Moai ancestor head from Easter Island
twelfth to fifteenth century
A huge stone face, nearly two metres high, stares past you with deep eye sockets, a long straight nose and a jutting chin. The grey volcanic rock is pitted and weathered, and the head has been cut from the body of a full statue. This is a moai, one of the ancestor figures of Rapa Nui, Easter Island, the most remote inhabited island on earth, and one of very few to be seen outside the Pacific. The islanders carved almost a thousand of them between roughly the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries and raised them on stone platforms along the coast, facing inland to watch over their descendants.
Moai were cut from the soft tuff of the Rano Raraku quarry with stone tools, and this head shows the standard features: the heavy brow, the elongated ears and the tight, closed mouth. Look at the surface and imagine it coated in white coral and red stone eyes, which the finished statues wore once they stood on their platforms. The neck and shoulders have been sawn or broken away, which is why it stands at the height of a person rather than towering above you; complete moai of this type were four or five metres tall.
The head was brought to France in 1872 by Rear Admiral de Lapelin, commander of the frigate La Flore, whose crew took it from the island during a survey voyage. A young officer on board, Julien Viaud, later famous as the writer Pierre Loti, drew the statues in place and described the removal. It was given to the natural history museum, passed to the Trocadéro ethnography museum in 1930 and stood in the entrance hall of the Musée de l'Homme from 1938 until it came here. Rapa Nui has asked for the return of moai held abroad, and the museum's own friends' society funded the head's recent conservation, so it is an object with a living story.
Did You Know? The writer Pierre Loti, then a young naval officer, was on the ship that carried this head away from Easter Island in 1872.
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