MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Famous and mysterious ancient Statue to be returned to homeland

One of Easter Island's trademark “moai” will soon be returned its rightful place on the tiny Pacific island.

The eight-foot high statue and its red cap were first sent to Chile in 1927, and then taken out of Chile in 1970. On Tuesday evening, the statue will be given a farewell party in Buenos Aires' Recoleta Cultural Center before making its journey home.

The statue was taken from the island's capital town of Hanga Roa in 1927 when it was given to then-president of Chile Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. It remained in Santiago until 1970, but was then sold and transported to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Later it was displayed in Holland for eight months.

It was upon returning to Argentina that the statue became the center of a complicated legal row.

Rosa Velasco, the Chilean who now owns the statue, has worked for three years to bring it back to Easter Island. Velasco, together with Chile's Ambassador in Argentina, Luis Maria, and President of the Easter Island Elders, Alberto Hotus Chávez, finally secured the statue's repatriation.

The giant stone moai will be transported to Valparaiso before being loaded onto an Armed Forces' ship and carried an inauguration ceremony on Easter Island late this week.

The immense sculpture is not the world's only "traveling moai." In 2004, the city of Dublin received a similar-sized moai replica fashioned out of volcanic stone. The gift came courtesy of Alejandro Pakarati, an Island-born artist.

Moai average four meters high and depict human heads-on-torsos from rough hardened volcanic ash. About 1,000 of these volcanic stones remain on Rapa Nui (Easter Island), a small triangular island located about 3,760 kilometers off the Chilean coast in the South Pacific Ocean. It has been part of Chile since its annexation in 1888.

The origin of the monolithic stone sculptures remains a mystery. Some believe the inhabitants who carved them were of Peruvian origin due to the similarities between carvings. Some even suggest the island is the remnant of a lost continent.

Scientists and anthropologists believe the inhabitants of Rapa Nui were driven to cannibalism two centuries ago after the island's ecology collapsed in the wake of competitive moai-building efforts by the island's nine warlords. Moving the huge stone monuments required the deforestation of the island's trees (used as rollers), which in turn led to an economic and social collapse, and ultimately cannibalism.

The felling of the volcanic island's forests ended the society's ability to move the monolithic moai, crimped supplies of fire wood, devastated the bird population and terminated a sea-faring and fishing tradition that relied on wooden canoes fashioned from the large, once-abundant palm trees. The island's extreme isolation left inhabitants with no alternative forested living spaces ? and a society in chaos.

Lauren Amundsen - The Santiago Times - News about Chile