, moved and raised hundreds of multi-tonne statues using stone tools, ropes, timber and a great deal of organised labour.

Seeing them for yourself

Rano Raraku and Ahu Tongariki, with its row of fifteen restored statues, are the island's best-known sites. Entry to Rapa Nui National Park requires a ticket, visitors must keep to marked paths, and it is worth checking the current rules before you go, including whether a local guide is required. Touching or climbing on the statues is forbidden, and the soft tuff is fragile.

This is the view most visitors remember: half-buried figures scattered across the green outer slope of Rano Raraku, with a walking path winding between them and the Pacific beyond. Most of these heads continue several metres down into the hillside.

The bodies beneath the heads were never really hidden from archaeologists. What the photographs did was let everyone else see the statues the way their carvers made them: whole figures, standing in the hillside, still waiting to be finished and moved.

(The video originally embedded here is no longer available on YouTube.)

Sources: Easter Island Statue Project, Jo Anne Van Tilburg, “Easter Island statues have bodies” (May 2012); Wikipedia: Moai. Excavation photographs: Easter Island Statue Project (EISP.org), as credited on the images.

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