[8] In 1868, Hoa Hakananai'a was standing erect, part buried inside a freestone ceremonial "house" in the Orongo village at the south-western tip of the island.

[20] Typical of Easter Island moai, Hoa Hakananai'a features a heavy brow, blocky face with prominent nose and jutting chin, nipples, thin, lightly angled arms down the sides and hands reaching towards the stomach, which is near the base.

It has a raised Y-shape in the centre of the chin, eyes hollowed out in a way characteristic of statues erected elsewhere on the island on ceremonial ahu platforms, and long, rectangular stylised ears.

Most statues on Easter Island are of a reddish tuff,[24][25] but Hoa Hakananai'a is made from a block of dark grey-brown flow lava.

[11] The base of the statue, now concealed in a modern plinth, may originally have been flat, and subsequently narrowed, or was rough and tapering from the start.

[34][35] Either side and above the ring on the maro are two facing birdmen (tangata manu), stylised human figures with beaked heads said to represent frigatebirds.

The Y-shaped lines at the top of the head are the remnants of two large komari, partly removed by the other carvings, which were added at a later date.

The beak of the right birdman comes to a short, rounded end, not a long pointed tip; the latter reading of the digital models was supported by a new interpretation of a photo of the statue taken in 1868.

[58] One group of critics described this interpretation as "interesting, thought provoking and even somewhat poetic", but, while "greatly impressed by the work", rejected the proposals.

[51] The archaeologists behind the new digital study have released the captured photogrammetry model online, along with the Reflectance Transformation Imaging datasets.

Hoa Hakananai'a was found in November 1868 by officers and crew from the British Royal Navy ship HMS Topaze.

[64] At that time Commodore Richard Ashmore Powell,[11] captain of the Topaze, wrote to the British Admiralty offering the statue, along with a second, smaller moai known as Hava.

It returned to the British Museum's main site in 2000, when it was exhibited on a new, higher plinth in the Great Court, before moving to its present location in the Wellcome Trust Gallery (Room 24: Living and Dying).

In November 2018 Laura Alarcón Rapu, the Governor of Easter Island, asked the British Museum to return the statue.

[71] Keeper of the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the British Museum, Lissant Bolton, visited Easter Island in June 2019.