Jacob Roggeveen, a Dutch explorer, indeed discovered Easter Island on Easter Sunday, April 5, 1722. He was the first European to encounter the island, which is located in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Roggeveen's expedition was primarily aimed at finding Terra Australis, a hypothetical continent thought to exist in the Southern Hemisphere. Instead, he stumbled upon Easter Island, known to its indigenous inhabitants as Rapa Nui.
Since then, people have been in awe of the enormous sculptures on Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, which stand for one of the greatest sculptural traditions in history. From the time the island was colonized about 1100 AD until 1600 AD, about 800 of these sculptures, called moai, were created. The majority are still in Rapa Nui, though a few are housed at museums including the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., and the British Museum.
Moai, which are made of local basalt rock and depict the faces of ancestor chiefs, were constructed to provide protection to the local populace both in this life and the next. Although most of them are between two and ten meters tall, one incomplete moai is twenty meters tall. Usually, they stood facing outward on an ahu, or stone platform.
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