Testimonials and legends confirm that there were difficult times.  Juan Tepano, a major source for Routledge, Macmillan Brown and Metraux, told them that when he was young the old people spoke of the “failure of the overthrown statues”.  He also remembered a story about when the Moai (statue) Paro at Ahu Te Pito Kura on the northern coast, which according to tradition had been the last one erected, was taken down.  “A Tupahotu woman was killed and eaten by the Tu´u people. Her son showed his devotion to her by shutting up in a cave more than 30 people who were from the place where the crime was committed.  The Moai was also a victim of this battle.  Great ropes were tied around his neck and vengeful warriors pulled on them to throw the statue to the ground.  The enormous structure fell face forward.”

But not all Moai seem to have been brought down intentionally and violently during tribal wars.  In various excavations, older platforms were found buried under more recent constructions, some of which were rebuilt up to eight times in periods dating between the 13th Century and the 17th Century.  It has been seen that some of the platforms were used over a relatively short period of time of no more than two or three generations, then were dismantled by rather complicated methods and partially reused in new platforms.  The archaeologist José Miguel Ramirez thinks that, due to the need to adjust to new critical situations that arose in each period, the platforms were transformed.  In some of them chambers were built in their interior to receive the bones of the dead, a practice which replaced the more ancient practice of cremation due to the lack of firewood from deforestation.

Clearly there was an ecological crisis, but it didn’t necessarily cause the destruction of the platforms or the overthrow of the statues.  It did, however, mean the end of megalithic construction, the production of the giant statues.  No new Ahu-Moai (platforms with statues) were made after the 18th Century.  Those statues which were left in the quarry of Rano Raraku don’t seem to have been intended for platforms, but possibly were being made to convert the extinct volcano into a new sacred center, perhaps as part of the cult of the “Bird-Man” which lasted for 200 years, from approximately 1680 until the arrival of the Christian missionaries in 1864. The proof is in the different styles that characterize the giants distributed throughout the Island and those which remained in the quarry, the appearance of cave painting, essentially in the service of the god Make-Make, and the development of the ritual of Tangata Manu, or bird-man.

The big question still remains : What really happened that the production of the Moai stopped seemingly from one day to the next and was then slowly replaced with a cultural and religious change?