Easter Island breakthrough after new moai statue unearthed at bottom of dried up lagoon

Salvador Atan Hito, vice president of Ma’u Henua, the indigenous organisation that oversees the island’s national park, told ABC News: “For the Rapa Nui people, this is a very, very important discovery”.

The Ma’u Henua is currently conducting initial research on the monolith in an effort to learn about its preservation and “to find the resources that will allow the study to determine the dating, the period to which it corresponds and how it got to the place where it was found, since it is a piece that is not found in the quarry’s archaeological survey records or inventories”.

Terry Hunt, a professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, noted that “ground survey can tell us that there are, in fact, more moai in the sediments of the lagoon bed”.

The fire last October tore through Rapa Nui, a national park with over 1,000 stone statues situated 3,500km (2,175 miles) off the west coast of Chile.

Article source: https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1741745/easter-island-breakthrough-new-moai-statue-discovered-dried-up-lagoon