This story appears in the July 2012 issue of National Geographic magazine. On a winter night last June, José Antonio Tuki, a 30-year-old artist on Easter Island, did one of the things he loves ...

surfing, and enticing beaches when a bit of relaxation is in order. Giant moai statues dot the grassy flanks of an extinct volcano on Easter Island.

One of the most remote inhabited locations on Earth, Easter Island is famous for the thousand or so enigmatic, towering statues that dot its landscape, called moai. Earlier this month, a fire ...

(Podcast: National Geographic's Hannah Bloch on Easter Island statue theories.) Meanwhile, for many of Easter Island's 2,000 or so indigenous Rapanui, descended from the original Polynesian ...

The moai of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) are among the ... "No more lethal than any other kind of rock" A research team led by National Geographic grantee Carl Lipo of Binghamton University analyzed ...

About ten of my fellow travelers came along, as did National Geographic photographer Massimo Bassano who planned to coach us and get in a few shots of his own. My camera’s aperture bottoms out ...

The meanings of many of these significant geographic talisman have been teased out by archaeologists, but some are resistant to revealing their secrets. Here are just a few. Easter Island—Rapa ...

It’s 1964, and a group of Canadian scientists had sailed across the Pacific to Easter Island in order to study ... were discovered as part of the National Institute on Ageing Interventions ...

There is no place in the world like Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui ... after death they would once again become divine," National Geographic said. Their spirits were said to temporarily ...

The sun sets behind Easter Island's monolithic statues. Relics like these, with constructions that seem to defy the technological capabilities of bygone eras, has led to some speculation that ...