Along Molokaʻi's south central coastline in Kawela, a raised mound along Kamehameha V Highway holds 900 years of stories.
“There are a group of sites that we call early sites (across Hawaiʻi) and these date to about the 1300s, 1400s. But the bottom of the Kawela Mound dates to about the 1100s, up until the early 1200s. So that's one of the most comprehensively dated habitation areas in the whole Hawaiian Islands," said archeologist Marshall Weisler.
Weisler is a professor at the University of Queensland in New Zealand and has been working in archeology in the Pacific Islands for nearly 50 years. Over that time, he has studied dozens of sites on Molokaʻi.
He originally excavated the Kawela Mound in 1981 and concluded that its contents were about 500 years old. But since then, radiocarbon dating technology and methods have greatly improved, and he recently re-dated samples. He was surprised to find out the site was, in fact, about 900 years old.
Weisler says each layer of the mound tells a different story.
"Inside those layers is the evidence of people living on the landscape, and that's an incredible time capsule because it not only tells us about people, but it tells us about the environment.”
The area is now dry and hot, but for hundreds of years, the Kawela Stream brought ample fresh water to the coastal region. Nearby, the Kakahaiʻa Pond used to be fed by springs, creating a marshy wetland perfect for growing kalo. Weisler found evidence of species living centuries ago that are no longer found in Kawela.
The discovery also changes what archeologists previously presumed about the location of Hawaiʻi’s earliest settlements. Lush, windward areas were believed to have been more attractive to early agricultural Polynesians, but Kawela’s leeward location proves that theory wrong.
He describes the site as a "habitation mound."
“It's where people lived and there are tens of thousands of bones of fish. There's hundreds of bones of pig, dog, chicken, nēnē, other birds, urchins. It's loaded with food and there's imu, there's earth ovens... There's post molds where houses used to be. There's evidence that people were making stone tools like adzes...”
Weisler said one of the most interesting discoveries of early habitations across the eastern Pacific, from New Zealand to Rapa Nui and Hawaiʻi, is that they all date to within about a century of each other.
“It's the most incredible over-water migration in the whole history of humans. And it took place in the eastern part of the Pacific, and part of that story is Hawaiʻi. And part of that story, now, is this Kawela mound site," he said.
