In 2003, the Chilean government began an investigation into two moai heads within a set of 15 other Easter Island artefacts — the possessions of Hernan Garcia de Gonzalo Vidal — which were put on sale at The Cronos gallery in Miami. After a photographic inspection by Patricia Vargas, an archaeologist at the University of Chile's Easter Island institute, she commented that ""They might be nice art pieces, but I doubt any one is 500 years old. It appears that the cuts have been made with modern machinery and not with stone tools." A meeting arranged between the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio which first reported the sale, and Hernan Garcia Gonzalo de Vidal, later failed to take place when Mr Gonzalo de Vidal became unavailable due to a "family emergency".
