Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 5, Number 12, 1 December 1988 — Lanaʻi Petroglyphs Recorded — [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Lanaʻi Petroglyphs Recorded —

By Deborah Ward Editor, Ka Wai Ola O OHA In the shadow of the Lana'ihale range at Luahiwa, Lana'i, and among the remains of the ancient coastal village of Kaunolu, the passage of time has not yet erased the handwork of ancient Hawaiians who onee lived in these sacred places. Today their presence ean still be pondered, when standing face-to-face with the enigmatic petroglyphs that are among the only remaining examples of ancient Hawaiian art still in the original setting where they were made by ka po'e kahiko. Yet even these precious survivors of an ancient time are being affected by the tide of change. In recent years vandals have altered or rescratched some of the thousand-year old rock carvings, destroying in the process the legacy of ancient artisans, as well as valuable cultural information that could some day tell us who they were and why they made them. Also, development of tourism on Lana'i is likely to increase visitation to these already popular sites with further impacts. With this uncertain future in mind, the major petroglyph sites of Lana'i at Luahiwa, Kaunolu village and Kukui point were documented in a sixweek recording project done in August and September by teams participating in a University of California at Berkeley/Castle and Cooke, ine. research expedition, directed by anthropologistarchaeologist Georgia Lee, PhD. In addition, the petroglyph site near Keomuku and a portion of the petroglyphs at Mamaki were documented. More than 1,150 images were mapped, scientifically recorded and photographed.

Project director Lee is a rock art sp'ecialist and is a research associate at the Institute of Archaeology, UC Berkeley, and also at an institute on Easter lsland, Chile. She be!ieves the findings add valuable in-depth information to earlier reports on the petroglyphs of Lana'i by Bishop Museum anthropologist Kenneth Emory (1924) and Halley Cox and Ed Stasack (1970). For example, Emory listed 15 boulders with petroglyphs at Luahiwa, and the team found 17 more, for a total of 32. Squatting for hours on end in the summer heat, or perched on dirt slopes, patient teams of six members per two-week segment carefully documented the numerous petroglyphs, recording to scale the size, shape and depth of the figures as well as the method of manufacture used by the original makers. Using this method of archaeological recording brings out details that only human eyes ean perceive and that a map or photograph could miss. In contrast, mapping provides a schematic layout and distribution of images and measurements.

One member of the recording team on Lana'i this summer was University of Hawai'i at Manoa anthropology graduate student J. Mikilani Ho, who received a Halley Cox scholarship to participate in the field study. A double major in art and anthropology, her passion is petroglyphs, a devotion evidenced as she spent most of her two

weeks clinging to the Luahiwa hillside working on one large boulder that measures 4.3 meters long by 2.7 meters tall. In keeping with her belief that petrog!yphs are "visual symbols of spiritual belief, a statement of cultural values, a manifestation of mana," Ho follows traditional practice before beginning work at a site. She brings with her a puolo from her home in Kahalu'u, prays, blesses the worksite, and asks permission to work on the site. Only then would she begin. After carefu!ly setting up a temporary stringgrid to establish the scale and location of figures, Ho then painstakingly copied the petroglyphs on her graph sketchpad. As she observed the figures from early morning until sunset, she realized that the changing light revealed super-positioning of figures that had never been noticed by earlier researchers. On one face of the boulder she found three large dogs that had been shallowly pecked, but that now are eroded and almost obliterated by later figures carved over them. Bird and dog

images are abundant# on Lana'i, as well as a distinctive figure she calls the "mo'o." Studying the petroglyphs from a native Hawaiian cultural perspective, Ho brings to her work a profound respect and a commitment to their study and protection. She is developing her unique theory that there is a relationship between the i • 1 _ i 1/ 1 • 1 1 _ ■ • . _

muu niiciyfe;b eiiiu euiuehLiai/ y^n^cuuyiucu i^imiunships. Petrogiyphs may have been made a part of a special ceremony to venerate ancestors, she believes. This theme will be the focus of her doctoral research and eame out of her honors thesis research. Ho notes that the smaller Lana'i is second only to the Big Island in estimated total number of petroglyph images. With the keen eye of an artist, she !earned to look for subtle details — shallow peek marks or deep abrasions that told of different tools and techniques of carving. To recognize and understand petroglyph carving methods, Ho conducted a two-week experiment in 1987 at the Kalahuipua'a site of the Mauna Lani Resort hotel on the island of Hawai'i. On unmarked lava, well away from the ancient petroglyph sites existing there, she carved new petroglyphs, imitating the ancient ones, with modern steel and stone tools to study and identify their characteristics. She measured and photographed the images made by pecking, abrading and other techniques, timed herself and' documented the results. Surprisingly, she found it took less time to carve the images with stone tools than with modern equipment.

wwp* «w* 9 * ■ w • e ■ v ^ •**- ~ — v " . i. - - # • Petroglyph boulders at Luahiwa, Lana'i. Photos by Georgia Lee

Mikilani Ho, recording petroglyphs at Kukui Point, Lana'i.