Ahu Toŋariki

The Island's Largest Ahu

Ahu Toŋariki is the largest ahu or ceremonial platform on Rapa Nui.

It holds 15 mo'ai, the most of any ahu, and one of them weighs eighty-six tonnes, making it the largest mo'ai ever erected on the island. So, Ahu Toŋariki is the largest ritual site in multiple ways.

Ahu Toŋariki is along the south coast with its mo'ai facing inland to watch over the living, as is the case with most ahu.

Rapa Nui and surrounding islets are the summit of a large volcanic mountain rising over 2,000 meters from the sea floor. What protrudes above the ocean are the coalesced peaks of three extinct volcanos. Poike, 400 meters tall, overlooks Ahu Toŋariki from the eastern tip of the island. It's the gently sloping cone you seen in the banner picture above.

Rano Raraku, a smaller volcanic peak, is a short distance inland from Ahu Toŋariki, beyond the lone mo'ai in the pictures below. Rano Raraku was the main mo'ai quarry and workshop, where the statues were carved from layers of tuff, lithified volcanic ash.

The above mo'ai came to be known as "The Traveling Mo'ai" after the Japanese-led restoration project described below led to it being loaned to Japan for an exhibition in Osaka.

An incomplete mo'ai lies on its back some distance from Ahu Toŋariki toward Rano Raraku. Its eye sockets were not completed. At least during the later years of mo'ai creation, the eye sockets would not be completed until the mo'ai had been transported to its ahu and erected. Once the eye sockets were done, eyes of white coral with red scoria or black obsidian pupils would be added.

1960 Tsunami and 1990s Reconstruction

The Peru-Chile Trench is a long oceanic trench about 160 kilometers off the coasts of Peru and Chile, 5,900 km long and up to 8,065 meters deep. It is created by the Nazca Plate subducting under the South American Plate.

That motion under southern Chile has a long history of producing extreme earthquakes, including the 1960 Valdivia earthquake that was the largest ever recorded. That earthquake generated a tsunami that was well over fifteen meters high at the Chilean coast, and its waves were six to ten meters high when it reached Rapa Nui, 3,700 kilometers to the west. The tsunami washed 500 meters inland, pushing some of the mo'ai more than 100 meters inland, scattering their pukao topknots around, and heavily damaging the ahu.

In 1990–1996, a Japanese industrialist undertook the project of rebuilding the ahu and repairing and re-installing the mo'ai on it. He was the director of Tadano Limited, one of the largest crane manufacturers in the world. Everything about the project would have been challenging, as there isn't much of a port on the island. Cargo is mostly delivered in ships with their own on-board cranes. The ship's crane transfers short containers and other cargo onto a pair of boats that carry them onto a short pier near the north end of the airport's runway. They really needed a Tadano crane to get the project's Tadano equipment onto the island.

At the same time, a multi-disciplinary team headed by two archaeologists from the University of Chile did scientific examination and restoration.

Arriving at Ahu Toŋariki

You will have seen Ahu Toŋariki from a distance of about a kilometer if you first visited the mo'ai quarry and workshop at Rano Raraku.

You only begin to appreciate this site's true size when you arrive at the parking area and begin to walk down the slope.

Poike, the gentle cone in the distance beyond the ahu, is the oldest of the three main volcanic peaks of the vast undersea volcanic mountain that forms the island. Poike last erupted between 230,000 and 705,000 years ago.

It happens that these mo'ai face sunset during the winter solstice in late June. But is this meaningful in some archaeo-astronomical sense? Or is it simply a coincidence caused by the coastline alignment? No one knows.

The mo'ai represent specific deified ancestors. Similar to other Polynesian cultures, the Rapa Nui people believed that there was a relationship between the deified ancestors and their living descendants. If the people created mo'ai correctly, and carried out the proper rituals to provide for the ancestors in the spirit world, then the ancestors' mana or powerful spiritual force would provide good health, good fortune, and the fertility of the land and animals.

Most of the ahu were built along the coastline. The mo'ai stood with their backs to the spirit world in the sea, looking inland over their descendants' settlements.

It may have been that there was something auspicious about the location of this ahu, or of the associated settlement, and the coast alignment just happened to align the ahu facing the winter solstice sunset. Ahu Akivi is aligned with its mo'ai facing sunset during the spring equinox, in late September, which has them unusually facing the sea. Some other ahu are aligned north-south. But we don't know that these alignments were at all meaningful.

In the below picture you see an outer perimeter of small stones, it's a recent addition to keep visitors away from the ahu. The ahu platform is made of the quite dark basalt that forms much of the island. You can see here that the mo'ai stand at the rear of the platform, which slopes down in front of them. The ahu platform is almost 100 meters long. A low retaining wall forms the "wings" or extensions that continue outward for a total length of 220 meters. The extension to the south, toward us in this picture, is a little over twenty meters longer than the one to the north. Those extensions contain rows of rounded sea stones, called poro. The poro are placed most densely in the space in front of the ahu.

Looking straight down the ahu and its "wings", you can see how the poro are laid down in straight lines.

The mo'ai here range in height from 5.6 to 8.7 meters tall. The largest mo'ai weighs eighty-six tonnes. It's the largest one ever erected on the island. It's #5, counting from the right.

Mo'ai #2 has a pukao. All of these had pukao originally, but only the one could be replaced. The others were too eroded and damaged by the tsunami. Some of them remain scattered around the site.

Looking beyond the left "wing" of the ahu, you see the steep slope down to the sea at the base of Poike.

Around the Back

In the below, I am at the far left end of the ahu "wings", about to continue around the back.

The rear retaining wall of this ahu is built like the others, large stones fitted into place without mortar. The 1960 tsunami wrecked the ahu, scattering its large stones. The reconstruction project recreated the ahu, replaced the mo'ai on its central platform, and repaired them as needed. Some heads had been broken off torsos, some faces had been heavily damaged.

The mo'ai look inland toward the settlement protected by their mana. Rano Raraku is at an angle to their left.

Next❯ Te Pito Kura and Anakena — The Arrival Beach