AFP, Santiago

A new moai, one of Easter Island’s iconic statues, was found in the bed of a dry laguna in a volcano crater, the Indigenous community that administers the site on the Chilean island has said.

“This moai has great potential for scientific and natural studies, it’s a really unique discovery as it’s the first time that that a moai has been discovered inside a laguna in a Rano Raraku crater,” said the Ma’u Henua Indigenous community in a statement on Tuesday.

The statue was found on February 21 by a team of scientific volunteers from three Chilean universities collaborating on a project to restore the marshland in the crater of the Rano Raraku volcano.

Several moai in that area suffered charring in an October forest fire on the island, which is also known as Rapa Nui and lies some 3,500 kilometres (2,175 miles) off the west coast of Chile.

“This moai is in the center of a laguna that began drying up in 2018,” Ninoska Avareipua Huki Cuadros, director of the Ma’u Henua Indigenous community that administers the Rapa Nui National Park, where the volcano is found, told AFP.

“The interesting thing is that, for at least the last 200 or 300 years, the laguna was three metres deep, meaning no human being could have left the moai there in that time,” said Huki, who is also the provincial head of the local branch of the national forestry corporation, which is collaborating with the restoration of the marshland.