Pukao outside the crater.
Placing the headdresses on top of the statues’ heads was a tremendous feat of engineering. Those to be seen today on restored statues were all put there by cranes (fig. 5.11), and not without difficulty. Captain Cook suggested that ramps and scaffolding were used. Some scholars have proposed that the cylinders were lashed to the statues and both were raised together, but this is generally considered to be far too risky.
Experiments by Pavel Pavel show that some pukao may have been put in position by gradually pulling them up sloping beams of wood. A concrete pukao, 1 m in diameter and weighing 900 kg, was raised onto the top of a 3 m concrete moai by only 4 men in 6 hours (fig. 5.12).2
It should be borne in mind, however, that Paro’s monstrous pukao, which was by no means the biggest, measures almost 2 m across, 1.7 m high, weighs about 11.5 tons, and had to be raised 10 meters into the air.
