In a moment I'm going to show you pictures of a fish bone a long-dead Hawaiian native modified to scrape meat from animals he or she had killed to avoid, well, starving to death. To provide perspective and a measure of the distance from these ancestors, here’s the view from the 29th floor of the Sheraton – an unimaginable altitude for the fish-bone-scraper users. Unseen but also relevant is the dinner buffet twenty-nine floors below where I captured this photo, where all eating tools are supplied (including specialized forks), and where more food than our ancestors likely ever saw at one moment is presented alongside what would be to them other mysteries like blue cloth and ice.
Where I was living:
Where they lived, but are gone now:
What is mostly a long sad story for Hawaii and its inhabitants is due to this geological accident: The Hawaiian islands are the largest islands for thousands of miles. Those miles that amount to months on a creaking ship where you can see nothing but water. Hawaii is larger than the Marquesas, Tahiti, and the many other Pacific Ocean volcano burps that resulted in mostly dry land. Hawaii is large enough to grow serious crops, develop animal husbandry, and hone related skills like language, agriculture, tool technology and what might be called other vices. This means that everyone on a ship around 1500 AD wants to visit Hawaii. Since they carry and share their germs, the moment they land, 9 of every 10 Hawaiians were doomed, since they had no immunity to the diseases carried by their visitors.
The site we explored was most likely a “Pre contact” site, meaning it was inhabited before contact with (mainly) western civilization. Captain Cook came here (and was killed here), but so did many others, among them Vancouver, many others, and now the three of us, who we can safely say followed the people who put up the No Trespassing signs.
Right after those signs, there's a steep hill that leads to an overhang, which is where you and I would want to live five hundred years ago.
At first this place looks unremarkable, but our guide points out things that I had missed. Overhanging rock for shelter, a large flat stone for grinding poi, places that would be good for sleeping. And this all seems circumstantial, something that's open for interpretation, like seeing faces in the clouds, until he kneels to dig a bit beneath a rock outcropping, and he plucks these things from the dirt:
These are fish bone tools. The last one, single bone in hand, has been modified, broken and sculpted, to facilitate scraping meet from a fish. An ancient fork. We are about a mile from the ocean, and the inescapable fact is that the parts of fish we're finding here were brought here by someone long ago, someone who was hungry. It's likely been hundreds of years since this particular fish was eaten, but this morning it seems like we just missed them by a few minutes. Had I not stopped for coffee, we'd be having sushi with these folks.
There's other evidence too. Here's a flat stone bearing the marks (beneath moss) were poi was ground:
Perhaps this is a tool they used? This is coral, and we're not near the ocean.
And here, what appears to be the remnants of a stone wall:
We begin to appreciate that this place is very old, with the silent signs of people who arranged stones, prepared food they hunted or plucked from plants that are likely descendants of the ones we're walking around this morning.
The site has a spot that affords a great view of the ocean to the north, and pools where they raised shrimp, like we do now. The only thing that would have been missing is the road.
