Last Day on Easter Island

When Easter Island was settled, a man and his sister owned the boats that were used. The sister ended up with half the island, and the man with the other half. There is a Moai for the sister, made of scoria - unlike every other Moai I saw. Only the body has been restored. A number of the other Moai that have been restored had to have concrete used to join the head to the body, but I guess that scoria would be difficult to join. The hat is still there too.

 One of the hats had been made into a big water vessel, with petraglyphs around the outside.

 Then we visited a site where nothing has been restored, and the Moai are still lying on the ground.

 There were originally two separate Moai installations - each of several Moai. You can see the back of both platforms below. The first is older. It is thought that there was some communication between Easter Island and Peru before the second platform was built. The stones have all been trimmed a lot more than those of the first platform, and they show similar stonework to the Inca ruins.

We stopped at the high point of the island. From here you could see the town and the two volcanos at the tip of the island.

We then visited the birdman site. Originally, Easter Island had two peoples - the ruling class and the workers. The king of the island was hereditary from one clan, and the Moai were all ancestors of the ruling clans (I think there were about 12). The Moai were protecting the Island and their descendants, facing inland from the coast.

Then there was a revolution, at about the same time as explorers came to the islands. The first explorer noted that all the Moai were standing, but later ones reported that Moai were being toppled. The new "birdman" cult enabled any of the clans to have a person in charge for a year. Each clan would have a candidate, and when the migratory birds came to nest on these islands

 the candidates would run down the side of the volcano, over the lip, down the cliffs to the sea. They would swim to the largest island and obtain an egg. The first one back with the egg was the ruler for the next year. There was a lot of hokey pokey, and deaths of some of the contestants was normal during the race. the stones in front of the crater have birdman petroglyphs on them.

There were a lot of houses built here during the birdman period. Unlike earlier houses, the stones were all shaped into thin blocks which were built into the houses.

 One was cut away to show how it was constructed inside. Basically it had the same boat shaped interior of the earliest houses.

 There was a quarry next to the crater where the stone was obtained.

 

 There were traces of platforms where Moai had stood, and it is thought that even after the birdman cult started, people were still raising Moai here. However, the platform is one of the smallest on the island, so it wouldn't have taken as many people to erect the Moai.

 And then we went to a sea cave that has birdman drawings on its roof. Originally, there were fifteen caves along this part of the coastline with drawings in them, but the sea has made all but one of them inaccessible.