In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

41 Histories of the Before Lelu, Nan Madol, and Deep Time David Hanlon From the “Sea of Little Lands” to “Our Sea of Islands” During his end-of-century tour through what he called the “sea of little lands,” the British anthropologist F. W. Christian (1899a) visited Nan Madol on the island of Pohnpei in the Eastern Caroline group of the larger Micronesian geographical area. In three separate visits to the ruins in March of 1895, Christian surveyed the entire site, made maps, and took photographs of the larger, more prominent islets of Nan Dauwas and Pahn Kadira; he also conducted excavations of several tombs on Nan Dauwas, from which he took a substantial collection of beads and shell burial goods. Christian supplemented his description of Nan Madol with selective, self-serving, and liberally interpretive accounts of Pohnpeian traditions concerning the site. Despite an avowedly scientific posture, Christian’s ideas reflected the late nineteenth century’s essentially racialist—often racist—approach to issues involving the origins and migrations of Pacific peoples. Christian held Pohnpei’s settlement to be the result of separate waves of migration, most of which had moved eastward from the Malay archipelago beginning some one thousand years ago. He described Pohnpeians as a branch of a widely dispersed Malay family that linked the inhabitants of the Caroline Islands with the people of Formosa, Borneo, the Philippines, and the Marianas. According to Christian, a later party of Japanese migrants sweeping down upon the island from the northwest proved the most prominent and influential of the island’s settler groups. It was they, argued Christian, who were most responsible for the building of Nan Madol. The upward sweep of the junction of the northern and western walls of Nan Dauwas provided concrete testament, believed Christian, to this Japanese influence. Christian saw only degeneration and decline in the history that followed Nan Madol’s construction. A centuries-old pattern of racial mixing had diluted the ingenuity and talents of Nan Madol’s builders. Christian held contemporary Pohnpeians and indeed all Caroline Islanders to be a “strange apathetic folk, with all of the Malay naivete, and alas! some of the Malay treachery—in a word endowed with all of the strange power and strength and equally strange weaknesses and limitations of the Malay” (Christian 1899b: 288). Christian read a similar history into the ruins of Lelu (also spelled Leluh) on Kosrae, which he visited the following year. 42 | Histories of the Before The similarity between the two sites struck Christian. While not as elaborately constructed as Nan Madol, Lelu, wrote Christian, possessed a “rude and massive grandeur” of its own (Christian 1899a: 157). He drew a partial map of the ruins that centered on the compound of Kinyeir Fulat, but he carried out no excavations. He did, however, develop a theory on the identity of the builders of Lelu that mirrored his explanation of Nan Madol’s origins. Lelu, he argued, was settled by Japanese from either a wrecked junk or from one of the early trading vessels that plied the Pacific from the port of Nagasaki before the Tokugawa interdicted such voyaging in 1640. Christian supported his theory with reference to more contemporary drift voyages and shipwrecks from Japan, alleged Kosraean legends that spoke of a foreign race of builders who came on ships from the northwest, and parallel accounts from Pohnpei that spoke of contact between the two islands. Christian’s writings represent an older, decidedly colonial archaeology that sought to make evolutionary sense of Lelu and Nan Madol. Like those before him and after him, he read his times, his prejudices, his politics, and his moral values into the ruins. In so doing, he appropriated science to the cause of colonialism. There was imperial opportunity in the gap between the magnificence of the ruins and the allegedly demoralized , impoverished, racially diluted descendants of those who built them. Science would close this gap by replacing the silences with explanations, while colonialism arrested the social decline with development programs and civilizing projects. Lelu, Nan Madol, and sites like them were manipulated to serve as powerful symbols that justified the colonization of the Pacific and its people. I use Christian’s accounts as a vehicle for the reconsideration of the historical relationship or links between Lelu and Nan Madol. Borrowing from Greg Dening’s (2004) concept of deep time, I write of the ways in which archaeology might again be history, and in support of the project that would relax if...

Share