Estimates of when people first reached the island are as varied, ranging from the first to the sixth century A.D. Over the past few decades, archaeologists have assembled evidence that the first settlers came from another Polynesian island, but they can’t agree on which one. When did the first people arrive? Where did they come from? Why did they carve such enormous statues? How did they move them and raise them up onto platforms? Why, after centuries, did they topple these idols? Such questions have been answered again and again, but the answers keep changing. The missionary’s anecdotes, the archaeologist’s shovel, the anthropologist’s oral histories and boxes of bones have all revealed something of the island’s story. But attempts to unravel that history have produced many interpretations and arguments. History, as much as art, made this island unique. A society of hereditary chiefs, priests, clans and guilds of specialized craftsmen lived in isolation for 1,000 years.

Its megalithic statues are even more imposing than the landscape, but there is a rich tradition of island arts in forms less solid than stone-in wood and bark cloth, strings and feathers, songs and dances, and in a lost form of pictorial writing called rongorongo, which has eluded every attempt to decipher it.

Too far south for a tropical climate, lacking coral reefs and perfect beaches, and whipped by perennial winds and seasonal downpours, Easter Island nonetheless possesses a rugged beauty-a mixture of geology and art, of volcanic cones and lava flows, steep cliffs and rocky coves. Just 14 miles long and 7 miles wide, the island is more than 2,000 miles off the coast of South America and 1,100 miles from its nearest Polynesian neighbor, Pitcairn Island, where mutineers from the HMS Bounty hid in the 19th century. But the art of Easter Island still looms on the horizon of the human imagination. By Cook’s time, the islanders had toppled many of their statues and were neglecting those left standing. He freely speculated on how the statues might have been raised, a little at a time, using piles of stones and scaffolding and there has been no end of speculation, and no lack of scientific investigation, in the centuries that followed. “We could hardly conceive how these islanders, wholly unacquainted with any mechanical power, could raise such stupendous figures,” the British mariner Capt. The island’s population was too small, too primitive and too isolated to be credited with such feats of artistry, engineering and labor. To early travelers, the spectacle of immense stone figures, at once serenely godlike and savagely human, was almost beyond imagining. In fact, their descendants are making art and renewing their cultural traditions in an island renaissance. Its nearly 1,000 statues, some almost 30 feet tall and weighing as much as 80 tons, are still an enigma, but the statue builders are far from vanished. “The island is planted with monstrous great statues, the work of I don’t know what race, today degenerate or vanished its great remains an enigma.” Named Easter Island by the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen, who first spied it on Easter Day 1722, this tiny spit of volcanic rock in the vast South Seas is, even today, the most remote inhabited place on earth. “There exists in the midst of the great ocean, in a region where nobody goes, a mysterious and isolated island,” wrote the 19th-century French seafarer and artist Pierre Loti. Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from its original form and updated to include new information for Smithsonian’s Mysteries of the Ancient World bookazine published in Fall 2009.

We were here together statue puzzle