Mauna Kea

The Adze Makers of Mauna Kea
by Kenneth P. Emory
Paradise of the Pacific
April 1938, v50 n4

In the bare and silent regions where Mauna Kea rises above the trade-wind clouds, thick ledges of compact basalt, warmed through the day by their southern exposure, follow the 12,500 foot contour for several miles.

Before canvas sails formed white puffs on the sea far below, bringing to these shores the iron which took the place of the hard stone of the Hawaiian cutting tools, a maker of stone adzes wandering into this region must have been driven by the penetrating wind to seek shelter under the ledges.

Here he would have found natural caves large enough to shelter himself and several companions. Building a wall to deflect the wind, he would have observed that the loose stones which lay about in such abundance were mostly in thin pieces such as he had sought far and wide when he had occasion to replace a broken adz or make a new one for exchange purposes.

From the time of their discovery until the coming of the white man these ledges of compact basalt on Mauna Kea, shedding under the action of nightly frost an excellent grade of fine-grained basalt in a most convenient form for working, drew adz makers into this solitude. The number of generations this went on can only be guessed by the immense quantity of chipped stone.

When the air is clear and still at this altitude, words spoken in an ordinary tone are audible for several hundred yards. How the air must have rung with the blows of the hammer stones and the clink of broken pieces of bell-like rock sliding down the talus slopes of flakes!

A person passing by on an August day in the year 1750 would probably have heard halloing across from one work shop to another and, if he had come close enough, the banter and laughter with which the Hawaiians made light any tedious task.

Visiting this region in the summer of 1937, we located seven caves, and seven shelters formed by the overhanging of bluffs and protected from the wind by stone walls erected by the ancient Hawaiians.

Here the adze makers turned out adzes in the rough, that is, finished except for grinding and polishing. Alongside the present main trail from Humuula to the summit cones is located the most important of the work shops known as Ke-ana-ka-ko‘i (The cave of the adzes). The chips and unfinished adzes at this site cover an area of roughly fifty feet long by twenty feet broad, and the thickest part of the pile rises approximately ten feet above the sloping ground. Some of the other piles are nearly as large.

Nowhere else in Polynesia are there such accumulations of chips and rejects. So far as I am aware, these are the largest, so far recorded, anywhere in the world. Several hundred nearly finished adzes ranging from two to twelve inches in length, and a few chisels, lay on the pile of chips at Ke-ana-ka-ko‘i site.

The ordinary discoidal hammer-stones, which we saw scattered about, were not more numerous than spherical stones of the same vesicular basalt, flattened slightly on one side. These spherical stones puzzled us until we discovered that a number of the rejected adzes had been smoothed and shaped by pecking so as to be gripped comfortably in the hand.

We figured that these shaped rejects must have been gripped in the left hand like a stone chisel, one end placed on a stone block to be chipped, and the other end struck a smart blow with the flat face of the spherical stone mallet held in the right hand. Such a method has not before been described but no other has been suggested which would explain these two tools certainly employed in the manufacture of the adzes. The use of the mallet-stone and of the chisel-stone, would be effective in the first rough chipping of a large block, but the discoidal hammer-stone would be necessary for the final chipping.

Large slabs and blocks of stone had been carried to the work shops from the quarries nearby. The quarries are simply places along the ledges of hard rock where quantities of slabs have been broken off by the scraping of the glacier which once covered Mauna Kea and by the freezing of water penetrating into cracks. There is evidence that the Hawaiians broke some of the stone from the bluffs themselves but generally they simply broke loose slabs into pieces to be carried to the work shops. Acres of ground are strewn with the dark blue, freshly broken rock contrasting with the dull grown surface of the weathered stone.

In many places, the rock of the ledges is quite reddish, owing to the oxidation of its iron minerals, and this has led to the supposition that the Hawaiian built fires against the bluffs to split off the stone. But this redness is equally marked on inaccessible parts of the ledges, and is therefore due to weathering.

The floors of the caves and shelters contain grass-padding and some fragments of sea shells, but no accumulation of shells or bones such as would indicate use as living quarters. On calm nights the temperature drops well below freezing. On rainy and windy nights, water drips through the roofs of the caves. During the winter months, snow frequently covers the ground, and the bitterly cold winds sweeping over the work shops would be unendurable to the workers. In two hours of easy walking one may reach the work shops from timber line.

So it is my conviction that the adz makers lived at warmer altitudes, walking daily to their work during favorable weather in the summer months.

In the immediate vicinity of the work shops and quarries we discovered shrines consisting of single upright stones, and lines of upright stones planted in a low platform. Dr. T. A. Jaggar, in 1919, photographed on the west slope of Mauna Loa, an alignment of upright stones, which he called Umi's altar, near the head of the Alika lava flow, at 7,000 feet elevation. Such structures have much in common with the prehistoric altars, or shrines, of lonely Necker Island, about three hundred miles northwest of Kaua'i, and belong to the earliest type of sacred structure in the Tahitian region of Polynesia from which we are quite sure the Hawaiians came.

The adz makers, clinging to the ancient form of shrine at which to approach their patron gods, have preserved a most important link with their ancestral home. Each upright stone at a shrine probably stood for a separate god. The Hawaiian dictionary describes ‘eho as "a collection of stone gods" and this is the term which the Tuamotuans, the neighbors of the Tahitians, used to designate the alignment of upright stones on the low and narrow platform at their maraes, or sacred places.

The shrines at the adz quarries of Mauna Kea indicate that the work carried on here was in the hands of a group of skilled adz makers. They were able to create a stone-tool industry on a scale unequalled in the stone-age because of the superior social organization of the Hawaiian people.