A Lost Super Science

One of the world's supreme ancient mysteries is also among its most obscure. In a remote corner of the western Pacific Ocean, nearly 1,000 miles north of New Guinea and 2,300 miles south of Japan, stand the massive ruins of a long dead city. Incongruously built on a coral reef only five feet above sea level between

the equator and the eleventh parallel, Nan Madol is a series of rectangular

islands and colossal towers choked by draping vegetation. During its prehistoric lifetime, sole access to Nan Madol was via the ocean, from which vessels entered an open-air corridor flanked by artificial islets. At the end of this sea-lane still remains the only entrance to the city, a dramatically impressive flight of broad stone steps rising to a plaza. Ninety-two artificial islands are enclosed within the "downtown" area's 1.6 square miles. All are interconnected by an extensive network of what appear to be canals, each twenty-seven feet across and more than four feet deep at high tide.

An estimated 250 million tons of prismatic basalt spread over 170 acres went into the construction of Nan Madol. Its stone girders rise in a Lincoln Log–like cribwork configuration to twenty-five feet. Originally, the walls rose higher still,

perhaps by another ten or twenty feet. Better estimates are impossible to

ascertain, because the Pacific metropolis is being slowly, inexorably dismantled by relentless jungle growth, which is dislodging the unmortared ramparts and scattering their roughly quarried blocks to the ground. David Hatcher Childress,who conducted several underwater investigations at Nan Madol in the 1980s and early 1990s, concludes that "the whole project is of such huge scale that it easily compares with the building of the Great Wall of China and the Great Pyramid of Egypt in sheer amounts of stone and labor used, and the gigantic scope of the site." In fact, some of the hewn or splintered basalt prisms built into Nan Madol are larger and heavier than the more than two million blocks of Khufu's

Pyramid. Between four and five million stone columns went into the

construction of the Caroline Islands' prehistoric metropolis.

Nan Madol (photograph by Sue Nelson).

Outcrops of basalt were quarried by splitting off massive splinters into the

quadrangular, pentagonal, or hexagonal "logs" that went into building Nan

Madol. They were hewn roughly into shape, then loosely fitted without benefit

of mortar or cement, in contrast to the finely lined and joined stonework found in

the supposed canals. These prismatic columns usually range in length from three

to twelve feet, although many reach twenty-five feet. Their average weight is

around five tons each, but the larger examples weigh twenty or twenty-five tons

apiece. According to Science magazine, "At places in the reef there were natural

breaks that served as entrances to the harbors. In these ship-canals there were a

number of islands, many of which were surrounded by a wall of stone five or six

feet high."

In fact, the entire site was formerly encircled by a sixteen-foot-high wall

originally 2,811 feet long. Only a few sections of this massive rampart have not

been broken down by unguessed centuries of battering storms, against which still

stand two breakwaters. One is 1,500 feet in extent, but the other, nearly three

times greater, is almost a mile long. Some of Nan Madol's walls are more than

twelve feet thick, to what purpose no one has been able to determine because

they are not part of any military fortifications. There is no evidence of keystones

or arches, just a simple slab lintel placed over doorways. None of the presumed

"houses" have windows; nor are there any streets, only what may be canals. Yet

the site did not result from haphazard episodes of construction over several generations. Its overall layout of structures deliberately grouped and positioned

into orderly sections attests to an organized plan carried out with single-minded

purpose in a relatively short time.

The city's best-preserved building is known as Nan Dowas, a tall, square,

hollow, windowless tower composed of fifteen-foot-long hexagonal black basalt

pillars laid horizontally between courses of rudely cut boulders and smaller

stones. The islet is a double-walled enclosure comprising 13,500 cubic meters of

coral, with an additional 4,500 cubic meters of basalt. Although the site

comprises numerous other structures, they are dominated by Nan Dowas.

Childress points out that "the entire massive structure was built by stacking

stones in the manner in which one might construct a log cabin." The

southeastern side of Nan Dowas features the city's largest block, a single

cornerstone weighing no less than sixty tons. Digging underneath this impressive

megalith, archaeologists were surprised to discover that it had been intentionally

set on a buried stone platform.

They were in for yet another surprise when they found a large tunnel cut

through coral running from the center of Nan Dowas. An entire network of

underground corridors connecting all the major man-made islands was

subsequently revealed, including an islet known as Darong joined by a long

tunnel to the outer reef that surrounds the city. Incredibly, some tunnels appear

to run beneath the reef itself, exiting into caves under the sea. Darong is also

notable for its stone-lined artificial lake, one of several found throughout the

complex. What appears to be its longest tunnel extends from the city center out

into the sea for perhaps half a mile. Larger even than Nan Dowas is the artificial

islet of Pahnwi, containing 20,000 cubic meters of coral and basalt rock.

Estimates of the 20,000 to 50,000 workers needed to build Nan Madol are in

sharp contrast with the native population of Pohnpei. This inhabited island just

offshore could never have supported such numbers.

But not a single carving, relief, petroglyph, or decoration of any kind has

been found at Nan Madol, nor any idols or ritual objects—in fact, few artifacts at

all to identify its builders. No statues or sculpture ever adorned its watery

boulevards. Not even one of the small, portable stone images commonly found

throughout the rest of Micronesia and across central and western Polynesia was

discovered at the site. Nor has a single tool or weapon so far been recovered.

Although a ruin, the city is not difficult to envision during its heyday.

Remove all concealing vegetation, and visitors would behold crudely worked

masses of basalt contrasting with orderly courses of stone rising in massive

towers and overpowering walls amid a complex of smaller rectangular buildings

and artificial lakes interconnected by dozens of canals, spread out over eleven

square miles. No wonder Nan Madol has been referred to as the Venice of the

Pacific. But it had no marketplace, temples, or storage areas, not even a

cemetery to bury its dead.

The name Nan Madol means "spaces between," referring to the spaces

created by the network of canals, while Pohnpei (Ponape, until its incorporation

in the Federated States of Micronesia, in 1991), means "on an altar." Its ruins are

not confined to the coral reef facing Madolenihmw Harbor, but may be found

across Pohnpei itself and on several offshore islands. A rectangular enclosure

forty-six feet long by thirty-three feet wide, with a bisecting three-foot-high

interior wall, was discovered in a remote, swampy meadow high in the

mountains, near Salapwuk. Although the twin courtyards enclose a 1,520-

squarefoot area, a pair of inner platforms are only one foot high. As at Nan

Madol, roughly cut basalt boulders and basalt logs were stacked to form the

enclosure. Several others stand on Pohnpei's southwest coast, with the largest example atop a 720-foot mountain. The summit is surrounded by walls five and

seven feet high connected by paved walkways to several terraced platforms.

About a quarter of a mile away, to the southwest, several so-called crypts

were found at Pohnpei, but no trace of human remains have ever been recovered

from the 12.5-to 14.8-foot-long containers, whose real function has not been

identified. Nearer the coast, Diadi features a finely made basalt enclosure with a

platform 1,060 feet square. Alauso's two-tiered, 340-foot-square pyramid with a

central fire pit stands not far from the sea, near Kiti Rock's 24-foot-square

platform, with four upright basalt columns at each of the inner corners. Sokehs

Island, separated from Pohnpei by a mangrove swamp, is crossed by numerous

stone pathways connecting platforms.

Significantly contributing to the mystery of these structures, it would be

difficult to imagine a more out-of-the-way place than Pohnpei, a mere speck

amid the 4.5 million square miles of western Pacific Ocean surrounding

Micronesia. Sea-lanes and trading routes are thousands of miles away. As the

encyclopedist of ancient anomalies William R. Corliss observes, "Only one

hundred twenty nine square miles in area, it is almost lost in the immensity of

the Pacific."

Totolom, Tolocome, or Nahnalaud, the "Big Mountain," rises 2,595 feet

from the middle of the squarish, twelve-by-fourteen-and-a-half-mile island,

overgrown with mangrove swamps but devoid of beaches. Pohnpei is just

thirteen miles across and is surrounded by a coral reef, together with twenty-

three smaller islands. Abundant rainfall—195 to 200 inches annually—conjures

a profusion of ferns, orchids, creepers, bougainvillea, and hibiscus throughout

thickly wooded valleys and across steep mountainsides. Humidity is excessive,

and mildew, rot, and decay permeate the island. Additionally, its remote location

hardly seems to qualify Pohnpei as an ideal spot to build a civilization. Indeed,

the island has nothing to offer for such a gargantuan undertaking as Nan Madol.

Yet its very existence implies city planning, a system of weights and

measures, division of labor, and a hierarchy of authority, plus advanced

surveying and construction techniques on the part of its builders. All this was

needed to raise the only premodern urban center in the entire Pacific. But what

kind of a place was it, this city without streets, windows, or art? Bill S.

Ballinger, whose Lost City of Stone was an early popular book on the subject,

observed, "Nothing quite like Nan Madol exists anywhere else on Earth. The ancient city's construction, architecture and location are unique."

At Pohnpei's northern end, Kolonia, its capital and the only town on the

island, stands in stark contrast to the magnificent achievement just across the

bay. Unlike the orderly precision evident at Nan Madol, Kolonia grew

haphazardly, with no regard to planning of any kind, and is today inhabited by

perhaps 2,000 residents who live in mostly one-story, cinder-block buildings

with corrugated tin roofs. In contrast to the prehistoric stone pathways that still

crisscross the island, some fifteen miles of dirt roads are often impassable,

especially during the frequent downpours. Many islanders dwell in small shacks

of dried grass, cane, and bamboo, not monumental stone. "Kolonia is anything

but beautiful," writes Georgia Hesse of the San Francisco Examiner, "a cluster

of weathering wood and rusting corrugated buildings strung anyhow along a

wide street." Employment opportunities are virtually nonexistent, so the natives

lead subsistence lives from the richly fertile, volcanic soil, their diet

supplemented by fish and chickens.

The Carolines have never supported a population growth commensurate with

the labor needed to build the Venice of the Pacific. As Ballinger put it, "The

point is that large reserves of manpower were never readily available in and

around Ponape. This is a factor that must always be considered when trying to

solve the mystery of the construction of Nan Madol." Pohnpei's 183 square

miles are mostly mountainous and uninhabitable, barely able to support its

30,000 inhabitants. Only a far greater number would have justified, let alone

been able to build, a public works project on the huge scale of Nan Madol. A

leading New Zealand scholar of the early twentieth century, John Macmillan

Brown, noted, "The rafting over the reef at high tide and the hauling up of these

immense blocks, most of them from five to twenty five tons weight, to such a

height as sixty feet must have meant tens of thousands of organized labor; and it

had to be housed and clothed and fed. Yet, within a radius of fifteen hundred

miles of its centre there are not more than fifty thousand people today." Just

about that many workers would have been needed to assemble Nan Madol's four

or five million basalt logs in approximately twenty years.

Today, Pohnpeians lay little claim to the archaeological site outsiders find so

awe-inspiring. Science magazine reports, "The natives have no tradition

touching the quarry, who hewed the stone, when it was done, or why the work

ceased." They mostly avoid the place as evil and dangerous, where visitors after

dark were known to have been killed by some mysterious power. Indeed, the

islanders appear to have always considered it taboo, at least into the late

nineteenth century. More than 100 years later, a few local guides are willing to escort outsiders to the site, but never after dark. According to Ballinger, "Present

Ponapeans and their preceding generations have demonstrated no skill, or even

interest, in any kind of stone construction. The building of the city demanded

considerable engineering knowledge," which the indigenous residents have

never demonstrated. "I had to use all my powers of persuasion even to find two

boys to take me over to Nan Madol every day," complained the famous "ancient

astronaut" theorist Erich von Daniken, when he visited Pohnpei in the early

1970s. Citing the thousands of work hours, complex organization, and well-

directed labor required to quarry, transport, and erect 250 million tons of basalt,

a U.S. Department of the Interior report stated, "The unwritten history of Ponape

indicates that Nan Madol was constructed by or under the direction of people not

native to the island of Ponape." Von Daniken dismissed the modern natives as

"poor and incurably lazy and [with] no interest in business." William Churchill,

an early-twentieth-century American ethnologist at Pohnpei, concluded that the

prehistoric city was "utterly beyond the present capacity of the islanders." He

echoed the sentiments of the ship's surgeon of the Lambton, a British cutter that

anchored at the island in 1836. Dr. Campbell concluded that Nan Madol was

"the work of a race of men far surpassing the present generation, over whose

memory many ages have rolled, and whose history oblivion has shaded forever,

whose greatness and whose power can only now be traced from the scattered

remains of the structures they have reared, which now wave with evergreens

over the ashes of their departed glory, leaving to posterity the pleasure of

speculation and conjecture."

To be sure, the islanders' own traditions suggest as much. They recount that

seventeen men and women who arrived from a land far to the south created

Pohnpei by piling rocks upon the local coral reef. This work accomplished, the

inhabitants—mixed offspring of natives and newcomers—descended from these

first inhabitants. Over time, their numbers multiplied, but they lived in perpetual

anarchy. Much later, riding in a "large canoe," the twin brothers Olisihpa and

Olsohpa arrived from a different homeland in the west, remembered as Katau

Peidi. When this Motherland, known by many different names to various Pacific

Islanders, was referred to as Kanamwayso, its myth depicted a splendid kingdom

from which a people of great power very long ago sailed throughout the Pacific.

Falling stars and earthquakes were responsible for setting Kanamwayso aflame

and dropping it to the bottom of the ocean, where it is still inhabited by the

spirits of those who perished in the cataclysm, who preside over the ghosts of all

those who die at sea.

Olisihpa and Olsohpa were sorcerers, wise and holy men, and very tall. They

first landed on the northern end of Pohnpei but found the geography there

somehow unsuited to their purposes. Three times more they tried to establish

themselves along the east coast—at the summit of Net Mountain,

Nankopworemen, and U, where the supposed remains of these failed attempts

are still pointed out by local guides.

But each location failed some predetermined requirement. At last, after a

careful search, the perfect site was found at Sounahleng, a reef at Temwen

Island, upon which Olisihpa and Olsohpa built Nan Madol with the aid of a

"flying dragon." After it cut through the coral, dredging the canals, the twin

sorcerers levitated the ponderous basalt logs through the air, piling them to a

great height, and fitted them neatly into place. The work took only a single day

to complete. Thereafter, Nan Madol became a sacred city and administrative

center, from which the brothers brought government and social order to Pohnpei.

They ruled together for many years, until Olisihpa died of old age, and Olsohpa

assumed sole power as the first Saudeleur, or lord of Deleur, an early name for

the island. He married a local woman, from whom he sired twelve generations of

Saudeleurs, who continued to rule wisely and peacefully until the arrival of the

ancestors of the modern Pohnpeians.

They were led by a warrior chief from the south, Isokelekel, who killed

Saudemwohl, the last of the Saudeleurs. His was an easy victory, because the

lords of Deleur never concerned themselves with military affairs. Isokelekel's

line endured through the centuries into the modern era, despite years of

occupation by foreign powers, until shortly before Pohnpei became first part and

then capital of the independent Federated States of Micronesia, in 1984. Samuel

Hadley was the last Nahnmwarki to assume the title, in 1986.

Something of this mythic version of Nan Madol's origins came to light

during 1928, when Japanese archaeologists excavated human skeletal remains

near several prehistoric sites on Pohnpei. While the bones numbered only a few

dozen pieces and were incomplete and in poor condition, enough survived to

show that they belonged to people unlike the indigenous islanders. Their ancient

predecessors were far taller and more robust. Discovery of these anomalous

skeletal fragments was supported by surviving evidence. The men of Pohnpei

still make and use a kind of throwing spear they claim as an inheritance from the

Saudeleurs of long ago. While Polynesians and other Micronesians traditionally

employ spears five to seven feet long, the Pohnpei spear is a unique twelve feet,

suggesting the tall descendants of Olisihpa and Olsohpa.Olisihpa and Olsohpa were sorcerers, wise and holy men, and very tall. They