It was the 17th century, the civilization living on Easter Island had reached its peak in prosperity. At the same time, the generation of their Moai statues had also reached an all-time high. Flash-forward a hundred years and you’d see that the first European ships had landed on Easter Island. The explorers had adventured through the island. Each of the majestic Moai statues that they had reported having seen were all standing. By the end of the 19th century the reports of the amount of standing statues from visitors had dwindled until they became nonexistent. It should be known that to this day there have been 887 statues found with weights reaching 86 tons. What could have happened to a civilization to have incited them to create such wonders and at the same time, topple and destroy their creations? Archaeology is important as it is what allows us to revisit and learn about these events in the past through the analysis of these artifacts.…show more content… The excavation of the statues are said to have started even back in the 1900s or perhaps even further back. In 1868, a British crew excavated a Moai statue, in good condition in comparison to many others, and brought it back to England. This statue was called “Hoa Hakananai’a” and was made of flow lava otherwise known as basalt. Even now, there are archaeologists excavating more of these statues with tools such as mattocks, brushes, trenches, handpicks etc.… There is currently a site called www.eisp.org where you can get informed by the recent discoveries and even fund the