While Europeans eventually discovered the impressive moai statues for which the Rapa Nui are best known, they also stumbled upon a yet-undeciphered script known as Rongorongo—a three-dimensional ...

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

Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, sits isolated in the vast Pacific Ocean, famous for the colossal stone faces that stare out to ...

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, ...

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.

We’re documenting something that really has needed to be documented, but in a way that’s really comprehensive and shareable.” Lipo is one of the foremost experts on the Easter Island moai. In October, ...

Archaeologists have long assumed that the ancient society that erected the colossal Moai figures on Chile’s Rapa Nui, better known as Easter Island, collapsed many centuries ago. Now, a new study ...

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 ...

The sacred statues of Easter Island have been around for at least 600 years. For centuries, the 1,000 or so stone anthropomorphic monoliths, called “moai,” on the craggy island off the coast of Chile ...

No one knows where Easter Island is, and that’s just the start of the island’s immutable mysticism. When I told people I was traveling to the small island this spring, people would say, “The place ...