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.We shall return to the significance of this pointwhen we estimate the total effort involved in building Easter's ahu and moai.An ahu's rear (seaward) retaining wall is approximately vertical, but thefront wall slopes down to a flat rectangular plaza about 160 feet on each side.Inback of an ahu are crematoria containing the remains of thousands of bodies.Inthat practice of cremation, Easter was unique in Polynesia, where bodies wereotherwise just buried.Today the ahu are dark gray, but originally they were amuch more colorful white, yellow, and red: the facing slabs were encrusted withwhite coral, the stone of a freshly cut moai was yellow, and the moai's crownand a horizontal band of stone coursing on the front wall of some ahu were red.As for the moai, which represent high-ranking ancestors, Jo Anne VanTilburg has inventoried a total of 887 carved, of which nearly half still remain inRano Raraku quarry, while most of those transported out of the quarry wereerected on ahu (between 1 and 15 per ahu).All statues on ahu were of RanoRaraku tuff, but a few dozen statues elsewhere (the current count is 53) werecarved from other types of volcanic stone occurring on the island (variouslyknown as basalt, red scoria, gray scoria, and trachyte).The "average" erectedstatue was 13 feet tall and weighed about 10 tons.The tallest ever erectedsuccessfully, known as Paro, was 32 feet tall but was slender and weighed"only" about 75 tons, and was thus exceeded in weight by the 87-ton slightlyshorter but bulkier statue on Ahu Tongariki that taxed Claudio Cristino in hisefforts to reerect it with a crane.While islanders successfully transported astatue a few inches taller than Paro to its intended site on Ahu Hanga Te Tenga,it unfortunately fell over during the attempt to erect it.Rano Raraku quarrycontains even bigger unfinished statues, including one 70 feet long and weighingabout 270 tons.Knowing what we do about Easter Island technology, it seemsimpossible that the islanders could ever have transported and erected it, and wehave to wonder what megalomania possessed its carvers.To extraterrestrial-enthusiast Erich von Daniken and others, Easter Island'sstatues and platforms seemed unique and in need of special expla- nation.Actually, they have many precedents in Polynesia, especially in EastPolynesia.Stone platforms called marae, used as shrines and often support-ing temples, were widespread; three were formerly present on Pitcairn Is-land, from which the colonists of Easter might have set out.Easter's ahudiffer from marae mainly in being larger and not supporting a temple.TheMarquesas and Australs had large stone statues; the Marquesas, Australs,and Pitcairn had statues carved of red scoria, similar to the material usedfor some Easter statues, while another type of volcanic stone called a tuff(related to Rano Raraku stone) was also used in the Marquesas; Mangarevaand Tonga had other stone structures, including on Tonga a well-known bigtrilithon (a pair of vertical stone pillars supporting a horizontal crosspiece,each pillar weighing about 40 tons); and there were wooden statues onTahiti and elsewhere.Thus, Easter Island architecture grew out of an exist-ing Polynesian tradition.We would of course love to know exactly when Easter Islanders erectedtheir first statues, and how styles and dimensions changed with time.Un-fortunately, because stone cannot be radiocarbon-dated, we are forced torely on indirect dating methods, such as radiocarbon-dated charcoal foundin ahu, a method known as obsidian-hydration dating of cleaved obsidiansurfaces, styles of discarded statues (assumed to be early ones), and succes-sive stages of reconstruction deduced for some ahu, including those thathave been excavated by archaeologists.It seems clear, however, that laterstatues tended to be taller (though not necessarily heavier), and that thebiggest ahu underwent multiple rebuildings with time to become larger andmore elaborate.The ahu-building period seems to have fallen mainly in theyears A.D.1000-1600.These indirectly derived dates have recently gainedsupport from a clever study by J.Warren Beck and his colleagues, who ap-plied radiocarbon dating to the carbon contained in the coral used for filesand for the statues' eyes, and contained in the algae whose white nodulesdecorated the plaza.That direct dating suggests three phases of construc-tion and reconstruction of Ahu Nau Nau at Anakena, the first phase aroundA.D.1100 and the last phase ending around 1600.The earliest ahu wereprobably platforms without any statues, like Polynesian marae elsewhere.Statues inferred to be early were reused in the walls of later ahu and otherstructures.They tend to be smaller, rounder, and more human than lateones, and to be made of various types of volcanic stone other than RanoRaraku tuff.Eventually, Easter Islanders settled on the volcanic tuff from RanoRaraku, for the simple reason that it was infinitely superior for carving.TheI! tuff has a hard surface but an ashlike consistency inside and is thus easier tocarve than very hard basalt.As compared to red scoria, the tuff is less break-able and lends itself better to polishing and to carving of details.With time,insofar as we can infer relative dates, Rano Raraku statues became larger,more rectangular, more stylized, and almost mass-produced, although eachstatue is slightly different from others.Paro, the tallest statue ever erected,was also one of the latest.The increase in statue size with time suggests competition between rivalchiefs commissioning the statues to outdo each other.That conclusion alsoscreams from an apparently late feature called a pukao: a cylinder of redscoria, weighing up to 12 tons (the weight of Paro's pukao), mounted as aseparate piece to rest on top of a moai's flat head (Plate 8).(When you readthat, just ask yourself: how did islanders without cranes manipulate a 12-ton block so that it balanced on the head of a statue up to 32 feet tall? Thatis one of the mysteries that drove Erich von Daniken to invoke extraterres-trials.The mundane answer suggested by recent experiments is that thepukao and statue were probably erected together
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