Pu’uhonua O Honauhau National Historical Park at Honaunau, Hawai'i

Hawaiian Islanders before Contact

On a white sandy beach shaded by palm trees, looking out at the vast Pacific Ocean, a building of volcanic rock with a steeply pitched roof anchors a ceremonial complex for the Polynesians who made the Hawaiian Islands home. The Hawaiian archipelago holds 132 islands with the Big Island of Hawai’i the largest of the group. The Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park on the west coast encompasses 420 acres and preserves some of the most significant traditional Hawaiian sites in the archipelago. Honaunau Bay offered the ideal location for the Hawaiian royalty who established their residential and ceremonial sites nearby, known now as the Royal Grounds. For over four centuries, the pu'uhonuvast a, the Royal Grounds, the fish ponds, and other adjacent areas served as one of the primary religious and political centers on the island.

The Royal Grounds (Photo courtesy of NPS)

The first immigrants to Hawai’i came from southeast Asia and spread through the islands of the Pacific beginning around 3,000 years ago. Sailing in double hulled outrigger canoes holding people, livestock, seeds, and supplies, these Polynesian explorers reached the Hawaiian Islands around 1,600 years ago. Based on centuries of life on or near the ocean, Polynesians sailed great distances, gathered the bounty of the seas, and cultivated lush tropical foods.

Kapu (Forbidden Objects and Activities)

The first Hawaiians had a stratified social structure similar to the Moundbuilders and the Algonquin consisting of chiefs, priests, skilled laborers, and commoners. Strict laws called kapu existed which helped enforce the social order. Certain activities, certain people, and certain places were sacred and at times, forbidden. Some of the kapu focused on gender, others on behavior. For example, men and women could not eat together, and a commoner who cast a shadow on royalty could be executed (which explains why people prostrated themselves before royalty).

An interesting aspect of kapu was that it regulated fishing, planting, and harvesting so the Hawaiians avoided overfishing or otherwise depleting their resources. In this way, kapu meant “closed” so that fishing certain species during spawning time was forbidden to insure future harvests. Any breaking of kapu disturbed the stability of society, and often resulted in severe punishment, including death.

Pu’uhonua (a religious sanctuary) presented a refuge for those who broke a kapu. At a pu’uhonua, a kahuna pule (or priest) could grant absolution and free an offender of punishment.  At the Pu'uhonua  Honaunau National Historical Park, this sanctuary features a reconstruction of a heiua, the central building of the complex. The steeply pitched roof thatched with palm fronds is surrounded by wooden totems. Nearby runs the Great Wall, a massive 965 foot long black lava rock wall that towers twelve feet high. The L-shaped Great Wall bounds the pu'uhonua on its eastern and southern sides.

A heiua (Photo courtesy of NPS) 

At the site, there is the Kaʻahumanu Stone, which Mark Twain described in his "Letters from Hawaii."  He wrote:

On the other side of the temple is a monstrous seven-ton rock, eleven feet long, seven feet wide and three feet thick. It is raised a foot or a foot and a half above the ground, and rests upon half a dozen little stony pedestals. They say that fifty or sixty years ago (1806-1816) the proud Queen Kaʻahumanu (favorite wife of King Kahmehameha I) used to fly to this rock for safety, whenever she had been making trouble with her fierce husband, and hide under it until his wrath was appeased.

Even queens found sanctuary at this pu’uhonua.

At the park, the Royal Grounds shows us how some Hawaiians lived before contact with Europeans. The site contains ruins of former chiefs’ dwellings, including a men’s house, a family house, a cooking structure, and a women’s eating house. Nearby, an eight foot high retaining wall protected the chief’s complex and the ceremonial area. To mark the boundaries of the Royal Grounds, kapu sticks stuck in the ground at the northern, eastern, and southern boundaries warned non-royal people that the area was off limits. One of the temples holds the remains of twenty-three chiefs, and so the place is still sacred.

Fishing and Farming

Another key feature of the park is the ahupua'a, which is the traditional wedge-shaped unit of land that extended from the off-shore waters through the coastal area up the hillsides to the higher nearby peaks. When the seafaring migrants first arrived at the Hawaiian chain, they couldn’t farm near the shore because of the coarse volcanic soil and lack of fresh water. Nonetheless, the rich fishing grounds off shore attracted these settlers. Arable land farther up the slopes of the mountains supported farming. This ahupua'a held all the resources of the island— from the shores to the mountains and from forests to farms. As in other Polynesian islands, kinship-based descent groups originally developed the ahupua'a, overseen by local chiefs. Eventually, as communities grew, kinship ties loosened, and the groups changed into a more politically based system where less powerful chiefs became subservient to stronger ones, and a feudal system developed. The ahupua'a of Honaunau was the original seat of the chiefdom of Kona and the ancestral home of the one of the most powerful line of Big Island chiefs, the Kamehameha dynasty.

Fishing played an integral role in pre-contact Hawai’i. Islanders used bone fish hooks, trolling lures, basket traps, and woven nets with sinkers to tap into the abundant fish, squid, marine mammals, seaweed, and shellfish in both the salt and fresh waters. They also found raw material for tools such as coral and sea-urchin files, awls, and scrapers.

They farmed fish. They constructed elaborate holding pens to raise fish which especially helped during the times when kapu forbid fishing from the ocean. The fish ponds required organized labor to build and maintain. Similar to the pueblo building in Chaco and the mound building at Cahokia, this meant that a stratified social system developed where many people undertook construction projects that supported the elite.

The plants and animals brought by the sailing settlers in their out-riggers greatly contributed to survival. They introduced plants like taro, yams, breadfruit, paper mulberry (for clothing), and herbs, along with pigs, dogs, and fowl. To transport harvest to the coast and to trade with other chiefdoms, the people of the ahupua'a constructed elaborate trails. These trails connected diverse communities, royal lands, sacred sites, and resources both between and within the ahupua’as. People walked from the coastal villages to the upland gardens to gather food, to seek help from kahunas, and to appeal to royalty.

Religion permeated pre-contact Hawaiian life. Prayers blessed significant events, celebrations, and seasonal observances to ensure individual and community health, success, and prosperity. Hawaiian gods split into two groups: the akua were animist spirits connected with natural forces while the ‘aumakua represented ancestral gods. The four main Hawaiian gods were Kane, the primary god and creator of all things; Ku, connected with the abundance of the earth as well as with politics and war; Kanaloa, god of the sea and of death; and Lono, god of rain, agriculture, and fertility. In addition to these main gods, hundreds of lesser deities populated the land, including the famous Pele who ruled over volcanoes.

Kahunas (human priests) communicated with the gods and spirits. These shamans mediated with the deities for humans, healed people, and legitimized a chiefs’ power by declaring divine provenance. As with all pre-contact cultures that we have looked at in this section, religion played a major role in everyday life. Praying to spirits who controlled rain in the desert Southwest or volcanoes on the Hawaiian Islands was an intimate act of convergence with powers bigger than humans.  

King Kamehameha II

King Kamehameha I

English explorer Captain James Cook made first European contact with the Hawaiians in 1778. He and his ship visited the islands several times as they sailed around the Pacific. Change happened quickly after contact. In 1819, Kamehameha the Great died and, Kaʻahumanu and Keōpūolani, two of his wives, convinced the young king Kamehameha II to overthrow the kapu system. Consequently, Kamehameha II sat down with his mother and ate a meal, breaking the kapu. Additionally, people burned many of the wooden statues and tore down some of their rock temples. On the heels of the overthrow of the kapu system, in 1820 missionaries from Boston arrived and began to convert the islanders to Christianity. Native religion and traditional practices came under assault and while some of these beliefs survive on the islands today, they were suppressed for decades. Few pu'uhonuas survive, thus the historic site at Pu'uhonua o Honaunau is one of the best preserved and illustrates the rich texture of religion and industry of the first Hawaiians.

Pu'uhonua o Honaunau National Historical Park National Historical Park,

State Highway 160, 

Honaunau, Hawai'i  

(808) 328-2326  

http://www.nps.gov/puho/index.htm

Conclusion for Section One: Precontact Americans.

The pre-contact Americans that we visited at the five NPS sites in this section show sophisticated societies that grasped the complex world that we live in—from plotting the passage of the sun, moon, and planets, to managing and protecting fragile eco-systems. They developed extensive trading networks that transported plants, animals, and goods across thousands of miles of challenging landscapes and oceans. They organized their communities, both large and small, into a variety of social structures that rivaled the feudal kingdoms of Europe at the time, and they embarked on ambitious public works of large earthen mounds, of massive multi-storied pueblos, and of structures aligned to the movement of the heavens. Their built environment served as a cosmic clock. Pre-contact peoples also believed in a world animated with spirits that protected families, ensured good hunting, provided rain when needed, and healed them.

The 500 nations of North America had abundant foods unknown to the rest of the world. Corn, potatoes, chile, chocolate, tobacco, and tomatoes testify to their skills as agricultural scientists and experimenters. With a population equivalent to Europe at the time, people in the Americas had vibrant, interconnected, sophisticated civilizations that rivaled what was going on worldwide, except for three items. They did not have metal tools. They did not have large draft animals. And they did not have immunity to European diseases. In the next section about the NPS sites that chronicle the contact with Europeans and then Colonial America, we explore the encounter of different cultures which produced our United States. This contact impacted both Native peoples and Europeans and indeed, transformed the world that we live in.