3D model of Easter Island quarry offers new clues on how giant stone heads were made

The largest unfinished statue on Easter Island is known as Te Tokanga. It would have weighed around 270 tons if completed. Carl P. Lipo/Binghamton University; Terry L. Hunt/University of Arizona

Archaeologists say a 3D model of a centuries-old quarry of unfinished stone head statues on Easter Island offers new clues about how these monuments were made and the Polynesian society that brought them into being.

Also known as Rapa Nui, the remote island is famed for the gargantuan sculptures that look out over the Pacific Ocean, but its inhabitants never erected what would have been the community’s largest statue. The giant head, along with hundreds of others, remains embedded in rock in the quarry, a volcanic crater.

Individual clans, and not a single entity with an island-wide workfo