A months-long drought exposed the cracked clay floor of Rano Raraku, the volcanic crater that served as the main statue quarry on Easter Island. In the middle of the newly dried lakebed a compact moai about 1.5 m long came into view. Researchers who kept an inventory of the island’s stone figures had no record of a statue at that spot, prompting them to ask whether it had been there all along.
“It was the first time a moai was documented in the former lake,” said Terry Hunt, an archaeologist at the University of Arizona, during an interview on Good Morning America. Hunt’s catalog listed more than 1,000 statues across the island, each with GPS readings and measurements compiled over the past decade.
Salvador Atan Hito, vice president of the Indigenous rights organization Ma’u Henua that manages the UNESCO World Heritage site, emphasized the cultural importance of the find. “For the Rapa Nui people, this is a very, very important discovery,” he said. “Because it’s here in the lake and no one knew it existed, not even our ancestors, our grandfathers didn’t know about this”. He added that the drought could help archaeologists locate “additional statues in the mud,” a view shared by Hunt.
The newly exposed figure ranked among the smallest ever recorded on Easter Island, a detail that fueled speculation that many other compact moai lay concealed under the crater’s silt. Hunt told Origo that “every sign indicates that additional statues may be in the mud,” and that dozens could surface if the drought continued. The crater floor was usually obscured by reeds several metres high, making the small statue nearly impossible to see in wetter years. Hunt noted that remote-sensing equipment could reveal further figures beneath the lakebed, and he explored the use of ground-penetrating radar, drones, and phone-based 3D scans to map statues that remained in the quarry.
Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, formed a volcanic triangle of just 163 sq km in the southeast Pacific. A 2023 study by Uppsala University suggested that settlement reached the island in multiple waves, implying more contact with greater Polynesia than scholars once assumed. Paul Wallin concluded that pioneers arrived from central eastern Polynesia around 1200-1250 CE, bringing the tradition of erecting stone platforms, or ahu.
Between about 1300 and 1600 the Rapa Nui carved their ancestors’ images into hardened volcanic ash. Each moai honored a leader or chief; once a figure reached its ahu, workers hollowed the eye sockets and often inserted white coral eye stones. Most statues averaged about 4 m in height and weighed roughly 12-14 tons, but some were much larger. The tallest standing moai stretched more than nine metres and weighed up to 86 tons, while the unfinished giant Te Tokanga, 19 m long and up to 100 tons, still lay on its back in the Rano Raraku quarry. Another colossus, Paro, once measured nearly ten metres and 82 tons.
Moving such bulk required ropes, sleds, and wooden rollers, researchers believed, though the exact methods remained debated. Many moai never left Rano Raraku: dozens stayed half-finished along the crater slopes, and nearby rectangular clearings served as ritual spaces that in several cases remained sacred. The latest discovery joined a 1.7-m statue found in 2023, underscoring how much of the island’s heritage was still buried.
“Along with more moai, we are looking for tools that may have been used to carve the statues,” said Hito. Experts warned that the drought offered only a narrow window; once rains refilled the crater, the reeds would quickly reclaim the lakebed.
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