Island has been a source of fascination for historians, researchers, and tourists for centuries. Reaching it is not ...

Island has fascinated historians, researchers, and tourists for centuries. Reaching it is not easy; flights from Europe, with ...

According to archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg—who is the founder of UCLA's Easter Island Statue Project and has studied the artifacts for nearly 30 years—about 95 percent of the statues were ...

and the statues remain sacred vessels. Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen landed here on Easter Sunday in 1722, the first European known to visit the island, but only stayed for one day. By the time ...

A decades-long stretch of extremely low precipitation in the 1500s may have spurred cultural changes among the Rapa Nui people that reduced time spent building statues, but not all archaeologists agre ...

“The island is planted with monstrous great statues, the work of I don’t know what race, today degenerate or vanished; its great remains an enigma.” Named Easter Island by the Dutch explorer ...

On average, they stand 13 feet high and weigh 14 tons, human heads-on-torsos carved in the male form from rough hardened volcanic ash. The islanders call them "moai," and they have puzzled ...

He’s a Rapanui, an indigenous Polynesian resident of Rapa Nui, as the locals call Easter Island; his own ancestors probably helped carve some of the hundreds of statues that stud the island’s ...

Rapa Nui, the indigenous name of Easter Island, bears witness to a unique cultural phenomenon. A society of Polynesian origin that settled there c. A.D. 300 established a powerful, imaginative and ...

Chile officials say fire damaged some of Easter Island’s iconic moai statues A fire that ripped through part of Chile's Easter Island this week has caused permanent damage to some of its iconic ...