Hoa Hakananai'a
About 1000 to 1200
A tall figure of dark grey basalt stands at the end of the gallery, head tilted slightly back, brow heavy, lips set in a line, hands resting on the belly with long fingers. He is a moai, one of the ancestor statues of Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, in the remote Pacific. His name means something like lost or stolen friend. Unlike most moai, which were carved from soft volcanic tuff, he is cut from hard basalt, which gives him crisper features and a finer surface.
Walk around to the back. The shoulders and the rear of the statue are carved with reliefs added long after the figure was made: two birdmen with human bodies and beaked heads, a small bird, dance paddles and rings. These belong to the birdman cult that flourished on the island in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the chiefs competed each year to fetch the first egg of the sooty tern from an islet offshore. Traces of red and white paint were still visible when the statue was removed. The eye sockets would once have held eyes of white coral and red stone.
The statue stood in a stone house at the ceremonial village of Orongo, on the rim of the volcano Rano Kau, facing inland. In eighteen sixty eight the crew of the British ship Topaze took it, with the help of islanders, and presented it to Queen Victoria, who gave it to the museum. The people of Rapa Nui have asked for its return, and a delegation came to London in twenty eighteen to see him. Their governor said they saw the moai not as a stone but as a living ancestor. He stands here on a low plinth so that you meet his gaze directly, which is the way the islanders intended.
Did You Know? The back of the statue was carved with birdman figures centuries after it was made, turning an ancestor statue into a record of a later island religion.
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