Rapa Nui settlement and the moai

Polynesian voyagers reached Rapa Nui, one of the most remote inhabited islands on earth, around AD 1200. Over the following centuries its people carved nearly 1,000 moai, statues of ancestors, from volcanic tuff at Rano Raraku and moved them to stone platforms around the coast. European contact from 1722, Peruvian slave raids in the 1860s and disease later devastated the population.