Nearly three hundred megalithic statues were at one time erected on ceremonial platforms on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), the vast majority along the almost 60 km (37 miles) of coastline around the Island. All of them, carved until the 17th Century, did not look toward the sea, but kept vigil inland over a village or a settlement, transmitting their Mana (supernatural power) from respected ancestors and revered by the entire tribal community. Those three hundred statues that were on their altars in the villages were different from other Moai (statues) in several aspects, but especially in the deep oval eye sockets carved into their faces. The German ethnographer and linguist, Thomas Barthel, felt that the addition of eye sockets gave the statues the look of a cadaver which would have been apt for representing someone who was already dead. Folklore always emphasized the existence of eyes on the Moai but, until the end of the 1970s, what the archaeologists of the world understood to be “eyes” were the mentioned eye sockets … and nothing more.

The reports from the first Dutch navigators who reached the Island in 1722 confirm that idea. What amazed the visitors were the enormous megalithic monuments which were described by every expedition which arrived on the Island in the 18th Century – the Dutch in 1722, the Spanish in 1770, the British and the Germans in 1774, the French in 1786. For all of them, the eyes of the Moai were the sockets resembling cadavers which gave these figures a ceremonial, funerary look. Shortly thereafter, the gradual overthrow of the Moai during inter-tribal conflicts or for political reasons left the monuments in ruins, waiting for new scientific expeditions to come and study them. Visits by Gana, Geiseler and Thomson, in the 19th Century, didn’t note any differences in the ceremonial platforms from the descriptions in the earlier reports. The faces of the fallen Moai held only empty eye sockets.

From where did the coral eyes that we see today on replicas of statues and on the Moai at Ahu Ko Te Riku in Tahai come? In 1978, during the restoration of Ahu Nau-Nau at Anakena, Sonia Haoa and other members of the excavating team found an oval object made of white coral with a hole in the center in which a piece of polished red scoria could fit – the iris. Sergio Rapu-Haoa (the archaeologist who led the restoration and the then-director of the Anthropological Museum) noted that this piece fit perfectly within the eye socket of one the Moai of the Ahu (platform) and identified it as an eye. This seemed to confirm what had been recorded from the elders José Fati and Leonardo Pakarati, well-known conservators of the oral traditions, who swore that they had seen objects like that before and that they were, effectively, eyes of Moai.

Six more eyes were found during the same campaign to restore Ahu Nau-Nau. In following years, the statues of this Ahu were decorated with replicas of coral eyes for special occasions. In the early 1980s, the statue at Ahu Ko Te Riku in Tahai received permanent replicas of coral eyes, sculpted by Juan Haoa-Veriveri. The decision to do so was taken by the Council of Elders at that time with the intention to show the appearance of a Moai complete with eyes; this Moai already had a Pukao (a type of hat or hairdo made of red scoria stone) which was not original, but had been placed over the statue in the 1960s.