This is Vaihu, on the southern coast. At some point during the history of Easter Island, the various groups of people had what is today described as a civil war or tribal conflict. It was simply two or more groups fighting it out with each other. All of the groups had their own statutes for their own ancestors. The statues are called Moai. Our guide, a local Rapa Nui woman, said that the statues had Power and represented power for their owners. Naturally, in a civil war, the idea was probably to knock out the power of the other people. That translated into knocking down the other people’s statues. So naturally, those people retaliated by knocking down the first group’s statues. Eventually, every single stone statue on the entire island had been knocked down. They always knocked them down so that the statues face was in the ground. So when early explorers showed up, the statues were all lying on the ground.

Our guide showed us the location below at Vaihu so that we could see what the statues looked like when the explorers arrived on Easter Island. In truth, most of the statues still look like this since most of them have not yet been restored.

There wasn’t really all that much to see. It looks like a group of rocks more than anything. You would have to give them a close looking over to realize that they were moai that were lying face down in the dirt.

The red topknot rocks, called pukao, are all from a different quarry (volcanic caldera) on the island from the quarry where the statues were carved. A topknot like the one below might weigh up to 12 tons.