Clive Ruggles

A Polynesian sighting wall

In Hawaiian traditions, Newe (the Southern Cross) was used as a marker to guide the navigator to Kahiki (Tahiti), the ancestral homeland.

Kahikinui (“Big Tahiti”) is an isolated district of south-eastern Maui where the pre-contact landscape survives unusually well. Hanamauloa is a coastal location, particularly inaccessible today, and it was here that Kirch introduced Ruggles to a unique monument referred to in ethnographic testimony as the pānānā, or “sighting wall”. It is an isolated stretch of well-constructed linear wall, unconnected to anything else, with a large central notch framing a clear view of a segment of ocean to the south.

Our investigations revealed that the wall, together with an associated cairn and upright stone to the south, are positioned so that the notch framed the stars of the Southern Cross (as it still does, but precession has shifted the constellation lower in the sky). The constellation appeared at its most upright when right above the upright slab. Precise Uranium-series dating of branch coral associated with the cairn suggests a date of AD 1444 ± 4 for the construction and/or use of the site.

We suggest that the pānānā was not so much an observational device as a structure built to commemorate long-distance voyaging. It may well relate to a particular figure important in Hawaiian oral traditions, the voyaging chief La‘amaikahiki.

The geographical situation of the monument is also of interest: it sits within an area containing a number of place-names referring to ancestral Polynesian lands.

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