Hidden in the mists of the South Pacific
on one of the most remote islands on earth
is a mystery locked in stone.
Giant human forms stand against the weathering of time.
These are the mute sentinels of Easter Island,
stone statues called moai.
Roughly 900 moai were carved
over a period of 500 years,
hewn with stone tools
from the volcanic rock of an ancient crater.
No one knows
how the many ton statues came to stand
at their sacred sites.
How could an isolated culture
with only the simplest tools
move monoliths from the quarry
to sacred platform sites scattered all over the island
some of them five miles away?
Legend says the statues magically walked
to their venerated platforms.
To penetrate beyond the myths,
NOVA assembles a team of archaeologists,
engineers,
and the Easter Islanders themselves.
Together they launch a series of hands-on experiments
to explore the methods used by the ancients.
But no one anticipates the events that unfold.
We want to go little by little.
Ideas clash.
by the study because the angle is different.
Tensions escalate as new methods are presented.
I've got 12 people moving six tons.
You didn't do that.
That's 65?
Yeah.
No way.
Resources run out,
just as they did in ancient times.
What are we going to do, fight over it?
This is the legacy of Easter Island,
a culture that exhausted itself
in moving giant stone.
How did this ancient society achieve such monolithic greatness?
And why did it fall?
Around 400 AD,
Polynesian voyagers set out across the open sea
in search of new land.
It is believed they sailed a large double canoe
made of wood and rope lashings.
Their journey took them thousands of miles
across the Pacific
until, by chance,
they came upon the rugged coastline of
a solitary, uninhabited island.
Easter Island,
now known as "Rapa Nui."
Today, treeless, wind-swept land
rises from an infinite sea.
Just seven miles across,
Easter Island is studded with volcanic craters
which provide the raw material
for the stone sculptures of the past.
For 1200 years,
the island culture thrived in isolation.
The population may have reached as much as 10,000.
It was a closed society.
As far as is known,
nobody came to the island,
and nobody ever left.
There was no recorded history,
and all that remains
is a thin thread of oral tradition
that has passed down through generations.
We do know
the ancient islanders feverishly expressed themselves in stone.
According to island folklore,
the moai are the spirits of powerful ancestors.
They were raised on platforms,
called "ahu,"
which were the centers for ancestral worship
among the island's clans.
But as population grew on the tiny island,
conflict erupted between the clans.
Food and timber were scarce.
The people stripped the landscape
of its once abundant trees.
Today only thin soils and exposed pastures survive.
Could it be that
this remote civilization
ultimately destroyed itself
over the moving and raising of their sacred moai?
For decades theorists have come to the island
to try their hand at moving moai.
In 1955, Norwegian archaeologist Thor Heyerdahl
tried to drag a nine ton moai
on a small tree fork over the ground.
The pulling method worked,
but dragging a heavy statue
is likely to damage the carved stone.
Heyerdahl returned in 1986,
inspired by Rapa Nui folklore.
Legends say that the human statues walked
across the island to their ahu platforms
through a spiritual power called "mana."
Heyerdahl tried walking the nine ton statue
by rocking it forward like a refrigerator.
Although it works,
the method is precarious on anything but level terrain.
Thousands of tourists come to gaze
upon the stone giants
and wonder how the Rapa Nui people moved and erected them.
Dr. Claudio Cristino
has been Easter Island's resident archaeologist
for the past 20 years.
He takes Wyoming architect Vince Lee
to the largest ahu on the island.
It was one of the ceremonial centers
on the east coast.
In 1960,
a tidal wave struck the ahu
and washed the 15 massive moai inland.
Claudio was in charge of restoring the site.
The statue was broken, was decapitated.
I see.
And just the head was 27 tons.
The head alone?
Just the head.
And you had to put it back on
and cement them together somehow?
Vince's expertise is Inca stone work.
He has explored how the Incas moved heavy stones,
and is intrigued by Rapa Nui ingenuity.
Is this more like the finish
that they had when they were first made?
In other words, most of them that you see now are -
More like here.
Oh, I see, very smooth, yeah, sure.
And all of this is erosion
due to weather over the years.
They vary in size,
but this one here with the top knot
has got to be pretty big.
How many tons is that?
65 tons.
Wow.
And is that how you erected these, with a crane?
With a crane.
With a crane, with 50 people, with ramps, with poles, with levers.
So, this gave us for the first time,
quite clear idea of the incredible energy
that was used in the past -
Even with modern equipment it sounds like it was a huge project.
Even Vince and Claudio have trouble imagining
how an ancient culture could have carved,
transported,
and erected such mighty stones
without the aid of modern technology.
The meaning of the moai to me,
as an outsider to this island
and to this culture,
is ancestor.
It's the link with the past.
The meaning of the moai is family.
Archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg is here
to test her theory of how the moai were moved.
For 15 years she has searched for
the cultural significance encoded in the moai.
When Rapa Nui people look at these statues
and think about these statues,
they are to them as if they are indeed living beings.
But with no written record left behind,
and only limited clues from archaeology,
the question of how the Easter Islanders moved their moai
remains elusive.
Science and mysticism, religion, faith, archaeology, engineering,
all of these things are trying to come together here
to understand what, when you look at it,
is this relatively simple object.
It's big,
there's no question about that.
But it's so beautifully designed in its simplicity,
that it offers us the possibility of answer.
And yet the answer is so deeply embedded in the culture.
And much of that answer, unfortunately, has been lost.
Jo Anne has measured the height, width,
and estimated weight of each moai on Easter Island.
Her inventory of measurements
created a digital model of a statistically average moai.
The computer data helps Jo Anne and robotics expert Zvi Shiller
formulate their theory
on how the ancients moved the statues.
By digitizing a topographical map of Easter Island,
Zvi simulates the undulating terrain.
This virtual fly-through shows them
a view of the island from the perspective of a moai in transit.
Over
That's up,
that's down.
This is where we actually,
this is the new part.
From this digital model,
a full scale replica will be made
for experiments on the island.
Jo Anne proposes laying the statue
on a triangular shaped sled
and then pulling the moai
and sled over logs that roll along wood tracks.
Our team of experts has gathered
It's safe for the statue.
It's comfortable for the statue.
They have to be fitted for these rigs.
The best way to fit them is standing them up -
They will first try Jo Anne's log roller method.
come back and get it at another time;
that's an option.
It's a reasonable option.
Claudio will be in charge of raising the moai.
All Polynesians and the people
that studied this culture for years
know that any of these events
was part of a very complex religious process
that took years.
Exactly.
Vince is the only member of the group
who has explored how another ancient culture,
the Incas, moved heavy stone.
From an engineering standpoint,
a triangle is the simplest -
While engineer Zvi Shiller has simulated moai transportation
on his computer,
he's here to see if his solutions will work
in the real worid.
Rafael Rapu, a Rapa Nui sculptor,
will be the foreman for the project.
Jo Anne's architect husband, Jan,
demonstrates Jo Anne's moai moving method.
Before we do that, the tracks -
A triangular A-frame sled will be placed
on logs that will roll over rails.
And then you just pull this forward.
And when you run out of a roller,
we're going to put another one there.
You run out of a roller -
They have their method.
Now they need a moai.
A concrete mixture of sand and stone from the island
is poured into a fiberglass mold
scaled up from Jo Anne's digital model.
It is as close as the team can get
to using a moai without risking damage to an actual statue.
Three days later
the nine and a half ton concrete moai
is ready to be lifted out of its curing pit.
It's a wonderful thing
to see this thing being born like this.
Even with the aid of a crane,
the moai is an unwieldy object.
Chain saw surgery frees the moai from its fiberglass mask.
From a digital computer image to a concrete facsimile,
this moai is the culmination of years of Jo Anne's research.
People call me the mother of the moai.
And right now I feel very fond of that object.
So I can see how people would invest family histories
and family traditions in something like this.
It's very easy to do.
More than half of Easter Island's moai
are still at the quarry,
known as Rano Raraku.
It is a mountain of hardened volcanic ash.
Here, the moai lie in various stages of production:
some half carved, some on their backs,
as if sliding down the quarry slope,
and others buried from carving debris and erosion.
Rafael Rapu comes from a long line of Rapa Nui carvers.
He takes local sculptor Santi Hito
to the high slopes of the quarry
to explain the techniques used by the ancient carvers.
They sculpted moai from the bedrock
using a stone tool called a "toki."
The largest moai on the island,
named "El Gigante," the giant,
was never finished.
Its partially-carved figure provides a glimpse
into how the moai were carved.
Continuing the tradition of Rapa Nui master carvers,
Rafael passes on the oral history to Santi.
His words came from the elder people
when he was a young boy.
So, it transcend from them to him,
as is right now you can witness
how it transcend to me.
And hopefully, eventually, to my kids and so forth.
Rafael explains that first,
channels were carved around the body of a moai.
He thinks that 20 people carved this moai
over a period of time of five to six years to this stage.
This is - are sections of people who were given
as your assignment, this is your section.
And you can see different ways of doing it.
You can clearly see the toki marks
and how the people were carving and going in
and make this deep cut in the rock like this, that.
The channels reached around
and eventually formed a boat-like keel
until the statue could be snapped off
and fully extracted.
This quarry was established around 900 or 1000 AD.
For a period of at least 500 years,
maybe a little bit more,
most of the statues that we know about were made.
This is a large statue of over 100 tons.
This massive statue was in the process of being moved downhill.
It's already detached from the mother rock.
And it's extracted from the quarry,
and it will end at the foot of the hill
into a prepared hole to put it in a vertical position.
This monstrous monolith needed certainly
hundreds of people
to move them downhill
to transport them to distant sites
all along the coast of the island.
At the base of the quarry slope,
the moai were erected in prepared holes
so the carving could be finished.
Immediately coming out of the quarry,
they came down to a prepared hole.
And you can see here,
the remains of the keel.
The main purpose to put the statues in this hole
was to finish this section.
And they built a very sophisticated wooden frame
that was attached to the statue while standing.
Then probably using soil, dirt,
this debris from the carving process,
they built mounds and ramps to move it down slope.
So, actually, the statue will go face down,
head first on top of the rig,
and we start moving on these several roads
along the coast of the island.
The replica moai is brought in by truck and crane
to the transport site.
A traditional Polynesian ceremony,
called an "umu tahu," is held.
The priest's blessing acknowledges
that working around a multi-ton statue
can be dangerous.
So it's a benediction for
on behalf of the Catholic church and this community
for this project and the work that they're doing here,
to take care of everyone.
Jo Anne's A-frame sled is ready for the moai.
Its unique triangular shape
is proportioned exactly for the statue.
The team will try to pull the entire rig 100 yards
on flat terrain
using Jo Anne's log roller system.
The logs should roll over this track of thin wood rails.
We're going to move it five meters and then stop.
Then we're going to regroup,
talk about it a little bit,
and then we're going to move it
probably we'll move it to the end of the rollers,
and that's the first day.
Jo Anne confers with Niko Haoa,
who is in charge of the Rapa Nui pulling team.
He rehearses his commands before they begin.
We're pulling on terrain that's flat as a pancake here.
And that's the easiest situation.
That's where I'd start out too to test the idea.
But, if it's got to be valid,
it's got to be something
that would work on going up hills and down hills
and side hills and stuff like that.
I think this system would be a little harder
to do on that kind of terrain.
But let's give them a chance and see what happens here.
Surprisingly, the logs don't roll.
They slide over the rails.
Slide and doesn't roll.
It rolled a little bit, it rolled a little bit.
We could roll first, and then slide maybe.
But, it slid first.
They're getting all these beams in place.
They're all crooked.
They're all bunched up.
They slid more on one side,
and they stopped completely on another side.
I don't know why.
But, now they've got them all straightened out.
I think we're just about ready to go again.
The rollers tend to move like this,
and they get stuck.
So, you can imagine that they had a big problem
if they were going like in a very steep slope,
over five percent.
That would be a real problem.
We tried rolling, they didn't roll.
They all slid. Four are bunched up here,
three are bunched up there.
We're now going to lash them,
so we simply make a sled out of it.
Well, you can see what happened.
When they started moving their sled,
their rollers went crooked
and got all jammed up underneath the sled.
So they're going to have to re-rig.
And actually it's too bad,
but it's not real surprising.
Because the use of rollers is one of those ideas
that looks great on paper,
but it's real hard to make it work in the real worid.
So what they've decided to do is pretty clever.
They're going to take those rollers,
and they're going to tie them to the bottom of the sled,
fix them so that they can't roll anymore,
but they also can't go crooked.
The disadvantage is going to be because they can't roll,
there will be more friction.
But I think it's going to work better.
So they'll lay it back on their rails with their moai.
And then they'll just slide it down the rails.
I think it will work pretty well.
The hardest part is overcoming the inertia of nine and a half tons.
Then, the sled slides easily.
This novel solution exploits rope lashings and wood crossbeams
that are common in traditional Polynesian culture.
The people of the Pacific are intimately tied to the ocean.
In ancient times, outrigger canoes were the vital link between islands.
The outriggers have two beams
that extend from the side of the canoe
to prevent it from capsizing.
The larger voyaging canoes were simply two hulls
bound together by wood crossbeams and rope lashings.
Jo Anne's theory is that the same sea-going technology
was used for transporting moai across land.
If you look down the length of this transport rig,
you will see the strong triangular shape
that we've created.
And what we've got here,
we've used basically the metaphor of Polynesian transport technology,
which is essentially canoe-building technology.
So this is a wood rig pegged and lashed
in the same way that a large canoe might be lashed.
The crossbeams act almost as balance beams on an outrigger canoe.
The Polynesians made wooden ladders to aid in carrying canoes
up on shore.
The crossbeams of this ladder are lashed onto long rails,
just like the rollers lashed to the sled for the moai.
What we've done is we've taken the canoe ladder concept,
which is essentially rails
and crossbeams with the moai lashed to the crossbeams,
and we've just used exactly that technology,
the canoe ladder: crossbeams, rails.
And it works like a charm.
Each group of statues was raised
on a long rectangular platform - or ahu.
According to island belief,
the ahu elevate the ancestral spirits
part way between earth and sky.
Most ahu platforms are along the coast.
The moai face inland,
their backs to the sea.
To have the moai facing inland on its ahu,
the team resorts to modern machinery.
Now they have to reposition the statue face down
and then rotate it 180 degrees.
Vince explains why.
Well, everybody agrees, I think,
that the moai were quarried up
on the side of the cliffs
and were lowered down to the bottom of the slope
facing out towards the ocean.
And likewise, everybody seems to agree
that once they got erected on the ahu
out at the seacoast,
they were facing inland away from the ocean.
So that means that there's one movement
that you can't avoid making,
regardless of what transport method you use.
Claudio thinks that the sled was fastened
to the face of the moai at the bottom of the quarry slope,
and then the whole rig was lowered onto the ground
for transport across the island.
And if he's right about that, of course,
it means that the moai was handled face down
instead of face up.
But whether he's right about it or not,
somewhere between the bottom of the quarry slope
and the ahu platform,
this moai has to be rotated 180 degrees
so that once it's erected on the ahu,
it's facing inland away from the sea.
Now repositioned face down,
the moai is rotated,
but not with the tools of the ancients.
You'll notice that the A-frame is now backwards
from the way it was yesterday,
which they did with a crane.
But, I mean doing it with manpower
would be somewhat of a project.
It's just a shame to see all the tricky parts done with the crane,
because pulling it on the level is not easy,
but it's the easiest of all the moves you have to make.
And that's the one we're getting to see.
It would be interesting to see the others tried by hand.
Because I think it would be a major operation.
Vince wonders how the islanders moved the giant statues
up to the ahu platforms that line the coast.
He doubts Jo Anne's pulling method,
since there is no space for long lines of people on ropes
behind the high ahu platforms.
As we've seen, many of these platforms are right on the shoreline.
And this is actually water out here,
this is actually ocean crashing against the bottom of this wall.
We have no other way to move it,
except long lines of pullers out here.
There's no place for these pullers to work.
They're all down here in the water swimming.
And we need some other way to get this sled up onto the platform.
So, watching that it occurred to me
that an improvement on this design
that solves that problem would be a sled
which has lots of cross bars on it
so that you have many places to apply leverage.
And that would, for example,
enable you to get this sled
up onto the platform here
just using levers.
And therefore, nobody would be swimming out in the ocean.
And incidentally, this sled works real well
for the 180 degree rotation,
which we've seen has to be done somewhere
between the quarry and the ahu platform.
If all the guys on one side lever forward,
and all the guys on the other side lever back,
as you can see,
it quite readily rotates the sled 180 degrees.
Vince has been given one day,
a half-carved stone of Rafael's,
and a few leftover materials to put his new idea to practice.
His sled is designed for levering a moai forward
when there is no room for long lines of people pulling on ropes.
The lever was probably one of the first tools
that primitive people learned how to use.
It was really the only way
they had to multiply the force of an individual person's muscle power.
The crossbeams act as leverage points for the men to push against.
OK, what we're trying to do now is
just demonstrate rotating the moai on this sled.
And by putting skids under,
and having the people on one side go to the rear,
the people on the other side go to the front,
and the people in front and back go to each side,
as you see we can rotate it.
Well, I think it's an interesting experiment.
The main problem we have here is that
certainly the frame was built
without knowing the weight of the block.
So, certainly we have a problem there.
It's tending to bend a lot.
And it's not because the method doesn't work;
it's simply because it was not carefully,
you know, designed for that block of rock.
The bottom line here is it's not really demonstrating very much,
because the design of the frame is so inadequate
that we can't really make a just extrapolation
from what we're seeing.
You know, we are moving it with 14 guys,
and it's a big rock.
I could hardly claim that
because of that it's a successful experiment.
But we've learned a whole lot of stuff.
And I think we've shown that
a small gang of people with levers can move a big rock.
You know one thing that's kind of neat here,
if you figure this thing weighs about six tons,
we've got 12 guys on it now,
so each guy is moving 500 pounds of rock right now,
each individual man. That's not too bad.
Can I make another point?
I would say that to turn the moai on the frame we designed
doesn't require the intricate ladder
that we have here.
We could have done it in a simpler way.
Vince's side experiment is beginning to raise the temperature
and turn the archaeologists and engineers
from critics to advocates of their own theories.
Having three beams for rotation,
the A-frame was just as fine,
as good for the rotation part.
It's actually better.
Did you do a rotation with the A-frame?
No.
We didn't. But we could. We could.
But you didn't?
No.
We didn't. We didn't.
You used a crane for it, if I recall correctly.
We did exactly what the experiment required.
I understand.
It's easy to say it's perfect for it,
but if you don't do it, you don't know.
I said this was perfect last night.
Now, I've done it and I say, whoops, hey maybe I -
Now, you say it's not only not perfect,
it's a mess. Look at it.
Look at that, that's a disaster.
No, but Vince, I'm looking - no, no, no. Let's not tear down anything.
I'm just looking at the principle. The principles are that -
Get real.
And by the way, I'd like to correct
to show you how poor an engineer I am,
I'd like to correct a comment I made a moment ago on camera.
I said each of these men was moving 500 pounds.
If that's a six ton rock,
each man is moving 1,000 pounds.
You can call it poorly designed if you want,
but you have 40 people to move nine tons.
I've got 12 people moving six tons.
You've got 12-
You didn't do that.
excuse me - you've got 12 people turning six tons.
Well, we moved it too, you saw it. You saw it move.
It's a big difference, Vince.
No, you saw it move.
I did. You're right, I saw it move, congratulations.
Well, sure.
Good for you.
Could similar arguments have divided the ancient stone movers?
That's the whole idea,
if you're trying to move an 80 ton rock,
you better make most use of your people.
And did the early islanders fight over the politics
of moving sacred stone?
During the 1600s, life on Easter Island was in crisis.
The island had become overpopulated
with thousands of people,
all competing for the dwindling supply of food.
Warfare broke out.
And in the ensuing power struggle,
there was growing rivalry to carve larger statues
to appropriate the spiritual power of "mana."
The whole society embarked on this religious sculpture compulsion,
reducing the amount of people that was actually producing food,
for example, creating some sort of imbalance
that at the very end led to a crisis
and to the collapse of the whole culture.
Resources were quickly disappearing.
The last precious trees were cut down,
as the demand for timber to raise and transport moai escalated.
Ancestral statues were knocked down
by the warring factions.
In time, the population would all but disappear.
The great civilization of Easter Island had collapsed.
A fallen moai lies beside a stone ramp
leading to an ahu platform.
Claudio walks along the back wall.
This ahu, abandoned in mid construction,
shows how the islanders moved their moai onto the elevated platforms.
The main device that was used to lift statues was a stone ramp.
Ramps were made from the limitless supply
of lava rock scattered all over the island.
Ascending the stone incline,
a moai would finally arrive at its high pedestal stone,
which often overlooked the sea.
This statue was going to be placed
on that ahu using the ramp just described.
And we know that the process was never finished
because the eye sockets were never opened.
Moais are completely finished at the quarry
several miles from here
except for the eye sockets
which were opened
when the moai was erected on top of the ahu.
At that very moment it became alive
and acquired the supernatural power,
and the ability to communicate to the ancestral worid.
At the beginning of another day
of testing Jo Anne's moai transport theories,
Vince surveys the ramp that was made for the experiments.
So, Claudio, the way I get it,
the platform out at the end where those guys are standing
is what remains after the project.
But this is just a construction ramp, is that right?
Most probably statues were approached
to the platforms using this ramp.
Sure. Because in most cases you can't get to the platform
from the rear anyway because of the sea walls and so forth.
Yeah, they're very close to the coast.
Most of them have very high backwalls, seaside walls.
Today's goal will be to transport the moai
up the ramp which is paved with laterally placed logs.
They start on flat terrain in front of the ramp.
More logs are brought in and placed in position
like the ties of a trackless railroad bed.
It takes a lot of trees to make a wood road
just 30 yards in length.
It seems plausible
that the trees of the island could disappear altogether
in the act of moving sacred stone.
Thick palm forests blanketed the island
when the first settlers arrived.
Pollen analysis shows that a species of palm,
strong enough to move moai,
called jubea chilensis,
once flourished here.
In their escalating efforts to move and raise giant statues,
the islanders cut down the last of their trees.
Long before the first Europeans arrived in 1726,
the island had been stripped bare.
Not one jubea chilensis palm tree remains today.
Could it have been the obsession with erecting giant statues
that led to Easter Island's ecological and social catastrophe?
The next day the team faces the challenge
of moving the moai the last six feet to the pedestal stone.
Jo Anne's team will now test a different method
that gives extra mechanical advantage to the moai movers.
The team has been reduced to 20 people.
They've actually done something quite clever here.
What they've done now is they've tied the rope from the sled
to a lever, a big lever beam.
And they've got a big crew over here
pulling the lever beam with the rope
attached much higher on the pole.
And the reason that's so smart
is because they get a huge mechanical advantage.
In order to move the sled one foot here,
they'll have to pull four feet here,
but they'll pull with four times the force.
So, in effect, it's like quadrupling the number of people
pulling on the load.
So as they pull,
the pullers back here,
they basically have four times the force
working on the sled by doing it this way.
It's a good method.
We needed a stronger beam.
I was waiting for something to break.
So we can learn from it. That was good.
Well, we were all waiting for it.
We were all waiting for that, and it got here, so -
With a smaller workforce,
it has taken an entire day to move the final six feet.
The last few days of experiments
have led Jo Anne to conclude
that there may have been more than one method for moving moai.
I have learned that the statues lend themselves very well
to manipulation.
They're well balanced, they're well designed.
You can attach rigs to them.
You can change them.
I think people would think on their feet,
and develop methods for moving these statues
that were adapted to each individual statue.
Many moai on Easter Island had top knots,
known as "pukao,"
placed on their heads.
They are thought to signify the headdresses
that Rapa Nui chiefs wore.
Red cylindrical pukao lie near the fallen moai
all over the island,
and they were carved from this ancient quarry
of red scoria stone.
Rafael carves an authentic pukao for the replica moai.
He uses a basalt toki,
the tool used by the ancient sculptors to carve island stone.
Rafael passes on the age-old technique to Santi.
Rafael says it is a scoria rock
which is used to make the pukao
because it is light,
and people are able to take this pukao
across the island to different sites
and place it on top of the moai.
Rapa Nui society supported specialist craftsmen.
The master carvers held an elevated status in the community.
So, there were master carvers
who were dedicated to just carve pukaos.
They never work with the rush of time.
There was no timeframe.
It was all based on mana and religion.
And, in our modern time will succeed, I think.
The team must now figure out how to raise the moai.
They use levers to lift the load inch by inch
while stones are carefully placed underneath.
Slowly the moai will be jacked up to a vertical position.
The pukao is now ready to be added to the load.
Not all moai had pukao,
and we don't know how the islanders raised them onto the statues.
The Rapa Nui men devise a simple pulley system
for rolling the one ton pukao up the short ramp.
Pukao and moai will now be joined together by rope
and secured for the raising.
Tomorrow we'll see them levering it up,
how easy it really is.
And it should go very quickly.
I think this is the way it was done.
I'm not sure.
It's also possible - it's possible to raise the two together.
But it's also possible to raise the statue first,
and then if the statue is deserving of a pukao,
maybe then they put the pukao second.
But the problem is when you do the statue
and then do the pukao,
you have to do everything twice.
This took days, and then you have two more days of doing it.
Claudio is the archaeologist in charge of the raising.
He hopes the moai will be raised in one day.
By three o'clock it's going to be very high.
About four o'clock it should be up.
Five o'clock, five o'clock. It's not a promise.
The work takes on its own rhythm.
And a steady stream of ideas
come from the onlooking experts.
The pile of rocks jacking up the moai gradually grows higher.
Zvi measures the team's progress
by calculating the moai's angle of incline.
30, exactly 30.
You're off.
How much?
We're going to go with about 34.
They are using the same instrument,
but somehow cannot agree on the angle.
It's pointing exactly at 30.
What do you mean approximate, it's exactly 30.
We've got about 31 degrees and 24 seconds.
Now it really moved from about 30 degrees
it's now approaching probably 40.
And at 45 it will be much lighter.
So now it's really going to go up very fast.
35, it went up five degrees.
The statue or the frame?
I go by the frame.
No, go by the statue because the angle is different.
I'm reading a little bit over 40, maybe 42.
But pretty soon, one more time, we'll be up at 45.
Well, I gather from Zvi here that it's about 43 degrees now.
You know, mathematically, once it gets beyond 45 degrees,
it should get easier rather than more difficult.
Getting to here has been the hard part.
And as you get nearer and nearer to vertical,
and you have less and less weight on the rock pile,
that's when it gets quite easy to set the stone upright,
but it's hard to control
because you don't have the friction of the load
leaning against the rock pile.
With a growing rock pile to clamber over,
the men find the work tricky
and the moai unstable.
Zvi becomes even more interested in their rate of progress.
49.
There are now fewer levering positions
on the 12-foot pile of rocks for the 20-man workforce.
They must all find a place on just three levers.
And with the daylight fading,
the work will have to continue in the morning.
My biggest concern now is that
because we are running out of light,
and it's quite late,
and the moai moved a little bit to the right,
we'll have to be very careful
because that's the critical angle.
We may lose the statue.
So we have to secure everything tomorrow,
put it straight, and control these rocks around it
so that people will work safely at the same time.
But it will happen.
It's not a problem.
That's just a little,
little disruption in the general process.
But it's going to go up, no problem.
In two movements, it should be up.
We'll have to go at it very slowly
because this can come with all the weight this way.
Certainly, this is the very - the most critical point.
61, approximately.
The work is soon stopped.
Zvi's obsession with the angle gets beyond Claudio's patience.
If this is 65-
65 degrees with reference to that - to what?
65 degrees is the angle of the base relative to the horizontal,
to the horizon.
You mean this angle here?
Yes.
That's 65? No way.
That's not even 45.
I don't know what you're talking about.
65 degrees this way, come on.
I'm measuring this angle here.
I mean, no. I'm tired of this bullshit.
It is a simple misunderstanding.
Great efforts will often bring out great passions.
Time, effort, and resources are all at play
in this arena of larger-than-life stone-moving.
It is a delicate moment
that must be played out with brute force.
Claudio and Rafael watch for signs of twisting.
We may never know how the moai were moved or raised,
but by a revealing stroke of fate
the methods tested here have taught us as much about ourselves
as about the ancient Rapa Nui.
Well done. Well done.
Thanks. After all this fighting and all that.
It took a lot of head butting and arguing and compromise,
but it's a very creative process.
It's a process that probably they went through in part
in the ancient times.
The bottom line is
we will never be able to reconstruct with total authority
exactly how they did it.
We learned a lot here, I think,
through the process of trial and error.
I mean we tried a lot of things,
some of them worked, some of them didn't.
Even using a crane for some of the difficult moves,
this was not an easy process.
I came here with a process in my head
that I was going to try something.
And I'm going away with more questions than answers,
as I always do.
But it wasn't until I saw all the people lay hands on this statue,
which started out as nothing more than a cement piece,
did I understand fully
what it means for a statue
to take on cumulative history of all of our efforts.
All the power of the carvers,
all the power of the masters who moved these things,
they became the families they represented.
Next week on "Secrets of Lost Empires":
They were gathering places to eat, drink, and gossip.
Social centers of the Roman Empire.
And the most technologically advanced buildings of the ancient worid.
How did they work? The Roman Bath.
Explore the sacred sights.
See the moai up close.
The Easter Island adventure continues on NOVA's Website.
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please call WGBH Boston Video at 1-800-255-9424.
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A grim discovery,
a 9000-year-old skeleton rewrites our history.
The Mystery of the First American, next on NOVA.
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