Rapa Nui

The Rapa Nui are the indigenous Polynesian people of Easter Island, more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest inhabited island. Their ancestors, led in tradition by the chief Hotu Matuʻa, settled the volcanic island between roughly 300 and 1200.

Between about 1250 and 1500 they carved nearly nine hundred giant stone moai as the living faces of deified ancestors, setting them on stone platforms called ahu. Competition between clans fed the birdman cult of Makemake, whose annual egg contest at Orongo chose a sacred ruler for the year. Rivalry was remembered in legends of war between the Hanau Epe and the Hanau Momoko.

The first European to arrive was the Dutchman Jacob Roggeveen on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1722. A Spanish expedition claimed the island in 1770, and James Cook and the comte de Lapérouse visited in 1774 and 1786.