While Europeans eventually discovered the impressive moai statues for which the Rapa Nui are best known, they also stumbled ...

The online model lets researchers and anyone with an internet connection explore areas that the island’s 100,000 annual ...

A sweeping 3D analysis of Rapa Nui’s main moai quarry shows that the island’s iconic statues weren’t produced by a single ruling authority, but by many small, independent groups working simultaneously ...

For years, the story of Easter Island has been told as a grim fable: a small, isolated community cut down its last tree, ...

Learn how several working groups with their own carving techniques built the iconic moai of Easter Island.

A first-ever 3D model of the Rano Raraku quarry lets anyone examine Easter Island’s iconic statue workshop in vivid detail.

Unfinished moai attached to bedrock by “keels” along their backs demonstrate how carvers worked underneath from both sides until figures were separated from the source material. This production stage, ...

Isolated in the Pacific, Easter Island is famed for its towering Moai statues—but the real story lies in the resilience of ...

Experts are shedding new light on the demise of the civilization that built the famous statues on Easter Island. It has long been thought that the construction of the statues, or moai, ended around ...

Scientists have found a previously undiscovered moai, monolithic human figures carved by the Rapa Nui people on Easter Island, in a dry lake bed on the tiny island in the middle of the Pacific.

A new 3D model shows Rapa Nui’s moai were carved by many small teams, overturning the myth of a single centralized system.

A dig at Rano Raraku, the quarry where Easter Island's statues were hewn out of rock, is casting new light on a remarkable discovery forgotten for decades. In 1919 pictures of the first excavations by ...