DAWG Colloquium with Dr. Mark McCoy, Department of Anthropology, Florida State University.

Was Seismic Activity Responsible for the Mass Destruction of Easter Island’s Statues? Most pictures you see of the well-known statues (moai) on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) shows them standing, either displayed on stone platforms, or unfinished in trenches at the island’s statue quarry. But, until modern reconstruction efforts, all of the island’s hundreds of finished statues lay fallen on the ground, about a third of them broken. The question of what caused the mass destruction of the moai has been a subject of speculation by Western scholars for centuries. In this presentation I will summarize new research aimed at determining if strong ground motion from earthquakes could have been the cause, and what these results mean for reconstructing the history of the island.