moai figure

Small wooden statue of uncertain religious significance, carved on Easter Island. The figures, thought to represent ancestors who live on in the form of skeletons, are of two types: moai kavakava (male), with a beaklike nose and goatee and occasionally an animal or a human figure incised on the head; and moai paepae (female), which have a flat, relieflike quality and large eyes. They were sometimes used for fertility rites but more often for harvest celebrations, when the first picking of fruits was heaped around them as offerings.

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