Kind: captions
Language: en
most visitors come all the way to Easter
Island because of these stone
statues the moai constructed between
1300 and sometime after the 1700s there
are more than 1,000 of these giant
carved figures scattered across the
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landscape cut from volcanic
rock some are more than 30 ft
High over time all of the moai have
fallen down
the 50 or so that are upright today were
put back up in recent
decades with their backs to the Sea they
stareing passively into the island arms
held rigidly by their
sides some stand on ceremonial platforms
known as
auu others are sunk into the
Earth how could the rapanui build and
transport the moai when Carl and Terry
analyzed The moai Lying by the roads
that l from the Quarry they noticed
something
significant a mo on the AO has a flat
base so the statue stands straight up
but most of the moai lying on the road
have angled bases and Carl and Terry
believe that angle had a very specific
purpose Road Mo has to be shaped in a
way that can be transported they did it
by shaping their base so they lean
forward to enable them to walk this is a
great example of of the forward lean of
these transport moai so if you took the
statue and we could put it back up it
would be leaning really far forward it
means that as you rock it side to side
it falls forward across that front edge
and takes a step without that it would
just rock back and forth and not really
go anywhere and walking really describes
what these moai
did to test their theory in 2012 Carl
and Terry built a model of a moai out of
concrete carefully mix to match the
fragile density of the ancient statue's
volcanic rock and made it walk
in our experiments we found it took
remarkably few people to move the statue
and we were terrible at it you know we
were the least expert of any people
who've ever moved to moai in the world
uh but we're able to do a 5ton statue
with 18 people