Ahu Tongariki on Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Mike W. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license)
Leading British archeologist and writer, Mike Pitts, has argued that the famous Easter Island statues were not all heading for the platforms, but were meant to be exactly where they are: in the quarry, on the roads and on the platforms along the shore.
I argued the same case over a decade ago in my book The Memory Code.
Pitts writes: The moai ‘now lying or standing at the quarries, or lying beside nearby paved “roads”, are said to have been abandoned, unfinished or in transit. … It is proposed that this supports an alternative view with significant implications for the meaning and purpose of statues: that at all three locations, they were carved to be raised where they remain today.’ [Details of Mike Pitts’s work below – click here]
Pitts’s robust argument is from a multivariate analysis of the statues. I argued from an understanding of the way knowledge systems work in First Nations cultures across the Pacific. I am absolutely delighted that we came to the same conclusion from such different perspectives.
Oral cultures store a vast depth of knowledge about animals, plants, weather, genealogies, navigation, astronomy, moral expectations, spirituality, healing and a pharmacopeia … the list goes on and on. They simply wouldn’t survive, physically and culturally, if this wasn’t the case.
Until we acknowledge the intellectual achievements of Indigenous peoples, interpretations of their ancestral archaeology remains impoverished.
The following is a very brief overview of the ideas presented in Chapter 12 of The Memory Code based on the previous chapters which analyse the way Indigenous knowledge systems work. I have added some new ideas from my more recent book, The Knowledge Gene, which added the statues and platforms from Hawaii. All my books are fully cited – my full bibliography is here.
Why did the Rapa Nui people carve amazing statues?
The purpose of the moai on Easter Island can only make sense by understanding the way knowledge systems work in Polynesian cultures.
Our brains are hardwired to use structured spaces to store information, hence it is a universal practice, still used by all memory champions today. The Rapanui structured their island with incredible statues.
Oral cultures use a combination of landscape features and monuments, portable objects, art in many formats, and ceremony to store their encyclopaedias.
Ceremony takes the form of song, dance and the stories of ancestral and mythological characters at performance sites to make the information as memorable as possible. Hence the Rapanui created performance spaces dominated by amazing platforms topped with the maoi.
Rituals are repeated events, usually formalised. It is better to use the word ‘ceremony’. Yet nebulous ‘rituals’ still pervade archaeological writing. Ceremonies convey and maintain essential survival information. That information is mythologised because stories populated with vibrant characters are far more memorable than emotionless facts.
The Rapanui would have carved representations of ancestors as memory aids to the stories they needed to store, adapt and transmit their oral tradition. They would have started with the ancestors who taught knowledge they bought with them. They would have then adapted the stories as they needed to encode the new knowledge of their environment and the laws by which their isolated society would live
To travel such vast ocean distances, and arrive with the people, animals and other necessities tells of hugely accurate pragmatic knowledge. To understand the purpose of moai on Rapa Nui, it is only necessary to explore the way knowledge is stored in Indigenous cultures right across the Pacific. That will also explain exactly why Pitts found the results he did – and updated the perceived understanding that the maoi in the quarry and along the roads were destined for the coast.
The amazing skills of the Pacific Navigators
The ability to navigate thousands of kilometres of ocean by the Pacific navigators is legendary. There is no doubt that the captains of the canoes which landed on Rapa Nui were highly trained Pacific navigators.
Songs, chants, stories and mythology were used to store a vast amount of navigational data along with masses of other information. Detailed knowledge of the taxonomy and behaviour of the birds, fish and other creatures were used to estimate exact positions in the ocean. Complex star compasses enabled navigation, memorised to allow for the changing skyspace over night. Star compasses are still used widely across the Pacific.
Knowledge included how the swells and wave patterns around each island or reef would feel in intensity and at what angle they would strike the bow of the double canoe in different tidal and weather conditions. A highly skilled navigator could sense even the slightest of wave movements by entering the water and using his scrotum as a hypersensitive detector.
During training, charts were constructed of sticks and shells representing real islands, reefs and sandbanks along with non-existent islands or fantastic creatures placed in the spaces between the real islands to give sufficient points for the memory technique that Ancient Greeks called the method of loci. This method has never been bettered. All memory champions depend on it still. Each location serves to act as a memory aid for specific information deliberately stored there. Your brain is structured to use this technique. Pity that it is not taught in schools any more.
The newly arrived Rapanui certainly used this method. They began making statues which represented the ancestors, be they human or mythological. They created ceremonial roads and spectacular performance spaces at the ahu. Although minimal oral tradition survives from the first Rapanui, we can get an idea of the way Polynesians settled new islands in similar circumstances from the oral tradition and knowledge systems of Rarotonga and New Zealand.
Insight from Rarotonga
Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, is only 67 square kilometres. On arrival, the Pacific colonisers built a marae, a Polynesian ceremonial centre. Over forty ceremonial centres were constructed along a road known as the Ara Metua and divided up the land for the clans, as has also been proposed for Rapa Nui. Processions also the roads follow a memory path, the recitation being a performance of the oral tradition. With the marae along its route, the familiar pattern emerges, that of a set of memory locations, their order fixed by the landscape.
The marae located on the Ara Metua were the sites of island-wide ceremonies, while those inland were more restricted. This is exactly the pattern which is indicated by the archaeology on Rapa Nui. The ahu on the shore act as the public ceremonial spaces, while the crater where the statues were carved was highly restricted. The roads acted as processional memory palaces, as for the Art Metua.
An expert on Rarotongan oral tradition, Matthew Campbell, wrote that:
the building of monuments is a near universal activity, and their purpose is also universally bound to memory. In most preliterate societies memory is preserved in oral tradition and genealogy, and such societies will build monuments with genealogical memorial practices in mind, as the Raratongans did with the Ara Metua and the marae. [M. Campbell, ‘Memory and monumentality in the Rarotongan landscape’, Antiquity, 2006, 80 (307): 102(116).]
Understanding Polynesian ancestors from the Māori Aotearoa (New Zealand)
Polynesian cultures typically maintain about 25 generations back in time. Beyond that the human and mythological ancestries become interwoven in the mythology.
Māori writer Bradford Haami explains that a lot of ancestors are needed in order to have sufficient stories to store enough information, but too many becomes unwieldy. The sacred stories are known as kōrero tuku ihu which translates as ‘words handed down’.
Haami notes that there was a deliberate construction of myths and legends. Along with extensive environmental knowledge, the Māori knowledge system, whakapapa, encodes genealogies, political relationships, inheritance status and extensive chiefly family relationships.
The Maori whakapapa, as it the case for knowledge systems across Polynesia, is structured by a complex of genealogies, much more complicated than simple family trees. Whakapapa is essentially the encyclopaedia which organises all knowledge into a structured format as is essential for ensuring information is not lost when it is not written down. The ancestry provides protagonists for the stories which then encode practical and spiritual information in an incredibly memorable form.
Haami describes whakapapa as an essential ‘skeletal framework’ for memorising a chronological sequence of events, giving a structure to the past including the arrival of people in Aotearoa, their subsequent travels and the ancestral sources of knowledge. It also provides a taxonomy for all aspects of the universe, not just human events.
A familiar pattern in Hawaii.
An illustration of a heiau at Kealakekua Bay at the time of James Cook’s third voyage, by William Ellis (Public Domain)
It is impossible to ignore the similarities of the ahu of Rapa Nui and the heiau of Hawaii, as shown in the above image. On the small ceremonial island of Mokumanamana (Necker Island) in Hawaii, at the Papahanaumokua-kea Marine National Monument, there are 33 ceremonial heiau with rectangular platforms, forecourts and standing stones. Portable stone images with human form, known as ki‘i po -haku, were found in the heiau. Elsewhere in Hawaii, large wooden ki‘i statues stood on platforms.
In The Knowledge Gene, I explain the evolutionary biology which led to the uniquely human ability to use these memory systems, showing that the skills are ancient, universal and innate in every one of us.
It would be difficult to arguing against ascribing similar memory methods to the original Indigenous population of Rapa Nui.
The Maoi
There are over a thousand individual statues, the moai. Although each statue follows the general rectangular form, each is different, as is essential for a memory system. These represent the ancestors, critical in structuring all Polynesian knowledge systems. Without structure, knowledge is too easily lost. The maoi are found on the platforms, along the roads and in the quarry.
Platforms, the ahu
There are at least 360 ahu on Rapa Nui. These consist of a central platform with two long wings of stone, the entire structure providing the backdrop to a plaza.
At the Great Ahu of Tongariki, shown at the top of this page, there were once fifteen statues while some other ahu supported only one. The central platform of the Great Ahu was nearly one hundred metres long reaching 220 metres when including the length of the wings. The largest of its moai was 8.7 metres tall and weighed 88 metric tons.
In front of the platform was up to 75 metres of smoothed stonework with the ground then levelled for another 50 or so metres. This was a performance space, a space for ceremony, a knowledge space. One of the first Europeans to live on the island, Katherine Routledge describes the effect:
Looked at from the landward side, we may, therefore, conceive an ahu as a vast theatre stage, of which the floor runs gradually upwards from the footlights. [Routledge, The Mystery of Easter Island, p. 196.]
As Pitts points out, previous understanding has been that the statues on the ‘roads’ and in the quarry were destined to stand on platforms. We both disagree.
Roads
Routledge believed the statues had been deliberately placed on the roads. She described the section of one road approaching the quarry as having statues occurring every hundred metres or so. As a ceremonial avenue, part of so many Indigenous cultures, an elder approaching the restricted quarry would have faced each standing moai individually. This would form a perfect sequence of memory locations.
The majority of maoi on the roads on Rapa Nui were standing in holes dug specifically to hold them. Excavations have now shown that what appear to be just heads to modern visitors are complete statues with torsos that have become buried by sediments up to their shoulders over time. The backs of the statues were carved with the belts and the rings and abstract markings which would have served as memory aids. Abstract markings are used by all oral cultures on a huge variety of forms acting as memory devices, including tattoos are used across Polynesia to designate clan affiliations and record further complexities of the knowledge system.
Quarry
The Rano Raraku crater was the quarry source for almost all moai. The crater apparently served as a restricted site for the whole island.
Over 150 moai are still within the Rano Raraku quarry. Some of those remaining were carved in a way which means that they would not stand if extracted. Twenty or so were already standing erect and others were simply too large to be moved. The largest, at 21.6 metres and weighing an estimated 270 tonnes, is nearly double the size of anything found outside the crater.
I have no doubt that the statues in the crater were part of the memory theatre of the quarry itself, the most restricted area on the island.
Restricted memory spaces are an integral part of all oral cultures. Without restricting information to elders, and constantly ensuring it is repeated accurately, critical survival knowledge would soon be corrupted.
Think of the telephone game, where whispered words are lost within minutes. Yet we have robust evidence of Indigenous stories dating back tens of thousands of years around the world. [See the work of Patrick Nunn, Duane Hamacher and Leah Minc (among many others) in my bibliography. My understanding of the essential role of restricted knowledge was hugely enhanced by my learning from Tlingit Elder and Storyteller, David Kanosh, as presented in The Knowledge Gene.]
Mike Pitts on Rapa Nui
Mike Pitts’s academic paper on the analysis of the maxi is highly readable – as is everything Pitts writes. The paper is linked here:
Multivariate analysis reveals significant differences in the shape and size of statues at key locations on Rapa Nui
Journal of Archaeological Science, 29 Pages Posted: 11 Mar 2026 Publication Status: Under Review
Mike Pitts, University College London
Abstract
The statues or moai on Rapa Nui in the eastern Pacific are among the best known achievements of the ancient world. Evidence for production is so extensive, with apparently unfinished statues in a variety of preparation states, that the quarries are commonly seen as no more than an industrial site: every detail is interpreted as part of a chain of carving, extraction and removal, for statues intended to be raised on coastal plinths or ahu. Those now lying or standing at the quarries, or lying beside nearby paved “roads”, are said to have been abandoned, unfinished or in transit. Here this model is challenged, with the first attempt using multivariate numeric data to analyse statue shape and size with respect to location. Using measurements gathered from three major field projects conducted by others, in 1914–15, in the 1980s, and in the 2010s, quarry and “road” statues are shown to be significantly larger, and shaped differently, from plinth statues. It is proposed that this supports an alternative view with significant implications for the meaning and purpose of statues: that at all three locations, they were carved to be raised where they remain today.
Pitts also writes excellent blogs. He has an analysis of the three locations of maoi there. (Click on the image to get to the blog):
Extract from the blog, which is wonderfully illustrated:
More on Rapa Nui statues! This time it’s not about just one carving, nor is it about recent historical events (see my previous posts about Hoa Hakananai‘a). Rather, it’s an attempt to take an overview of the island’s entire statue repertoire. Any implications from this study relate solely to what was happening before Europeans arrived on the scene. And, I argue, the implications are big.
Pitts has also recently released a book on the entire story of Rapa Nui (click on the image or title for Amazon UK):
Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island