The Facts about Easter Island
 
   
  Discovered on Easter Sunday 1722 by Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen (hence the name) this island sits in the South Pacific Ocean 2,300 miles west of South America, 2,500 miles southeast of Tahiti, 4,300 miles south of Hawaii, 3,700 miles north of Antarctica. The closest other inhabited island is 1,260 miles away - the tiny Pitcairn Island where the mutineers of the H.M.S. Bounty settled in 1790.

What Roggeveen discovered on the island was 3 distinct groups of people, dark skinned, red skinned, and very pale skinned people with red hair. It is suggested that the inhabitants are of Polynesian descent, but for decades anthropolgists have argued the true origins of these people, some claiming that ancient South-American mariners settled the island first. The people themselves were scattered across the island and had almost no culture they could remember, and without any links to the outside world.

When we think of Easter Island we immediately think of those huge stone figures, the Moai monoliths. They are carved from island rock and are found all over the island in various stages of completion. Many of them are still lying in the quarry where they were mined, abandoned and forgotten. No one knows what purpose they served, but research accumulated with local knowledge has ascertained that the Moai were carved by the ancestors of the present inhabitants.

It is believed there were two 'classes' of people on the island. One group dominated the other, and to keep them subservient forced them to carve huge images of their ancestors which were then used to plot celestial phenomenon (the inhabitants were ancestor worshipers and had only one deity - Make Make). After many generations the lower class rebelled and slew their rulers. This explains two important historical points. Firstly, why the statue building ended so abruptly, and secondly why all of the Moai were toppled. The ones seen standing have all been rebuilt since their first excavation by Thor Heyerdahl in the 1950's.
   
 
   
  Ahu Akivi is the best studied of these celestial observatories and was built around 1500 AD (bit of a problem for ancient civilisation fans), and has been the subject of major restorative work. As in the case of many of the structures on Easter Island, it has been situated with astronomical precision: it's seven statues look towards the point where the sun sets during the equinox. Folklore holds that its seven Moai represent the seven young explorers that legend says the Polynesian King Hotu Matu'a dispatched from across the seas, probably from the Marquesas Islands, to find a new homeland for him and his people.
   
   

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