Easter Island Trivia
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59 free Easter Island trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Easter Island is one of the most remote inhabited places on Earth, and this quiz covers the whole story of it, not just the statues. It starts with the Polynesians who reached Rapa Nui around 1200 and the chief Hotu Matu'a of oral tradition, then works through the moai themselves: where 95% of them were carved, how much they weigh, what their eyes were made of, why they face inland, what the red topknots are, and who toppled them. From there it moves to the Birdman cult and its egg-hunt swim to Motu Nui, the undeciphered rongorongo script, the Dutch Easter Sunday visit of 1722, Captain Cook, the Peruvian slave raids and smallpox that left 111 people alive in 1877, Chile's annexation, the sheep-ranch decades, citizenship in 1966, and the modern island of Hanga Roa, tourist caps and a runway lengthened for the Space Shuttle. Along the way you meet Thor Heyerdahl, Katherine Routledge and Jared Diamond and the argument over whether the islanders really committed ecocide. Easy questions suit anyone who recognises a moai; the expert tier asks about a French ethnologist and a Tahiti-based land-grabber. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the island, the moai, the Birdman cult and the people involved, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Hawaii and Easter Island mark two corners of a vast Pacific island region; which country marks the third?
New Zealand
New Zealand: seafarers believed to descend from the Lapita people went on to settle all three corners of the region.
Q 02Who are Easter Island's giant moai statues believed to represent?
Ancestors
Ancestors, and size mattered: the bigger the statue, the more standing it gave the chief or tribe that raised it.
Q 03What lies buried beneath the famous heads on Easter Island's quarry slopes?
Their bodies
Their bodies lie buried, and photos of these half-hidden statues spread the myth that the moai are only heads.
Q 04Which Dutch explorer gave Easter Island its name after sighting it on Easter Sunday 1722?
Jacob Roggeveen
Jacob Roggeveen's landing party shot dead about a dozen islanders.
Q 05How do Rapa Nui oral traditions say the moai travelled from the quarry to their platforms?
They walked
They walked, the legends say, moved by mana, and modern experiments have 'walked' replicas upright by rocking them side to side with ropes.
Q 06The Easter Island name 'Te pito o te henua' is often translated as what?
The Navel of the World
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'.
Q 07A crane maker from which country helped restore Easter Island's largest ahu in the 1990s?
Japan
Japan's Tadano donated the crane for a five-year restoration that set all fifteen statues back on the platform.
Q 08Which legendary chief led the two-canoe expedition that oral tradition says first settled Easter Island?
Hotu Matu'a
Hotu Matu'a is remembered as the first king, and Rapa Nui families still trace their lineage back to his arrival.
Q 09Which introduced animal is blamed for helping strip Easter Island of its trees by eating palm seeds?
The Polynesian rat
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.
Q 10By 1877, roughly how many native Rapa Nui were left on Easter Island?
About 100
About 100: just 111 islanders remained in 1877, after slave raids, disease and emigration had carried off thousands.
Q 11Slave raiders from which country abducted about 1,500 Easter Islanders in 1862-63?
Peru
Peru's raiders put their captives to work mining guano, and the few survivors who made it home carried smallpox, which ravaged the island.
Q 12What did the 1888 deed's Rapa Nui text promise?
Protection
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.
Q 13Which captain took possession of Easter Island for Chile in 1888?
Policarpo Toro
Policarpo Toro had first visited as a young officer, then wrote a report urging Chile to acquire the island.
Q 21The fitted wall at Ahu Vinapu is often compared to which civilization's stonework?
Inca
The Inca comparison fuelled theories of contact between Polynesia and South America.
Q 22Rapamycin, a drug named after Easter Island's native name, was first found in what?
Soil bacteria
Soil bacteria from samples taken there in 1964 made it; tested first as an antifungal, it ended up preventing organ transplant rejection.
Q 23The red 'topknots' placed on some moai heads are called what?
Pukao
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.
Q 14Who ran Easter Island until 1966?
The Chilean Navy
The Chilean Navy's rule suppressed the Rapa Nui language, and a 1966 law ended it.
Q 15What was most of Easter Island used for in the early 20th century?
A British-owned sheep ranch
A British-owned sheep ranch leased nearly all the island from 1903, stripping islanders of their land.
Q 16Easter Island's nearest inhabited neighbour, about 2,000 km away, is where?
Pitcairn
Pitcairn was settled in 1790 by HMS Bounty mutineers, and their descendants still live there.
Q 17What is the rough shape of Easter Island?
Triangular
Triangular, because it is built from three extinct volcanoes, one at each corner.
Q 18Which volcano forms the bulk of Easter Island and is its highest point?
Terevaka
Terevaka's lava built the main body of the island and joined Poike, once a separate volcanic island, to the rest.
Q 19Where were about 95% of the moai carved?
Rano Raraku
The volcanic crater's tuff was quarried for some 500 years, and 394 statues remain there in every state of completion.
Q 20What makes the moai Tukuturi unlike almost every other moai on Easter Island?
It kneels
It kneels, in the posture the chorus once took when singing riu songs.
Q 24What were the moai's eye sockets designed to hold?
Coral eyes with obsidian or scoria pupils
Coral eyes with obsidian or scoria pupils were placed in the sockets when ceremonies took place.
Q 25Which volcanic rock were almost all moai carved from?
Tuff
Tuff is compressed volcanic ash, soft enough for carvers to shape with hand-held basalt picks and no metal tools.
Q 26Which restored ahu has fifteen moai, including the heaviest ever erected at 86 tonnes?
Ahu Tongariki
Ahu Tongariki was the centre of one of the island's eastern clans, and its statues were toppled in the island's civil wars.
Q 27What natural disaster swept the fifteen-statue platform on the south coast inland in 1960?
A tsunami from a Chilean earthquake
Its statues had already been toppled during the island's civil wars.
Q 28What is unusual about Ahu Akivi's seven moai?
They stand inland and face the sea
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.
Q 29What was the period when rival groups toppled moai statues to destroy their power called?
Huri mo'ai
Not one moai was left standing when French missionaries arrived in the 1860s.
Q 30The moai are described in Rapa Nui as 'aringa ora', meaning what?
Living faces
Living faces is the idea: a moai was believed to hold the spirit of an ancestor, watching over the clan.