444. ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1944 
flattened appearance. The eyebrows are well marked and overlap the 
elliptical cavities which represent the sockets of the eyes. The nose is 
long, the tip slightly upturned and the nostrils expanded. The thin 
lips are pursed with what seems a scornful expression. The arms, 
slightly flexed, cling to the bust with the hands joined over the ab- 
domen, below which the figure is cut off. 
The other sculptures on the island—the lonely images on the plain 
and those that guard the slope of the volcano Ranoraraku—have the 
same features except that there are no sockets for the eyes. This part 
of the face, as in some modernistic sculpture, is defined only by the 
ridge of the eyebrows and by the flat plane of the cheeks below. The 
lower part of these statues tapers to an enormous peg, which was 
sunk into the soil. 
The function of the ahu images can be surmised from analogies with 
the rest of Polynesia. The old Marquesans, close relatives and perhaps 
forebears of the Easter Islanders, adorned their stone platforms with 
statues which represented their ancestors. Among all the natives of 
central and marginal Polynesia, there is the same tendency to give 
human form to ancestral gods presiding over the sacred places. In 
the sanctuaries of central Polynesia stood huge slabs that were erected 
in the same position as the Easter Island statues. These slabs were 
receptacles for the souls of the ancestral gods, who entered them when 
they were called by the priests. The Easter Island statues are merely 
a more realistic development of this idea, favored by the existence of 
easily carved tufa deposits. Their sculptors elaborated rather than 
originated a tradition. 
Everywhere on the island statues are to be found: on top of volcanic 
hills, along cliffs, and in places which seem almost inaccessible. Their 
mass must have made their transportation difficult. As a matter of 
fact, no one has yet explained how some of them were hauled from the 
quarry and then erected on the platforms on the opposite side of the 
island. 
Of course, there are many other instances of people with rudimentary 
equipment moving objects of great size—for instance, the dolmens and 
menhirs of Europe. As the statues that the Easter Islanders 
erected on their sanctuaries were of the native tufa, they were not ex- 
ceedingly heavy for their bulk. Their weight ranges from 5 to 8 tons; 
only one weighs as much as 20 tons. But because the rock from which 
they were carved is soft, it must have been necessary to take innumer- 
able precautions not to mar or break them in transit. This would 
have been easy if abundant supplies of wood had been accessible, 
but, except for a few bushes, the island seems always to have 
lacked wood. Good material for making ropes was apparently also 
lacking. The only thing they could have been made from is paper 
