{"it":{"id":"PAC-001","kind":"site","sub":"Pacific/Oceania","name":"Ahu Tongariki","place":"Chile","lat":-27.126,"lon":-109.277,"mat":"tuff","nfacts":0,"tags":["Oceania"],"sum":"Fifteen moai stand in a row on Ahu Tongariki, the largest stone platform on Rapa Nui. Every one of them was once face down on the ground. One weighs 86 tonnes, the heaviest ever raised on the island.","why":"It is Rapa Nui's largest platform, and its rebuilding shows both the scale of the moai and how little is known about their fall.","src":[275,605],"nsrc":3,"yt":"Who toppled the moai, and why would a society bring down its own ancestors?","rel":["RAP-MOA"],"hook":"In 1960 a wave from a Chilean quake threw Ahu Tongariki's fallen moai more than 150 m inland."},"S":{"275":["Wikipedia: Ahu Tongariki","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahu_Tongariki"],"605":["UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Rapa Nui National Park (Ahu Tongariki, 15 moai)","https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/715"]},"rec":{"id":"PAC-001","alias":[],"ms":[],"lab":[{"k":"Materials","mat":"site material (as stated in article)","m":"documentary mention (Wikipedia, auto-extracted)","v":"Rano Raraku is a volcanic crater formed by consolidated volcanic ash, or tuff, from which the moai are carved.","by":"no inline ref in article","b":"S","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ahu_Tongariki&oldid=1319099657"}],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"sub":[],"site":{"age":"","dm":"[see dating_excerpt; method not extracted]","lab":"NO: inference only (style/context/king list/textual)","weak":"no direct lab result on the structure in our records; date from stylistic, contextual or textual inference","unesco":"","dens":"CENSUS"},"co":{"lat":"-27.12583333","lon":"-109.27694444","src":"Wikidata P625 only + curated wave0 value agrees","agree":"agree","b":"V","note":"two independent sources agree; max delta 0.0001 deg (~0.01 km)","osm":"https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/221696391"},"src":[{"id":"S0257","t":"no inline ref in article","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ahu_Tongariki&oldid=1319099657"},{"id":"S0417","t":"Wikipedia: Ahu Tongariki","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahu_Tongariki"},{"id":"S2606","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Rapa Nui National Park (Ahu Tongariki, 15 moai)","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/715"},{"id":"VPAC-001-4","t":"Revista Chilena de Antropología (2002), DOI 10.5354/0717-5051.2002.12951","u":"https://doi.org/10.5354/0717-5051.2002.12951"},{"id":"VPAC-001-5","t":"Universidad de Chile, Programa Riesgo Sísmico: the moai toppled by the Valdivia earthquake tsunami","u":"https://prs.uchile.cl/los-moais-que-derrumbo-el-terremoto-de-valdivia/"},{"id":"VPAC-001-6","t":"UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Rapa Nui National Park","u":"https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/715/"},{"id":null,"t":"Bahamondez, Sawada, Inoue, Araki and Valenzuela 2007, Ahu Tongariki: trabajos de conservación de sus 15 moai, Conserva 11 (Centro Nacional de Conservación y Restauración, Chile)","u":"https://www.cncr.gob.cl/sites/www.cncr.gob.cl/files/2023-01/5.%20Ahu%20Tongariki%20trabajos%20de%20conservaci%C3%B3n%2015%20moais.pdf"},{"id":null,"t":"PBS NOVA Online, Secrets of Easter Island: Ahu Tongariki","u":"https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/easter/explore/ahutongariki.html"}],"sum":"At sunset on the winter solstice, the shortest day of the southern year, fifteen stone figures on the south coast of Rapa Nui, Easter Island, all face the setting sun. They stand in a single row on Ahu Tongariki, the largest stone platform on the island. Every one of them was once face down on the ground. One weighs 86 tonnes, the heaviest statue ever raised on Rapa Nui. That they stand at all is the work of archaeologists and a Japanese crane in the 1990s. Why they were ever brought down is still argued over.\n\nAn ahu is a raised platform of worked stone filled with rubble, with a ramp in front and a levelled plaza where people gathered. The moai are the ancestor figures that stood on top. UNESCO counts about 900 statues and more than 300 platforms across the island, and calls Tongariki the most colossal. The archaeologist Claudio Cristino of the University of Chile, who has surveyed the island since 1976, describes a platform about 220 metres long, with a central section of about 100 metres where the statues stood. Its seaward face was a wall about four metres high.\n\nThe statues were carved about a kilometre away at Rano Raraku, an extinct volcanic crater made of tuff, consolidated volcanic ash, and worked with picks of hard basalt called toki. Nearly half of the island's moai still lie in that quarry. The Tongariki figures stand from more than 5 to 9 metres tall, and with their pukao, the red stone topknots, the tallest reached about 14 metres. The weights given for them vary widely between sources. The heaviest is put at 86 tonnes in one account and 88 in another. The seismologist Mauricio Fuentes speaks of statues of more than 50 tonnes, and the American science series NOVA of statues \"some of which weigh 30 tons.\" The sources may be describing different statues, and none gives a full list.\n\nTongariki was the main centre of the Hotu-iti, the eastern confederation of the Rapa Nui people. Accounts of its life differ: one gives it 600 to 700 years of use, while Cristino says it grew over about 400 years and reached its peak in the sixteenth century. UNESCO itself gives two dates for the island's settlement, toward the end of the first millennium AD in one passage and about AD 300 in another.\n\nThen came the fall. By the time Spanish ships arrived in 1770, Cristino says, the statues were already on the ground and the platform was used mainly for burials. UNESCO reports the view of some studies that the using-up of natural resources brought an ecological crisis and the decline of island society by the sixteenth century, followed by a spiritual change in which the ancestor monuments were thrown down and a new birdman cult rose. That cult centred on Orongo, a ceremonial village of 54 stone houses on the Rano Kau volcano, and it lasted until the middle of the nineteenth century. A 2007 paper from Chile's national conservation centre dates the toppling differently. It places the throwing down of nearly all the statues in a phase known as Huri Moai, between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, during wars between island groups. The two pictures can be reconciled if different platforms fell at different times. But none of these sources gives a firm date for Tongariki's own collapse.\n\nThe sea added its own chapter. On 22 May 1960 a magnitude 9.5 earthquake broke about 1,000 kilometres of the Chilean coast near Valdivia, some 3,700 kilometres away. Almost six hours later its tsunami struck the east of Rapa Nui, straight at Tongariki. University of Chile researchers modelled the wave crossing open ocean at about 750 kilometres an hour and running ashore at 7 to 18, enough to flood 10 to 12 metres high. Accounts of the damage vary: the wave carried the fallen statues more than 150 metres inland in one account, and in Cristino's words dragged thousands of tonnes of stone more than 200 metres. Some of the statues rolled onto their backs and showed their faces for the first time in centuries. For Fuentes, the lesson is about force: a wave only 2 or 3 metres high, moving fast, can shift statues of 50 tonnes.\n\nRebuilding the platform was an idea of the 1980s that Cristino admits was seen almost as madness. In 1991 the Japanese crane maker Tadano offered money and a machine, under an agreement with the Chilean government and the University of Chile. \"On 13 October 1992 we laid the first stone of the old platform wall,\" Cristino recalls. Cristino and Patricia Vargas led a team of more than 50 people, most of them islanders, through to the end of 1995, sorting a field of rubble the size of four football pitches. The main crane could lift at most 55 tonnes. The last moai, at 65 tonnes, needed a second machine from Chile's public works ministry, three tractors to steady the crane, and more than three months.\n\nConservation was left unfinished for lack of money, according to the 2007 paper. Rain is the main enemy, dissolving the glassy matrix that binds the tuff. A five-year study with Japan's Nara conservation institute led to a treatment to strengthen the stone and repel water, last applied in 2004 under a UNESCO project.\n\nThe mainstream account is an island story: Polynesian settlers raised ancestor figures over centuries, and their own descendants pulled them down in a time of crisis and change. Tongariki also shows how hard these weights are to handle: raising them again in the 1990s took a crane, extra machines and years of work. Yet the most basic questions about the platform rest on very little. No laboratory date for the platform or its collapse appears in the conservation paper, the university account or the UNESCO listing. The material sealed beneath the fallen statues, which might have dated the fall, was disturbed by the excavation and has not been published. The row that visitors see today is a modern arrangement, sorted from the rubble by the excavators, of statues no living person had seen standing. Which figure stood where, and in what order they fell, is the restorers' best reading.\n\nThe islanders who toppled them did not leave their reasons in writing. What remains is the image the restorers gave back: fifteen giants on a 220-metre platform above the sea, watching the sun go down on the shortest day of the year.","qs":["Who toppled the moai, and why would a society bring down its own ancestors?","Does restoring a row of fallen statues tell their history, or rewrite it?","A wave from Chile moved 88-tonne statues. What does that say about how they were first moved?"],"gal":[{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Ahu-Tongariki-from-south-west-2013.jpg/1280px-Ahu-Tongariki-from-south-west-2013.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu-Tongariki-from-south-west-2013.jpg","title":"Ahu-Tongariki-from-south-west-2013.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Bjørn Christian Tørrissen","cap":"The moai at Ahu Tongariki lined up from the south. It's a rowdy bunch. Only one of them wears a \"hat\"/pukao, and the tallest one is the largest moai ever to sta"},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Ahu-Tongariki-2013.jpg/1280px-Ahu-Tongariki-2013.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu-Tongariki-2013.jpg","title":"Ahu-Tongariki-2013.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Bjørn Christian Tørrissen","cap":"All the fifteen standing moai of Ahu Tongariki."},{"src":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/Ahu-Tongariki-and-Traveling-Moai.jpg/1280px-Ahu-Tongariki-and-Traveling-Moai.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ahu-Tongariki-and-Traveling-Moai.jpg","title":"Ahu-Tongariki-and-Traveling-Moai.jpg","lic":"CC BY-SA 3.0","licurl":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0","by":"Bjørn Christian Tørrissen","cap":"At the Ahu Tongariki you are welcomed by The Traveling Moai (A Vere moai) in the foreground here. It received its name because he has traveled more than most mo"},{"src":"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Panorama_Ahu_Tongariki%2C_Oc%2CG.T.1705%2C_Mana_Expedition_to_Easter_Island%2C_British_Museum.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail_unscaled","page":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Panorama_Ahu_Tongariki,_Oc,G.T.1705,_Mana_Expedition_to_Easter_Island,_British_Museum.jpg","title":"Panorama Ahu Tongariki, Oc,G.T.1705, Mana Expedition to Easter Island, British Museum.jpg","lic":"Public domain","licurl":"","by":"Unknown authorUnknown author","cap":"Ahu Tongariki panorama, 1914–15, Easter Island. Lantern Slide (black and white), photograph of a photograph(?), originally spliced in three sections; view of th"}]},"img":null,"md":null,"hh":[{"v":"Tuff","h":"Made of","s":[30]}],"hs":{"30":["Wikipedia: Ahu Tongariki (and sources cited there)","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahu_Tongariki"]},"lh":{"s":"img/h/PAC-001.webp","w":1280,"h":960,"o":"https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Ahu-Tongariki-from-south-west-2013.jpg/1280px-Ahu-Tongariki-from-south-west-2013.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=thumbnail"}}