How were Easter Island's moai moved?

What archaeology found: the Rapa Nui and their quarry

How were the moai moved? The Rapa Nui, Polynesian settlers who built a tradition of monumental stone carving found nowhere else in the Pacific, carved and moved every statue themselves, using only rope, wood and their own coordinated effort. Archaeologists agree on that much; what remains argued is whether crews rocked finished statues upright in a walking motion or hauled them lying flat on wooden sledges, the two competing answers this record covers below. Who built Easter Island's moai is the least disputed part of the story: their descendants still live on the island today.

The statues start at Rano Raraku, the quarry where nearly all of them were cut directly from the rock face before being hauled, finished, to stone platforms around the coast. The Easter Island Statue Project (EISP), directed by Jo Anne Van Tilburg at UCLA's Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, has documented close to 900 moai in what it calls the longest collaborative artifact inventory ever conducted on the island. Roughly 400 statues remain at Rano Raraku itself; the rest stand or lie elsewhere on the island, some abandoned mid-journey along the old transport roads.

The islanders' own account: statues that walked

Rapa Nui oral tradition holds that the moai walked to their platforms under their own power, a claim European visitors and later scholars often waved off as legend. Sergio Rapu, a Rapa Nui researcher, worked with archaeologists Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo to show the engineering behind the claim: a moai's shape lets handlers rock it side to side rather than drag it flat, so, on their reading, the legend describes real mechanics rather than a myth.

The walking hypothesis and the 2025 study

The most detailed recent case comes from Carl Lipo, an anthropologist at Binghamton University, and Terry Hunt of the University of Arizona. Their paper, "The Walking Moai Hypothesis: Archaeological Evidence, Experimental Validation, and Response to Critics," appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science in 2025 and analyzed nearly 1,000 moai, including many abandoned along old roads.

The statues that fell along the way share a wide, D-shaped base and lean five to fifteen degrees forward from vertical, features Lipo and Hunt argue only make sense for a statue meant to rock rather than lie flat. Rapa Nui's transport roads ran about 4.5 meters wide with a concave, dish-shaped cross section built to keep a rocking statue from tipping sideways.

To test the idea, the team built a 4.35-ton concrete replica sized to an average moai and moved it 100 meters in 40 minutes using 18 people pulling three ropes tied near the head, rocking it side to side in a zigzag. "Once you get it moving, it isn't hard at all — people are pulling with one arm," Lipo said. "It conserves energy, and it moves really quickly."

How the walking hypothesis was tested, decade by decade

The 2025 study builds on years of field experiments. In 2011, Hunt, Lipo and Rapa Nui researcher Sergio Rapu, funded by the National Geographic Society, moved a 10-foot, 5-ton moai replica several hundred meters using 18 people and three ropes, with no logs or sledge underneath it. National Geographic has reported that some moai traveled as far as 11 miles from Rano Raraku to reach their final platforms.

Earlier attempts pointed the same direction but less cleanly. In 1986 the Czech engineer Pavel Pavel and the explorer Thor Heyerdahl used 17 assistants to twist a 13-foot, 9-ton moai forward while upright, but the motion damaged the statue's base and the test was abandoned. A different approach, tried by archaeologist Charles Love in 1987 with 25 people, dragged a similar replica on log rollers and a wooden sledge, covering 148 feet in two minutes.

Popular alternative claims: horizontal transport on sledges

The leading rival account comes from Van Tilburg's own Easter Island Statue Project. For a 1997 documentary made by the PBS series Nova, her team built a concrete replica representing what she called "the statistically average statue" and moved it lying down on an A-frame sledge adapted from Polynesian canoe-building methods, using cordage and a Y-shaped lashing tool called a keke.

The crew of about ten included the Rapa Nui collaborators Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, Niko Haoa, Darus Ane and Santi Hito, with Rafael Rapu supervising the work of standing the statue upright once it reached its platform. The test ran over 32 eight-hour days between October 1997 and July 1999, and the project's published notes present it as a demonstration of what is mechanically possible rather than a final answer.

What is still unsolved

Both camps agree that Rapa Nui hands moved every statue; what they still dispute is the method. Lipo and Hunt built part of their 2025 paper around answering named critics, a sign the walking hypothesis has not closed the argument even with new field data, while Van Tilburg's project keeps digitally mapping the interior of Rano Raraku for further clues.

The island's population history has also been rewritten. A 2024 study in Science Advances, co-authored by Hunt, mapped about 188 acres of rock-mulch gardens used to grow sweet potatoes and concluded Rapa Nui's population held at around 3,000 people, close to counts recorded at European contact in 1722, instead of collapsing from a much larger number as older accounts claimed. Hunt, who has studied Rapa Nui for more than two decades, said the rock mulch "created sustainable agriculture for a relatively small population."

The Rapa Nui today

Rapa Nui is not only a subject of archaeology but a living community whose members help direct the research. Van Tilburg has worked alongside island elders for nearly four decades and says EISP hires only islanders for its field crews; her longtime collaborator Cristián Arévalo Pakarati, a Rapanui graphic artist, now co-directs the project. UCLA reported in 2019 that the project also backs island initiatives, including the Mana Gallery and the Rapa Nui Outrigger Club.

Verdict

Real or Legend stamps how the moai were moved as disputed, not confirmed, because named specialists on opposite sides of the question still disagree after independently testing their own methods in the field. Lipo and Hunt's 2025 experiments give the walking hypothesis its strongest evidence yet and match Rapa Nui's own account that the statues walked, but Van Tilburg's decades of sledge-based fieldwork have never been ruled out, and no excavation has caught a moai mid-transport to settle it. What the evidence does settle is this: Rapa Nui hands, rope, wood and engineering did the work, whether the statues walked or rode.