A previously unknown moai turned up in a dried-up lakebed on Rapa Nui in 2023, a find archaeologists said had never before been made in that part of Easter Island. The statue was discovered in the statue quarry, in ground that had once been underwater and was only exposed as the area dried out.

The find matters now because it came when experts believed they had already accounted for the island’s known moai. More than 1,000 have been found and logged on Rapa Nui, and the newly discovered figure is one of the smallest ever identified, but its location matters more than its size: no moai had previously been found in the dry bed or in what had been a lake, according to Terry Hunt.

Moai were created by the Rapa Nui people and are usually linked to the likenesses of important figures, often chieftains or other leaders. Most are carved from volcanic tuff, with a few made from basalt, and the largest known statue weighs 86 tons and stands 32 feet tall. Most others are about half that size, which is why a smaller figure hidden in a lakebed still forced experts to rethink where these statues might be waiting.

That rethink is the friction point. For years, the assumption had been that the island’s statue sites were known, but the dried lakebed has already broken that certainty. Hunt said dry conditions may reveal more, and that tall reeds may have concealed others in the sediment; prospecting with equipment that can detect what lies below the ground surface could show whether the lakebed holds additional moai. He added that when there is one moai in the lake, there is probably more.

Salvador Atan Hito put the discovery in sharper human terms, saying nobody knew the statue existed, including the ancestors and grandparents. That is what makes this more than a curiosity from 2023: it is a reminder that even on an island with more than 1,000 logged moai, the next one may still be buried just out of sight.

Researchers now want to test that possibility in the lakebed sediments, where the drying ground has already produced a first-ever find. If more statues are there, the question is no longer whether the island still has secrets, but how many moai have been waiting beneath the reeds all along.