Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is often portrayed in popular culture as an enigma. The rationale is clear: The tiny, remote island in the Pacific features nearly 1,000 enormous statues—the ...

For years, the story of Easter Island has been told as a grim fable: a small, isolated community cut down its last tree, destroyed its own environment, and collapsed in a kind of prehistoric ...

A high-resolution 3D model of Rano Raraku shows that the moai were created in many distinct carving zones. Instead of a top-down system, the statues appear to have been produced by separate family ...