4 A Great Discovery on Huahine

Henri Derien, a young friend of Marguerite Thuret Emory from Maeva Village, in front of a large petroglyph depicting a canoe, at Marae Rauhuru. Huahine, 1925.

A canoe rises from the mud

A Among the remarkable discoveries you made in the Marquesas and the Society Islands were pendants made out of whale teeth. Can you describe the ways Polynesians used whales?

S The early Polynesians didn’t hunt whales, but would get teeth, bones, oil, and meat from animals that washed ashore or were grounded on reefs. They valued the meat for food, and the large, hard bones for making various tools.

A Polynesians also used whale teeth for carving.

S Yes. We believe that sperm-whale teeth in particular were quite precious to the Polynesians. In Tahiti and Hawai‘i, pendants made of whale teeth could only be worn by high-ranking chiefs. In Fiji, people made large pendants by passing a cord through holes drilled in whale teeth. In Samoa, they cut whale teeth lengthwise into long, thin pieces that were strung together along with other objects to make necklaces.

A I’ve seen those, but I didn’t know they were made of whale teeth.

S Among the most important artifacts I discovered were shaped whale-tooth pendants amid burial remains on Maupiti, in the Society Islands [Emory and Sinoto 1964]. Previously, whale-tooth pendants had only been found in Aotearoa.

A But Maupiti is about 2,ooo miles from Aotearoa!

S Yes, it is. However, according to Māori legend, the first people who journeyed to Aotearoa came from a marae called Taputapuātea, at Opoa, on Ra‘iātea, another one of the Society Islands. When this Māori pendant was discovered, we finally had material evidence of a cultural connection between the Society Islands and Aotearoa. I should mention that some archaeologists in Aotearoa don’t accept this evidence as conclusive.

A Could you do radiocarbon dating on the pendants?

S We could, but the pendants are from burials and we do not want to desecrate or damage them. However, we obtained a radiocarbon date from a hearth that we believe belongs to the same period: about ad 830. In May 1972 we made even more important discoveries at the construction site of the Hotel Bali Hai on Huahine, at Vaito‘otia, near the town of Fare [Sinoto 1979]. I was restoring an ancient meetinghouse at another site when I heard that workers at the Maeva Village Bali Hai Hotel site had found many large bones. I thought they might be whalebones, so I went there the next morning to see. The hotel architect, Richard Soupene, notified me and said, “When we saw the bones, some of them didn’t look natural; and the objects looked man-made.” He showed me a whalebone patu, a type of short hand-club. I immediately realized I had come upon something very significant: until then, patu were known to exist only in Aotearoa.

The hotel site was located between the airport and Fare, the capital. The area is swampy and has brackish pools. I passed by it when I first visited the island in 1962, on my way to Maeva Village. At that time, I was bicycling along the coast, looking for fishhooks. The shore has a lot of coral and debris, and there’s a lagoon filled with sand and debris, on the Maeva side. In 1962, I didn’t pay much attention to the area because it didn’t seem to be a very habitable place.

A Then, to your surprise, you discovered something there after all.

S When I saw the artifacts in May 1972, I sent an urgent request to the National Geographic Society for funds to conduct research. I began returning to Huahine annually, starting in 1973, spending an average of about two months each time. In August of 1973, I began test excavations to confirm that there were enough cultural layers intact to begin an archaeological dig. Soon, a few small whalebone artifacts were recovered, confirming the potential for more discoveries. I...