Another fascinating aspect of the statues is the ears. There are short eared and long eared statues. Some of the long eared ones may have, at one time, had coral or bone attachments in their ear lobes.
So just how many Moai are their on Rapa Nui?
According to a study by Jo Ann Van Tilburg, there are 887 including 288 erected or toppled from various platforms or ahus and 397 remaining in the quarry of Rana Raraku. This information creates one of the still unsolved mysteries of Rapa Nui: why were there so many figures unfinished, part finished or still left attached to the rock in Rana Raraku? The evidence seems to suggest a more sudden end to this activity rather than it’s gradual decline.
There is also some evidence to suggest that some of the moai that lie toppled along the “roads” that were used to transport the statues, may have been some form of boundary markers.
How were the Moai’s transported to their sites?
This has long been one of the most difficult questions. Firstly, we need to understand that the society that created the statues did so without the benefit of steel tools or the wheel. This was a primitive but obviously innovative society.
When researchers first looked at the challenges of transporting a statute that weighs 10-20 tons, over a distance of some 20 or more kilometres, the task seems immense. The most common form of moving large objects in classical Greece, Egypt or the Middle East was using round timber logs as rollers. However there is some doubt that the type of timber required existed on the island. The most common type of tree was the palm tree and although there are small areas of timbered forests on Rapa Nui today, it is doubtful that they existed in 1100-1700. For rollers, a quantity of tall trees with hardwood round trunks, would have been required.
Now, add to this the legend that the statues “walked” to their ahu sites, and the mystery becomes even greater. Various methods have been tried but there is only one that might satisfy all of these complexities. This is that the statues were fitted with giant wooden “boots”. When the statues where hauled upright onto their “feet”, they were rocked from side to side, pivoted on one foot, rocked back to the other side, pivoted again and the process repeated time after time until they reached that destination. Obviously roads would have needed to have been prepared and some form of ropes used but given a team of 90 men, it might be feasible. Thor Heyerdahl carried out trials to try to prove this theory. The assembled team did manage to move an upright statue a number of feet but the experiment was determined to be inconclusive.
