Revealed: Bodies of the Easter Island Statues
Posted by Tony on May 30th, 2012
They’re featured in the title of practically every documentary or television show dealing with mysterious places. Their heads have adorned everything from coasters to keychains to books to backyard statuary. Heck, one of them even made it in Hollywood and nailed a part in Night at the Museum with Ben Stiller.
But now a fairly recent investigation called the EISP (Easter Island Statue Project) is uncovering something relatively new about the heads of Easter Island…they have bodies.
While experts have known about the bodies for several decades now, it’s only recently that tourists have been able to really see the dig sites up close and have seen that the enigmatic heads actually sit on shoulders of a complete figure down to the feet.
Because tourism to the islands is limited, it’s taken a while for this pictures and this information to begin circulating.
There are over 1,000 Moari heads scattered across the island and most of their bodies have simply been covered up by time.
Why is this such a big deal if experts knew about the bodies the whole time? As the bodies are excavated, petroglyphs once hidden on the statues backs and other artifacts which laid at the feet of the statues on what used to be the top layer of soil are uncovering more and more clues about the mysterious islanders who once called Easter Island home.
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May 31st, 2012 at 10:21 pm
What’d be cool is if they then found an enormous Moari head completely buried on its side — a sleeping giant that dwarfs all the rest, but was completely buried on purpose by its builders.