A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
975 entries
ahu
On Rapa Nui, the stone platform on which moai stand — a ceremonial and burial structure, the statues on top of it facing inland with the sea at their backs. The word has come to stand for the whole complex. The earliest ahu were small, plain altars; they grew over centuries into things like Ahu Tongariki, which carries fifteen moai, the heaviest of them 95 tons.
Etymology
Rapa Nui ahu, from Proto-Polynesian *qafu, “to heap up, a mound.” The same root sits in Hawaiian ahu, a heap or cairn or altar, and in Māori ahu, to heap up.
Notes
Ahu Tongariki’s moai were pushed over during the island’s internal wars, then swept inland by the tsunami from the 1960 Chilean earthquake, and were re-erected in the 1990s. Radiocarbon work at several sites now puts the earliest formal ahu on Rapa Nui at least as early as the equivalent structures in the Society Islands, which complicates the old assumption that the form spread from west to east.