Mysterious Statues Need Facelift

Rapa Nui is the native name of the most remote inhabited island located in the South Pacific. It is more known by its familiar name—Easter Island.

The mystery about this island which draws 20,000 tourists is the statues called Moai. The enormous long faces of these best-preserved examples look down on their eroded brothers at outposts along the coast of Rapa Nui.

All of the existing 870 Moai sculptures were born here in a quarry of unique volcanic tuff rock.

The statues that were never moved from the quarry were protected from destructive rain, fire, animals, and souvenir grabbers that have destroyed other Moai and threaten to ruin the island's unique archeological treasure and tourism attraction.

The origin of the carvers and the engineering methods they used to move these statues is a mystery. No one knows if the creators of these statues paddled to this 425-square-kilometer island from Polynesia, 2,880 miles away, or the even more distant mainland of South America.

And there are many theories but no facts about how the people who carved these statues 400 to 1,300 years ago moved monoliths up to 6 meters tall and weighing up to 82 tons -- the equivalent of two sperm whales -- down the steep slopes of Rano Raraku to huge platforms near the shore, using only primitive tools.

Caretakers of the cracked and crumbling Moai fret that a piece of history is deteriorating before their eyes.

"Something must be done immediately. If the Moai are destroyed, the island is destroyed because without tourism this island is nothing," said Rapa Nui expert Francesco Di Castri, former deputy director of the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and former president of the World Science Institute.

But good news came in early November when UNESCO awarded German company Maar Denkmalpflege GmbH an $11.5 million contract to treat the statues with chemicals starting in 2005.

The chemicals are meant to prevent moisture passing through the porous tuff and to stop the widening of large cracks that are now forming rapidly.

The German project comes in addition to an ongoing $600,000 Japanese program to weatherproof some statues, including 15 well-known ones on the so-called Tongariki platform built by the Rapa Nui people from rock and earth at Anakena beach.

The ancient Rapa Nui people take the first blame in the history of damage to the statues, as they tore them down in tribal wars.

Man was the first to harm the statues, delivering them a big shock by toppling them, experts said. Wind, rain, earthquakes and tidal waves did further damage.

Europeans, who arrived on the island in the 1800s, hastened the deterioration, bringing sheep, horses and cows who stepped on and rubbed up against fallen statues and who still do so despite the fact that the figures are in a national park that protects most of the island.

In the 1900s tourists headed to the island and some broke Moai. Others were burned as the Rapa Nui cleared land with fire.

However, the park's caretakers are learning to get strict with tourists.

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Khorsheed.com – Nov, Dec 2003