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| Photo Bjarte Sorensen, Creative Commons |
Walking your moai is not a
task to be undertaken lightly. Weighing in at a 10,000 pounds and up, you will
need to have a team to help. The good news is that they won’t dash off chasing
rabbits like your dog. In the first place there are no rabbits on Easter Island
and the moai are just standing around staring into the distance and don’t seem
very interested in the world around them.
Easter Island has been
famous for it’s moai (huge stone statues) for a couple of centuries, but the
how and why has been topics of controversy. The sculptors quarried and carved
then from one location and roads were built to take them to their allotted
places. Some fell by the wayside, but about 900 made it.
The ongoing controversy is
how they got from A to B. A being the quarry and B being their home turf. A
popular view was that they were rolled the road along in a recumbent posture on
logs and propped upright when they arrived. The problem is that the heaviest
are ~ 160,000 pounds and there aren’t that many trees around, though there may
have been once. But the big problem is the weight and how to lift that.
The more recently espoused
idea is that they walked from their quarry where they were carved upright.
Perhaps shuffled is the best description, aided by groups of well wishers
holding onto ropes to pull and cajole them along.
A 10,000 pound concrete
replica was built by Lipo et al and
walked along a track using three strategically placed teams on ropes (1, 2). They made a good walking rate of 0.06 miles per hour. They conclude that that is the
favorite methodology for their location and the design of the base lends itself
to the shuffling motion.
However not everyone agrees
that the demonstration proves the point, so the controversy rumbles on. But
there is something attractive about imagining all those huge stone statues
shuffling along from their quarry to to settle down to nice viewpoints along the road.
- http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440312004311
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/oct/25/easter-island-statues-walked-into-position
