{"id":312198,"date":"2025-11-27T12:54:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-27T12:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/312198\/"},"modified":"2025-11-27T12:54:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-27T12:54:11","slug":"easter-island-statue-construction-wasnt-a-top-down-affair","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/312198\/","title":{"rendered":"Easter Island Statue Construction Wasn\u2019t a Top-Down Affair"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If anyone recently spotted advanced aircraft buzzing over Easter Island to surveil the mysterious moai statues, they weren\u2019t UFOs. Instead, these drones belonged to terrestrial researchers, interested in answering a very down-to-earth question: Who was in charge of this megalithic endeavor?<\/p>\n

Historic and archaeological investigations of the Rapa Nui people who carved the statues between 400 and 1,000 years ago suggest they lived in decentralized, close-knit family clans. However, many have assumed that their construction and transportation imply a more top-down hierarchical civilization, like the ancient Egyptians who built the pyramids. New research<\/a> published in PLOS One suggests that, unlike the statues themselves, there was no big head at the top of the Rapa Nui directing the work.<\/p>\n

Read more: \u201cAn Ancient Site with Human Skulls on Display<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

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Using more than 11,000 aerial images taken by drones of the site, Carl Lipo of Binghamton University and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona constructed a detailed 3-D model of the primary quarry, Rano Raraku. This model showed a hodgepodge of moai carved from multiple sites with statues in various stages of completion. Analysis of the statues remaining in the quarry revealed a variety of carving types as well. Rather than a centralized, top-down construction effort, the authors say, it more closely matches the works of a patchwork of freelancers consistent with their decentralized living arrangements.<\/p>\n

This new finding is bolstered by Lipo and Hunt\u2019s earlier research<\/a>, which showed that it only takes a handful of humans to move these moai, around 18 in a test case. If anything, these studies make the construction and transportation of these magnificent megaliths an even more impressive achievement. \"\"\/<\/p>\n

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Lead image: Horacio_Fernandez \/ Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

Jake Currie <\/p>\n

\n Posted on November 26, 2025\n <\/p>\n

\n Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Explore If anyone recently spotted advanced aircraft buzzing over Easter Island to surveil the mysterious moai statues, they…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":312199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,7285,460,134,100778],"class_list":{"0":"post-312198","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-blog","14":"tag-design","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-syndicated-feeds"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/312199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}