Easter Island - Ancient monumental statues

 Easter Island (Rapa Nui in the original language), is a Chilean-governed island in the south eastern Pacific Ocean. Rapa Nui is a little, hilly now treeless island of volcanic origin. It is been called the most isolated occupied territory on Earth, but there is one more aspect that sets it apart from any other place on Earth its hundreds of megalithic human-like statues that face inland from the shore. These mysterious statues are called moai. 

Almost all moais were carved out of characteristic, compressed, easily worked volcanic ash. The biggest one weights up to 165 tons & its height is almost 22 meters. Some upright moai have become covered up to their necks by shifting soils.  This huge production of megalithic works on an Easter Island that is absolutely barren, with just grass, right away captures our imagination.  

Some scientists suggest that Easter Island population, the Rapanui came from Polynesia. However similarities to Indian stone statues around Lake Titicaca in South America are striking.
Scholars are incapable to definitively explain the function and use of the moai statues. A few of them suggest that the statues were symbols of authority & power, both religious and political.   

One of the largest riddles about Easter Island is how the statues 'traveled' from the quarry to their platforms, every so often as far as 20 or 25 kilometers away. Rapa Nui legend has it that the moai ‘walked from the quarry’. However, not more than one third of all embossed moai actually made it to a final formal ahus site. Was this due to the inherent difficulties in transporting them?   

Were the ones that stay put in the quarry deemed culturally unworthy of transport? Or had the islanders run out of the wealth necessary to complete the Herculean task of carving and moving the moai?  

Easter Island is further well famous as Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua, meaning ‘The Navel of the World’ & as Mata-Ki-Te-Rani, meaning ‘Eyes Looking at Heaven’. These ancient names & a host of mythological details point to the possibility that the remote island may once have been both a geodetic marker and the site of an excessive observatory of a long forgotten civilization.