This story appears in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. On a winter night last June, José Antonio Tuki, a 30-year-old artist on Easter Island, did one of the things he loves ...

Island has been a source of fascination for historians, researchers, and tourists for centuries. Reaching it is not ...

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from any continent, Easter Island rises out of the sea. Its surface ...

On average, they stand 13 feet high and weigh 14 tons, human heads-on-torsos carved in the male form from rough hardened volcanic ash. The islanders call them "moai," and they have puzzled ...

Jon Canfield Easter Island Moai. Courtesy of Flickr user Ndecam ... roughed out the statues using stone tools called toki and employed sharp obsidian tools to make finer lines.

“The island is planted with monstrous great statues, the work of I don’t know what race, today degenerate or vanished; its great remains an enigma.” Named Easter Island by the Dutch explorer ...

also known as Easter Island, could have spurred islanders to invest fewer resources in building their legendary stone monuments. But some archaeologists dispute this interpretation. The island of ...

On average, they stand 13 feet high and weigh 14 tons, human heads-on-torsos carved in the male form from rough hardened volcanic ash. The islanders call them "moai," and they have puzzled ...