A British archaeologist has proposed a revised account of the excavation of Hoa Hakananaiʻa, the moai better known as the Easter Island Head, arguing that its removal was not a unilateral act of imperial extraction but a collaborative effort between British explorers and Indigenous Rapa Nui islanders that ultimately led to its voyage to England.Hoa Hakananaiʻa was one of roughly 1,000 basalt statues scattered across Easter Island, a subtropical landmass about the size of Manhattan located off the coast of Chile. The Indigenous Rapa Nui people call these towering figures moai—monuments that serve as vessels for the spirits of their ancestors. The best-known of them, Hoa Hakananaiʻa, has been on view at the British Museum since 1869, fueling one of the world’s most high-profile restitution campaigns.Since 2018, Rapa Nui community leaders, backed by the Chilean government, have formally requested its return, arguing that the statue holds vital cultural significance and that the British removed it without permission.The archaeologist Mike Pitts, however, has claimed that newly surfaced photographic evidence and eyewitness accounts of the excavation paint a more nuanced picture. Pitts told the Times that while researching his new book, Island at the Edge of the World: The Forgotten History of Easter Island, he encountered a report in the Army and Navy Gazette, a London-based newspaper published in 1869, one year after the excavation. “This finding was bigger than the book. This was one of those moments where the hair on the back of my neck stands on end, and I just get very excited,” said Pitts. An expert on the topic, he’s edited British Archaeology, the Council for British Archaeology’s publication, for 20 years and has led excavations at Stonehenge. He added that the article included a “quite detailed” eyewitness account of the statue’s removal, the only one currently known.It is undisputed that the excavation’s leader, Commodore Richard Ashmore Powell, presented the Eastern Island head to Queen Victoria, who later donated it to the British Museum for public display. According to the anonymous witness of the episode, the British expedition was welcomed by the Indigenous community: “On arrival at this place we were met by about four hundred men and boys standing in a perfect line of two all along the rocks where one had to pass, leaving a clear path between for us to pass.”The account goes on to describe the scene onshore as “very strange” yet “pleasant,” while also using a derogatory term for the Rapa Nui people. It claimed that the British were shown a concealed entrance to a cluster of stone houses where the statue—created sometime between 1000 CE and 1200—resided. According to the account, the Britons traded tobacco with the islanders, who then assisted in excavating the sculpture, before the sailors hauled it back to their ship.Perhaps anticipating skepticism, Pitt points to Easter Island’s state in 1868 as a possible explanation for the warm reception. At the time, the island was reeling from violent exploitation by competing foreign powers, both clerical and commercial, which had enslaved many Rapa Nui people on plantations and introduced a host of deadly diseases.Pitts showed the Times a photograph said to have been taken on the day of the excavation. The image belonged to a coveted historical album whose provenance was unknown, apart from a few pulled images sold by a Scottish auction house to a Persian collector. The whole business, he added, was “very secretive.”A copy of the album eventually surfaced at the National Library of Peru. In the photograph, reprinted by the Times, Commodore Richard Ashmore Powell’s crew pose around the Easter Island head, alongside what Pitts identifies as the tools and ropes used in its excavation. The eyewitness account records that 40 men took part in the dig—the same number visible in the photograph.“It had been said that the photograph was taken in Portsmouth, where the ship docked upon its return to Britain,” Pitts said, adding that he finds that account unlikely. In the image, the statue is still painted red and white—a decoration applied by the islanders that, he noted, had been washed off during the voyage, as seen in later photography.The British Museum has repeatedly declined calls to return Hoa Hakananai’a, citing the British Museum Act of 1963, which restricts the deaccessioning of objects from its collection without government approval.“My view as an archaeologist is that an excavation of the site where the statue came from would be really productive and informative,” Pitt said. “Now that’s the sort of project that the British Museum and islanders could work together on.”