Jeremy Hildreth

Such ethereal queries are accompanied by terrestrial ones, such as: How did the moai get from the single quarry where they all were carved to their erect positions -- mostly dotted around the coastal perimeter with their backs to the sea -- up to 12 miles away? Several theories have been demonstrated as feasible, including dragging the statues on wooden sleds. "There are lots of ways they could have been moved," says Sergio Rapu, the only born Easter Islander who is also a trained archaeologist. "'How was it actually done?' is the question."

Oral history claims that the statues walked, and Mr. Rapu believes he has found examples of the "shoes" they wore for the journey: stones, flat on the topside, used by the islanders to pivot a trussed-up statue back and forth and forward -- like moving a refrigerator -- while synchronizing their exertions with chanting. Some experiments show a convincing way the moai, if lashed upright into a wooden frame, could have marched themselves along practically under their own power, as though hobbling on crutches. In truth, islanders may have used a combination of techniques.

And why did they make so many? Well, why not? Easter Island, in the relative far east of the Pacific Ocean, 2,360 miles from South America, was one of the very last places to be settled by Polynesians. People arrived around the year 500, and after several generations the population was sufficient to get into the labor-intensive monument business. Polynesians were carvers anyway; here they had the perfect volcanic rock for it and little else to occupy their time. So statue building became the central activity of Easter's society. Unsurprisingly, the maximum population of 15,000 to 20,000, reached in the 15th or 16th century, corresponds to the peak of moai-making.