Small wooden statue of uncertain religious significance, carved on Easter Island .
The figures, thought to represent ancestors who live on in the form of skeletons, are of two types: moai kavakava (male), with a beaklike nose and goatee and occasionally an animal or a human figure incised on the head; and moai paepae (female), which have a flat, relieflike quality and large eyes. They were sometimes used for fertility rites but more often for harvest celebrations, when the first picking of fruits was heaped around them as offerings.