Ara o te, the moai road
It is thought that entire mountains were scraped away to make the Moai. The lighter volcanic rock can be cut away relatively easily with tools of basalt and obsidian, to give the statues their basic form within the quarry. Later they were removed and half buried to permit their makers to sculpt the details.
All the roads were built by excavating and then artificially filling them to level and avoid brusque slopes. In some places, the fill reached down to a depth of 1 meter (more than 3 feet) and served as a dyke to catch the sediment that was washed down by erosion. A great many of these roads have been destroyed during the 20th Century, by livestock ranching, massive forestry plantations in the 1970s and 80s, and by the recent changes in the system of landholding.
Oddly, the roads are not flat; the cross-section shows the characteristic form of a “V” or a “U”. In some stretches, the roads are flanked by rows of rocks. It is surprising to see that these rocks are sometimes not just placed there, but are actually fitted into holes carved into the bedrock. An important detail is that this type of carved support is found in those sections where the road has an ascending incline. Dr. Love is looking at the possibility that these carvings were made to accommodate some type of mechanism which would move the gigantic stones heads over uneven areas where, otherwise, they would have required an enormous amount of energy. There are still important unknown aspects of the system that the Easter Islanders used to transport and raise their mysterious stone statues.
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