Week 11

This week everything we needed for the transport of the moai on the terrain was done. What we didn't have, however, was the cart (it still wasn't working) and the plan for how to get the moai off of the cart and on to the ahu. We managed to tie the string from the pulleys on the cart and we tested out how we would want it to move, but it wasn't of much use because we couldn't manage to balance the moai on the cart so that it was stable throughout the entire transportation. We started thinking of possible solutions again. One of them was changing the cart entirely, and we actually did try that, but due to our time constraints we decided that it probably wasn't the bast idea. We decided to maintain the cart we already had, but we would have to change the way in which we placed the moai on top of it to gain the stability we were missing. We weren't sure what to do, but eventually we tried building a flat platform on top of the cart and that appeared to work. We can anticipate that it will likely be very difficult to tie down the moai in a way that will stop it from moving around during the transportation, but we're gad nonetheless that we managed to mostly stabilize the cart.

To top our worries about the cart and the transportation in general, we had an important incident during our trials. Our beloved moai, Hex, fell off of our cart and suffered devastating injuries. He will be forever remembered, but will never be the same. We tried to save him, but in the end the only solution was to replace him. Anna Vall and Irene Rivera built a new moai, which they affectionately named Hex 2.0, in honour of the recently deceased Hex. Below are two images, the first is that of the original Hex, and the second is Hex 2.0 prepared for a transport trial.