A new moai – one of Easter Island’s iconic monolithic statues – has been found in the bed of a dry lake in a volcano crater, the Indigenous community that administers the site on the Chilean island has said.
The statue was found on 21 February by a team of scientific volunteers from three Chilean universities who were collaborating on a project to restore the marshland in the crater inside the Rano Raraku volcano.
“This moai has great potential for scientific and natural studies – it’s a really unique discovery as it’s the first time that that a moai has been discovered inside a laguna [lake] in a Rano Raraku crater,” the Ma’u Henua Indigenous community said in a statement on Tuesday.
Several moai in that area suffered charring in an October forest fire on the island, which is also known as Rapa Nui and lies 3,500km west of Chile.
“This moai is in the centre of a laguna that began drying up in 2018,” said the director of the Ma’u Henua community that administers the Rapa Nui national park, where the volcano is found.
“The interesting thing is that, for at least the last 200 or 300 years, the laguna was three metres deep, meaning no human being could have left the moai there in that time.”
Moai are distinctive monolithic carved stone figures with elongated faces and no legs that were mostly quarried from tuff, a kind of volcanic ash, at the Rano Raraku volcano.
This Moai is 1.60 metres tall and was found lying down on its side looking at the sky.
It was “full-bodied with recognisable features but no clear definition”, the Ma’u Henua statement said, adding that the group was looking for finance to carry out a more extensive study on the discovery.
However, there were “no plans to remove the moai from where it is”.
The Rano Raraku volcano and its Moai are a Unesco world heritage site. Easter Island was long inhabited by Polynesian people, before Chile annexed it in 1888.