I've always been fascinated by Easter Island, the idea of a tropical island in the middle of the Pacific, miles from anywhere, populated by a people who would then spend hundreds of years obsessively building these slightly bizarre looking stylized statues in ever-increasing sizes. So, time for a bit of history……… Easter Island was populated in the 5th or 6th century, probably by Polynesians and the Moai building (the big heads!) began around 300 years later. They were built on a platform, or Ahu, to commemorate important ancestors from the village, and would always be facing towards the village ‘square’, usually away from the sea. The smallest was around one metre high, and they gradually grew over the years with the largest one ever erected being ten metres, at Ahu Te Pito Kura. The statutes were
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