Easter Island Statue Project Awarded $94,000

On January 5, 2009, the Archaeological Institute of America awarded a $94,000 grant to the Easter Island Statue Project. The grant will help the project develop preservation techniques to arrest the rapid deterioration of the statues, resulting from climate change, tourism, and the volcanic stone's fragile nature.

Three Moai on the Coast, Easter Island Photo by Jean Delard de Rigoulières

The Easter Island Statue Project is a survey and mapping project, designed to locate, document and classify every stone sculpture in archaeological context on the island. The work began in 1982, when archaeologist Jo Anne Van Tilburg was working on fieldwork leading up to her dissertation. To date, the project has collected records on 883 monolithic statues, and 40 portable statues; the project has amassed over 10,000 visual images and 4,000 graphic images, in addition to metrics data, fieldnotes and maps.

The preservation project, directed by Van Tilburg and co-directed by Cristín Arévalo Pakarati, will begin with two statues recently discovered in the Rano Raraku quarry site.

• The AIA selects Easter Island as its second Site Preservation project
• Easter Island Statue Project
• Easter Island: Moai in their Landscape