New Data from Poike (Rapa Nui - Easter Island): Dynamic Architecture of a Series of Ahu

OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS, THE Royal Museum of Art and History, with the collaboration of the University of Ghent, have undertaken a series of excavation on Easter Island. The starting point of this research was to verify the archaeological context of a colossal statue brought back to Belgium in 1935, on the occassion of the Franco-Belgian mission directed by Alfred Metraux and Henri Lavachery (Metraux 1941; Lavachery 1935). The great antiquity of the ahu uncovered at o Rongo in 200l, on the bay of Hanga Roa, was the stimulus to new inquiries pertaining to the early phases of Rapanui religious architecture (Huyge and Cauwe 2002).