Easter Island

Located out in the Pacific Ocean and a special territory of Chile, Easter Island holds Moai statues that are the only thing left of a culture that once lived here.  These gigantic and amazingly carved heads are just another
reminder that primitive people are not really all that primitive.  The stones that attract visitors to this island are made out of volcanic ash.
Many still remain in the quarry,
left by the settlers as diminishing resources on the island left their tribes doomed to war that finally killed them off.

 Easter Island View

One of the world's most famous yet least visited 

archaeological sites, Easter Island is a small, hilly, 

now treeless island of volcanic origin. Located in the 

Pacific Ocean at 27 degrees south of the equator and 

some 2200 miles (3600 kilometers) off the coast of Chile, 

it is considered to be the world’s most remote inhabited 

island. Sixty-three square miles in size and with three 

extinct volcanoes (the tallest rising to 1674 feet), the 

island is, technically speaking, a single massive volcano 

rising over ten thousand feet from the Pacific Ocean floor. 

The oldest known traditional name of the island is Te Pito 

o Te Henua, meaning ‘The Center (or Navel) of the World.’

In the 1860’s Tahitian sailors gave the island the name Rapa 

Nui, meaning ‘Great Rapa,’ due to its resemblance to another 

island in Polynesia called Rapa Iti, meaning ‘Little Rapa’. 

The island received its most well known current name, Easter 

Island, from the Dutch sea captain Jacob Roggeveen who 

became the first European to visit on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722.In the early 1950s, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl (famous for his Kon-Tiki and Ra raft voyages across the oceans) popularized the idea that the island had been originally settled by advanced societies of Indians from the coast of South America. Extensive archaeological, ethnographic and linguistic research has conclusively shown this hypothesis to be inaccurate. It is now recognized that the original inhabitants of Easter Island are of Polynesian stock (DNA extracts from skeletons have confirmed this), that they most probably came from the Marquesas or Society islands, and that they arrived as early as 318 AD (carbon dating of reeds from a grave confirms this). It is estimated that the original colonists, who may have been lost at sea, arrived in only a few canoes and numbered fewer than 100. At the time of their arrival, much of the island was forested, was teeming with land birds, and was perhaps the most productive breeding site for seabirds in the Polynesia region. Because of the plentiful bird, fish and plant food sources, the human population grew and gave rise to a rich religious and artistic culture.