Moai Rapa Nui

.. and nothing else.

To all of them, the Moai's eye was the cadaver-like bases that gave these characters a ceremonious, buried look. Soon after, the Moai's progressive fall during intertribal conflict or for policy purposes abandoned the memorials and waited for new science trips to explore them.

Faces of the Moai kept only empty orbits. Later, the Belgium archeologist Henri Lavachery noticed the strange appearance of some of the dead sculptures with corals, but there was nothing to suggest that they had anything to do with his skull. It was often used to shine the surfaces of carvings and to smoothen the sculptures.

In 1955, Thor Heyerdahl was the first to talk about the possible existence of bony and obsidian corneas in the caves of Rapa Nui's caves. Where did the replica of a statue and the moai at Ahu Ko Te Riku in Tahai come from today?

When restoring Ahu Nau-Nau in Anakena in 1978, Sonia Haoa and other members of the excavation crew found an egg-shaped item of pure water with an opening in the middle that could accommodate a slice of shiny chalk - the iaris. The archeologist and former head of the Anthropological Museum, Sergio Rapu-Haoa, found that this item fitted snugly into the orbit of one of the moai of the Ahu (platform) and recognized it as an eyeball.

That seemed to corroborate what of the Ancients José Fati and Leonardo Pakarati, known curators of verbal lore who vowed that they had seen such items before and that they were indeed Moai's gaze. Another six were found during the same Ahu Nau-Nau restoration drive.

During the following years the sculptures of this ahu were adorned with replica of the eye of a sea hawk for particular events. During the early 1980s, the Ahu Ko Te Riku in Tahai was permanently replicated with replica corals carved by Juan Haoa-Veriveri. This moai already had a pukao (a kind of cap or hairstyle made of scaria stone), which was not originally, but had been placed above the sculpture in the60s.

During the 1980s another exploration under the direction of Thor Heyerdahl found remnants of six more eye in Anakena, almost all at the back of Ahu Nau Nau behind the supporting masonry. Some of the other eye items were taken away from the Norwegian archaeological outreach in the 1950s before anyone had any clue about their real use.

After that, further Moai's eyelilies and Iris were found in the Vinapu and Tongariki areas. All of these findings have enabled both the locals and the science communities to see that at some point in the future all these Moai had corals eye. After all, the eye was detachable and undoubtedly pure ceremony items that were used for particular events.

When the Europeans came, the ancestor worship was either about to die or had already ended. But we also have evidence that not all Moai had eyes. A number of sculptures, apparently from an early age, have no orbits that are well enough in definition to have kept the corals' tears.

Furthermore, various sculptures that were carried and placed on stages in different eras were not provided with orbits. We have the four moai at Ahu Oroi, two at Ahu Hanga Tetenga, one at Ahu Hanua-Nua-Mea, among others. During 2012, the group of islanders used the sight of corals to solemnly welcome the crews of two New Zealand based traditionally Polynesia based vessels, navigated with the star and not with advanced stratagem.

Ahu Nau-Nau's moai was used to replace the sight so that the forefathers could once again take part in such a great occasion.