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Comment by bombcar | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much it would cost today to erect an Easter Island style statue (either there or anywhere).

It's a different style of work, but check out Opus 40. An artist bought an old slate quarry north of New York and spent nearly 40 years turning it into a drystone sculpture garden.

One person can make something fairly impressive given enough time.

There are giant CNCs [1] that can cut marble and other stone so between the machine and transportation to Easter island, in the ballpark of a few hundred thousand dollars. Most of that is setup cost for the first one though, since a block of stone is significantly cheaper than a CNC.

[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=iI8OmfEK8cE

The only cost is the time it takes you to sculpt it out of the rock.

The statues differ a lot in size so you can't easily answer that question. The biggest are very close to the quarry. Many didn't even make it to their final destination, they got abandoned or broke on the way. The picture in the article which is very common is just below the quarry, some 400 statues got left there and approximately 1000 exist in total.

On the other side of the island some statues are only standing about 1m tall while the tallest (but unfinished) statues measures around 20m in height.

Putting the Pukao (hat) on some of the statues is also an additional complexity, they were made in a different quarry.

Transport would also be a major cost. I don't think they are entirely sure how they were moved around, but one suggestion is a team of approx 20-30 men rocked/walked them to their final positions (i.e. upright, two teams on either side alternating pulling on ropes etc) over a period of days.

UK minimum wage is £10.42/h so:

10.42 * 30 men * 8 hours * 5 days = £12,500 just for delivery. That doesn't include installation costs.

UK minimum wage takes into account the current supply of labor and many layers of politics / economic theory. This is not comparable to the cost of labor wrt supply in ancient Maori culture.

And disregarding the fundamental error in comparison, the currency needs to be converted to the present Easter Island conversion rate -- does that even exist?

Additionally, total cost is probably not the bottleneck. These were allegedly hunter gatherer's, so TIME was more precious than cost because current theory is hunter/gatherer's didn't have spare time to spend on statues until agriculture.

The question was how much it would cost to do it today, and anywhere.

Question was not how much it cost to do it then. Please do try to keep up.

It would be interesting to try to recreate it "as period-perfectly accurate as possible" but yeah, I was thinking using modern equipment, but the same materials, how hard would it be.

A crane can be obtained that can lift one, probably no more than $10k a day maximum, heavy-haul trucks probably similar, so it's really the materials and the workmanship.

What would cause the stone statues to shrink as they move further from the quarry?

They don't shrink, it's just that moving them was harder the bigger they were, so the smallest ones got moved the furthest (at least easiest).

Smaller statues can be carried further without herniation?

It would depend if you had to use traditional methods or if you could use modern tools. In particular if you could pour it from concrete.

No that's cheating. You get a 6.5x1.75x1.75m block of granite and a small chisel, that's it

Lol. They weren't carving granite though, it was some very soft volcanic rock.

Yeah, I'd consider carving something out of stone to be the minimum, "building" one out of cast concrete or whatever seems a different project.

I wouldn't consider the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid to be the "same thing" as the Pyramids at Giza, for the same reasons.

I may be dating myself a bit here, but when I was growing up I used to go see Disney on Ice shows at the Memphis Pyramid rather than it being a Bass Pro Shop...

I'm genuinely curious what would cost the most; the stone, transport, or the sculptor?

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