Around three hundred megalithic statues stood upright on ceremonial platforms on Rapa Nui, the vast majority along the island’s nearly 60 km coastline. All of these, sculpted up until the 17th century, did not face the sea; instead, they gazed vigilantly toward a village, toward some settlement, channeling the Mana (supernatural power) of ancestors respected and revered by the tribal community. These three hundred statues, which stood on their altars in the villages, differed from other Moai in several aspects, such as their deep, oval eye sockets. The German ethnographer and philologist Thomas Barthel considered that the open eye sockets gave the statues the cadaverous appearance necessary for representing deceased individuals, but oral tradition always emphasized the existence of the Moai’s eyes. However, until the late 1970s, what archaeologists around the world understood as “eyes” were those eye sockets… and nothing more.
This is confirmed by the accounts of the first Dutch navigators who contacted the island in 1722. What captured the visitors’ attention most were the megalithic monuments. The Moai began to be described by all the expeditions that visited the island in the 18th century: the Dutch in 1722, the Spanish in 1770, the British and Germans in 1774, the French in 1786… the eyes of the Moai were those cadaverous eye sockets that stood out in the mortuary and ceremonial aspect of the megalithic figures. Shortly afterward, the gradual fall of the Moai during intertribal conflicts or for political reasons left the monuments in a state of ruin by the time new scientific expeditions arrived to study them. The visits of Gana, Geiseler, and Thomson, for example, detected nothing unusual in the ceremonial platforms compared to the classic descriptions. The faces of the fallen Moai had only empty eye sockets.
Much later, the Belgian archaeologist Henri Lavachery considered the presence of coral fragments under certain statues unusual, but there was nothing to suggest they had anything to do with the eyes. Coral was frequently used to smooth the surface of carved stones and statues. It was Heyerdahl who first speculated about possible eyes within the exposed eye sockets, based on the presence of bone and obsidian eyes in the eye sockets of wooden sculptures on Rapa Nui.
So where did the coral eyes seen today on various replicas of statues and on the Moai of Ahu Ko Te Riku in Tahai come from? In 1978, during the restoration of Ahu Nau-Nau in Anakena, Sonia Haoa and other members of the excavation team found an oval-shaped object of white coral with an opening in the center to fit a polished circular piece of red scoria: the iris. Sergio Rapu Haoa (the archaeologist who directed the restoration and was the director of the Anthropological Museum at the time), noticing that this piece fit perfectly into the eye socket of one of the Moai on the Ahu, identified it as an eye. This confirmed what island elders like José Fati and Leonardo Pakarati, renowned preservers of oral tradition, had said, asserting that they had seen such objects before and that they were indeed Moai eyes.
Six more eyes were found during the same excavation and restoration of Ahu Nau-Nau. In the following years, the statues on this Ahu were decorated with replica coral eyes for special occasions. In the early 1980s, the statue on Ahu Ko Te Riku at Tahai received permanent replica coral eyes, carved by Juan Haoa Veriveri. The decision was made by the Council of Elders at the time with the intention of showing people what a complete Moai would look like with its eyes. Furthermore, that Moai already had a non-original Pukao (a red scoria “topknot”) placed on the statue in the 1960s.
In the 1980s, the expedition led by Thor Heyerdahl found the remains of six more eyes at Anakena, almost all on the back of Ahu Nau Nau, behind the retaining wall. Other Moai eye fragments had been brought back by the Norwegian Archaeological Expedition as early as the 1950s, but no one suspected their original function. They were reclassified by Helena Martinsson-Wallin between 1989 and 1990. In subsequent years, more Moai eyes and irises were found at other sites, such as in the Vinapu and Tongariki regions. This led the scientific community to conclude that all the Moai had coral eyes at some point. Why didn’t the European visitors see them? Because the eyes were removable and because they were, undoubtedly, purely ceremonial features used on special occasions. By the time of their arrival, ancestor worship seemed to be in decline or had already completely ended. However, there is compelling evidence that not all Moai had eyes. Statues, apparently from the early period, lack eye sockets sufficiently defined to have contained coral eyes. Furthermore, several statues transported and erected on platforms at different times did not have their eye sockets carved: these include the four Moai of Ahu Oroi, two from Ahu Hanga Tetenga, one from Ahu Hanua-Nua-Mea, among others.
In 2012, coral eyes were used ceremonially by a group of islanders to welcome the crews of two traditional Polynesian boats that had just arrived from a long, non-instrumental voyage from New Zealand. The eyes were placed on one of the Moai at Ahu Nau-Nau so that the ancestors could participate in this momentous event.
