Final Report: Easter Island Project

Easter Island is a Polynesian island located in the Pacific Ocean. Politically this island
belongs to Chile (after being annexed in 1888), but geographically, it is over 3,000 km away
from the South American nation, and 2000 km away from it's closest inhabited neighbor. This
makes Easter Island one of the most isolated corners in all the world, which was the perfect
setting for the Rapa Nui people to develop a civilization uniquely their own, far away from any
other. Easter Island is the heart of one of the worlds most elusive mysteries. For the beginning of
its history, the island was an uninhabited volcanic landmass, kilometers away from any other
budding civilizations. This would remain true until, in approximately 1000 BC, the first settlers
arrived on the coast of Easter Island. Due to the lack of a written record, it is still a mystery as to
why those seafaring folk left their homeland in the first place and risked their lives, but that
decision would lead to one of the most sophisticated ancient civilizations the world would know
very little about. These people would become known as the Rapa Nui. The Rapa Nui were soon
greeted with the first problem they would have to overcome in order to survive: the dense,
subtropical, forest. The Rapa Nui had brought enough food in the form of crops and livestock to
Easter Island so that they would not immediately starve, but the forest would soon make
sustainability impossible. Hotu Matua, the first king of what was then known as Te Pito o te
Henua (the naval of the world), intelligently decided that in order to combat this, they would
have to use the slash and burn method. Four hundred people per day were involved in this
process of deforestation, and it lasted for about four hundred years. It successfully made space
for new food to be cultivated, and the Rapa Nui would be able to turn to developing their own
culture. They built statues all over the island, statues known as the Moai. They began as small,
personal shrines and grew to become huge statues that were still attached to the rock that they

were carved out of. Over the years this method evolved. The moais were eventually sculpted
from volcanic rock, and moved to an ahu (platform) where they were carefully placed. It is still
unknown how the Rapa Nui were able to accomplish this without damaging their features or
their pukao (the hat on top of the moai), but modern day historians suspect that they walked
the later statues to their final resting place, using ropes tied to either side of the stone and rocking
it from side to side. In 1722, the first European settlers, the Dutch, arrived on the shores of Easter
Island. It was a short visit, and the Rapa Nui continued to thrive after they left. The next time a
group of European settlers would arrive on Easter Island, they would discover that the Moai were
laying down on their faces, and the population was lacking. Previously it was thought that
ecocide had wiped them out, meaning that the environment could no longer sustain the
population, and therefore causing violence and wars broke out. The ecocide theory now seems
increasingly unlikely because the Moai had been placed (not thrown) down on their faces with
care, and it seemed as if only 2% of the entire population had been murdered, a statistic that is
not unusually high for a society not at war. Theories range from space aliens to rampant disease,
but we will probably never be sure of what wiped out the majority of the Rapa Nui people. It is
one of the more elusive mysteries of mankind;
The transportation of our moai is actually quite simple. The moai is loaded into our
homemade cart, a piece of wood attached to a second, circular piece of wood that is connected to
two large wheels, and nudged from the initial platform. The moai and cart then accelerate down
the hill, while a machine (but in our case, a person) steers the cart from going of either edge of
the terrain. Eventually, the cart stops a few centimeters away from its final destination, and
therefore a second machine pulls it forward until its wheels touch the blue markings that we
drew on the grass in sharpie. Then, a balloon attached to a pump is inserted underneath the cart

and slowly blown up, lifting the back end of the cart as it does. This forces the moai to slip out of
the cart and land on the ahu. It is guaranteed that the moai will land on the ahu because of the 3sided wooden box that surrounds the ahu and prevents the moai from falling sideways. TA DA! It
works!
Ultimately, Optimism and Glue was able to accomplish what we set out to do. That being
said, we also suffered numerous setbacks along the way. Our group started with the policy that
no idea was stupid, which worked for the very beginning of the project, before it became
apparent that there were very many impractical ideas and that pitching all of them was wasting
valuable time. We discussed ideas such as using a water slide and burning the cart after sending it
down the hill so that only the moai is left standing, among others. Eventually, we decided on a
transportation plan that we thought would work and built our terrain. Once assembled, we
realized that our initial thinking was flawed in several ways. Without a concrete plan, our group
continued onward building and figuring things out as we went, which had negative consequences
such as having to re-build our cart or extend our terrain that wasted more time. In the end,
however, we made a final product that we can be and should be proud of. That does not mean
there was not room for improvement. If we were to do this project again, Optimism and Glue
would like to think that we had learned from this experience and would adjust how we did
things, for example, having an obvious plan before we begin to decrease anxiety levels and
increase time.
To conclude, this project has given us the opportunity to study the physics weve learned
this past semester in a practical setting. Understanding why kinematics and linear equations,
Newtons three laws, and work, power, and energy matter in real life is very important.
Furthermore, we worked in a group of our classmates and had to negotiate with one another,

debate the physics behind our project, fail and succeed together, and share the responsibility of
each and every action everyone makes. Due our many failures and accomplishments during the
last five months, we can now be proud of our successful Easter Island project.