59 Fun Facts About Easter Island

Hawaii and Easter Island mark two corners of a vast Pacific island region; which country marks the third?

New Zealand: seafarers believed to descend from the Lapita people went on to settle all three corners of the region.

Who are Easter Island's giant moai statues believed to represent?

Ancestors, and size mattered: the bigger the statue, the more standing it gave the chief or tribe that raised it.

What lies buried beneath the famous heads on Easter Island's quarry slopes?

Their bodies lie buried, and photos of these half-hidden statues spread the myth that the moai are only heads.

Which Dutch explorer gave Easter Island its name after sighting it on Easter Sunday 1722?

Jacob Roggeveen's landing party shot dead about a dozen islanders.

How do Rapa Nui oral traditions say the moai travelled from the quarry to their platforms?

They walked, the legends say, moved by mana, and modern experiments have 'walked' replicas upright by rocking them side to side with ropes.

The Easter Island name 'Te pito o te henua' is often translated as what?

The Navel of the World is the romantic rendering, but pito can also mean 'end', so the phrase may equally mean 'the end of the earth'.

A crane maker from which country helped restore Easter Island's largest ahu in the 1990s?

Japan's Tadano donated the crane for a five-year restoration that set all fifteen statues back on the platform.

Which legendary chief led the two-canoe expedition that oral tradition says first settled Easter Island?

Hotu Matu'a is remembered as the first king, and Rapa Nui families still trace their lineage back to his arrival.

Which introduced animal is blamed for helping strip Easter Island of its trees by eating palm seeds?

The Polynesian rat gnawed the seeds of the island's giant palm, which is now extinct, and recovered seed shells still show its tooth marks.

By 1877, roughly how many native Rapa Nui were left on Easter Island?

About 100: just 111 islanders remained in 1877, after slave raids, disease and emigration had carried off thousands.

Slave raiders from which country abducted about 1,500 Easter Islanders in 1862-63?

Peru's raiders put their captives to work mining guano, and the few survivors who made it home carried smallpox, which ravaged the island.

What did the 1888 deed's Rapa Nui text promise?

Friendship and protection were its terms, while the other text ceded sovereignty; King Atamu Tekena is said to have insisted his people still owned their land.

Which captain took possession of Easter Island for Chile in 1888?

Policarpo Toro had first visited as a young officer, then wrote a report urging Chile to acquire the island.

Who ran Easter Island until 1966?

The Chilean Navy's rule suppressed the Rapa Nui language, and a 1966 law ended it.

What was most of Easter Island used for in the early 20th century?

A British-owned sheep ranch leased nearly all the island from 1903, stripping islanders of their land.

Easter Island's nearest inhabited neighbour, about 2,000 km away, is where?

Pitcairn was settled in 1790 by HMS Bounty mutineers, and their descendants still live there.

What is the rough shape of Easter Island?

Triangular, because it is built from three extinct volcanoes, one at each corner.

Which volcano forms the bulk of Easter Island and is its highest point?

Terevaka's lava built the main body of the island and joined Poike, once a separate volcanic island, to the rest.

Where were about 95% of the moai carved?

The volcanic crater's tuff was quarried for some 500 years, and 394 statues remain there in every state of completion.

What makes the moai Tukuturi unlike almost every other moai on Easter Island?

It kneels, in the posture the chorus once took when singing riu songs.

The fitted wall at Ahu Vinapu is often compared to which civilization's stonework?

The Inca comparison fuelled theories of contact between Polynesia and South America.

Rapamycin, a drug named after Easter Island's native name, was first found in what?

Soil bacteria from samples taken there in 1964 made it; tested first as an antifungal, it ended up preventing organ transplant rejection.

The red 'topknots' placed on some moai heads are called what?

Pukao, cut from red stone at Puna Pau, are thought to show the long hair high-ranking men wore tied on top of their heads.

What were the moai's eye sockets designed to hold?

Coral eyes with obsidian or scoria pupils were placed in the sockets when ceremonies took place.

Which volcanic rock were almost all moai carved from?

Tuff is compressed volcanic ash, soft enough for carvers to shape with hand-held basalt picks and no metal tools.

Which restored ahu has fifteen moai, including the heaviest ever erected at 86 tonnes?

Ahu Tongariki was the centre of one of the island's eastern clans, and its statues were toppled in the island's civil wars.

What natural disaster swept the fifteen-statue platform on the south coast inland in 1960?

Its statues had already been toppled during the island's civil wars.

What is unusual about Ahu Akivi's seven moai?

They stand inland and face the sea, at least from afar, though like other moai they look toward a former village site; archaeologists raised all seven in 1960.

What was the period when rival groups toppled moai statues to destroy their power called?

Not one moai was left standing when French missionaries arrived in the 1860s.

The moai are described in Rapa Nui as 'aringa ora', meaning what?

Living faces is the idea: a moai was believed to hold the spirit of an ancestor, watching over the clan.

What was the moai Hoa Hakananai'a's fate in 1868?

Taken to the British Museum by the crew of HMS Topaze, it's still there, and in 2018 Easter Island's governor asked for it back.

In Easter Island's Birdman contest, competitors raced to bring back the first egg of which seabird?

Sooty tern eggs decided the contest, and the winner's clan won power over the island for the year.

Which creator god was the chief deity of the Birdman cult?

Makemake gave his name to a dwarf planet found just after Easter 2005, a nod to the island's own Easter Sunday naming.

What brought Easter Island's Birdman competitions to an end?

Christian missionaries converted almost every islander in the 1860s, and the Birdman rites were abandoned along with the old beliefs.

What is rongorongo?

A script found only on Easter Island, it lost its readers, by tradition only ruling families and priests, to the 1860s slave raids and the epidemics that followed.

What sets the largest moai ever carved apart?

Unfinished at almost twice the height of any moai ever raised, the giant was likely too heavy to move, though some think it was never meant to stand.

Which Norwegian adventurer led a 1955-56 Easter Island expedition and wrote Aku-Aku?

Thor Heyerdahl had earlier sailed the balsa raft Kon-Tiki from South America to Polynesia in 1947 to test his theory of South American settlers.

Which English archaeologist sailed to Easter Island in 1914 aboard her own schooner, the Mana?

Katherine Routledge collected the island's oral traditions, including memories of the Birdman contests.

Which author argued in Collapse that the islanders committed 'ecocide' by deforesting their home?

Jared Diamond blamed deforestation, but later researchers argue that disease and slave raids after European contact did most of the damage.

Which South American crop, grown on Easter Island before Europeans arrived, is cited as evidence of early contact?

Sweet potato is kumara in Rapa Nui, close to Quechua k'umar, and DNA studies suggest Pacific islanders and Native Americans met centuries before Europeans came.

Which British explorer visited Easter Island in 1774?

James Cook found some statues already toppled, though earlier European visitors had reported them all standing.

What is the name of Easter Island's only town, where almost all its people live?

Hanga Roa is where islanders were confined until the 1960s, barred from the rest of their own island.

What is Anakena on Easter Island?

A white coral sand beach, Anakena is where oral tradition says the island's first settlers came ashore.

In the 1980s, NASA lengthened Easter Island's runway so it could serve as what?

An emergency Shuttle landing site was needed for planned polar launches from California, but those launches were cancelled, and big airliners used the longer runway instead.

Who has run Easter Island's national park since 2017?

Its indigenous community took over after islanders blocked access to the park in 2015, with the state agency that ran it as their main target.

Which European language is official on Easter Island?

Spanish is now what most Rapa Nui children grow up speaking, so many younger islanders manage only simple conversation in Rapa Nui.

Which Hollywood star co-produced Rapa-Nui, a 1994 film set on Easter Island?

Kevin Costner backed the $20 million epic, but it took only $305,070 in North American cinemas.

What happened on Easter Island in October 2022, soon after it reopened to tourists?

A forest fire damaged some moai beyond repair, officials said, and the island's mayor said the blaze was 'not an accident'.

In Easter Island's Birdman contest, which islet did the egg hunters swim to?

Motu Nui was where each clan's swimmer, floating on a bundle of reeds, waited for the seabirds to arrive and lay the first egg.

Which SpongeBob SquarePants character has a house shaped like an Easter Island head?

Squidward's moai house sits between SpongeBob's pineapple and Patrick's rock, so the grumpy octopus is stuck beside the neighbours who annoy him.

Which Frenchman bought up most of Easter Island in the 1860s-70s and shipped Rapa Nui to Tahiti as labourers?

Jean-Baptiste Dutrou-Bornier ruled with rifles and hut burnings, driving many islanders away, until he was murdered.

Easter Island's 2017 census counted roughly how many people?

About 8,000, and fewer than half now identify as Rapa Nui, after years of newcomers arriving from mainland Chile.

Roughly what area does Easter Island cover?

About 160 km², and more than 40% of it is national park, so visitors must buy a park ticket to visit most of its sites.

Which sky event was seen from Easter Island on 11 July 2010?

A total solar eclipse: the Moon's shadow crossed almost nothing but open ocean, so the island was one of very few places ashore to see totality.

At the end of the Tapati Rapa Nui festival, the winning family's candidate is named what?

Queen of the island is the prize, and the two rival families compete in sports, crafts and food contests to earn points for their candidate.

What were Easter Island's traditional hare paenga houses shaped like?

An upturned boat, though at exposed Orongo islanders built them from stone slabs instead of reed thatch to withstand the harsh weather.

Easter Island's ancient stone trumpet, Pu o Hiro, was blown to call on the god of what?

Rain was what the island's chiefs begged Hiro for in times of drought, chanting to him dressed in special ceremonial clothing.

The red crescent on Easter Island's flag shows a reimiro, which islanders once wore as what?

A chest ornament, the reimiro is painted red on the flag because red is the colour of mana, or supernatural power.

Which extreme-sport world series has held its Chilean leg on Easter Island?

The island's isolated position keeps its climate mild and cyclone-free, sitting outside the Intertropical Convergence Zone.