The Samoan Pyramid

by Maya Lynch

  ‘So you’re going to find a lost pyramid, huh?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Yep.’ I said. I pointed inland. ‘That jungle holds an incredible secret.’

  ‘Ha.’

  There was a long pause. Each of us sat, lost in our own thoughts.

  Eventually Mani broke the silence.

  ‘Hey Maya, how old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m 45.’

  ‘You’re older than my mum!’

  ‘It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage.’ I said in my best Indiana Jones voice.

  ‘You should get your hair cut. It would make you look younger. You should let me cut your hair.’

  I was to learn over the following days that this was Mani’s typical line with every woman who looked a day over 40: ‘How old are you? You look old. Let me cut your hair!’ In fairness, I saw more than a few women take him up on the offer and none of them regretted it. He was a master with the scissors and the comb.

  I noticed that Jess was passed out on the mattress, so I covered her with a blanket while Mani lit yet another joint. I opened the side of the hut to change the air. The bottle of rum was half done. The ashtray was overflowing and as we stared out at the ocean, the first signs of a tropic dawn were beginning to light the sky. Where had the hours gone? We smoked a bit, but had clearly both reached our limit.

  ‘I’d best be off,’ Mani yawned, taking a long puff on the joint and then passing it to me to finish off. ‘She’ll be alright there?’ he asked, gesturing towards Jess.

  ‘Oh yeah, she’s fine,’ I said. Mani left and I lay back on the hard wood floor, my head spinning. Talking about the pyramid had brought the old questions out in my mind again, they rattled around my head as I teetered on the brink of sleep: The Lapita didn’t build pyramids. So if it wasn’t them who built Pulemelei, who was it? What had happened to the ‘now extinct breed of men’? What did he mean by that? Why don’t we know a thing about them? What a wonderful life, I thought to myself as I snuffed the joint and drifted off into a deep peaceful, Pacific-side sleep.

  5

  Noah

  When I woke up it was late morning, Jess was gone. Wincing at the sight of the half-empty rum bottle and overflowing ashtray, I hauled myself up and out of the hut. There was no-one around at the resort, so I decided to get out on the coast road and see where the fates took me. First though, I needed to shake this hangover. I stopped in at the local cafe for the most fantastic island breakfast I think anyone could ever wish to have; french toast, crispy bacon, fried bananas, all smothered in maple syrup. All of this was accompanied by the unique sounds of Samoan electro-disco-reggae, a cultural experience that any visitor to the island should consider essential. After breakfast, my belly full, feeling fully restored after the night before, I walked out to the coast road and stuck out my thumb.

  The fourth or fifth car stopped. I gratefully climbed into the passenger seat. The driver was an old Hawaiian man.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘No problem. Nainoah’s the name,’ he said, accelerating. ‘Everyone here calls me Noah.’

  We chatted as he drove. He told me that he’d moved to Savai’i in the 1960s, when Hawaii had become ‘just too crazy’ for him. He’d come here to surf the waves the island is so famous for.

  ‘They’ve got great waves Maya,’ he said, gesturing towards the ocean.‘And that’s all I need.’

  As we weaved our way into town Noah warned me to be on my best behaviour while on the island.

  ‘Listen, they want the tourists to come here, sure. But they want them to behave,’ he said. ‘That means you should spend all day on the beach, never be late for dinner and go to bed as soon as it gets dark. Alright?’ He pulled into a spot outside the market. ‘Actually, it’s not too bad when you think about it like that. But try to do much of anything else Maya, and well, you can get yourself into trouble. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘This is your best bet if you want to find a guide,’ he told me, gesturing towards the market.

  ‘Okay thanks,’ I got out of the car, his warning still ringing in my ears.

  ‘If you meet me here at five,’ he said, leaning out of the window, ‘I’ll take you back. If you’re not here bang on five, I’ll figure you went on ahead okay?’

  ‘Okay, great, thanks!’

  ‘Take care Maya,’ he called out as he drove the car away from the kerb.

  Never be late for dinner. You don’t have to tell me twice, I thought to myself.

  All afternoon I wandered up and down the narrow aisles of the market, drifting with the scent of incense into the back streets, baking in the heat. I asked shopkeepers, street-vendors and market stall holders if they knew someone that could be my guide to the pyramid, but I just hit dead end after dead end. It quickly became frustrating - I was only going to be on the island for one week, I had to get into the jungle and get back out and time was against me. I hadn’t expected it to be this hard.

  I changed tack. Over the following days I passed the time by taking in some sights, hoping to meet someone who would agree to act as my guide. I visited the house of the rocks at Falealupo on the north west coast of Savai’i. A great lava cave where hundreds of men and women once lived underground, and the place where the legends say your spirit passes through on its way to the afterlife. I went to Paia Dwarf’s cave at Gaga'emauga, where a trickster dwarf is reputed to have lived many hundreds of years ago. I had no problem finding people willing to show me these attractions, which were all along the coast road, but nobody wanted to venture into the jungle. It was the strangest thing. I realised that people were making excuses not to take me. I could sense that they were scared. Scared (it seemed to me, at least) beyond reason. What was going on?

  I’ve since learned an old Samoan proverb:

  'E mana’o I le vao, ae, fefe I le aitu'

  —We want the forest, yet fear the spirits.

  It became clear pretty quickly that no one on Savai’i wanted to talk to me about the pyramid at Pulemelei. In fact, it was a real conversation killer. The people I met, young and old, were happy to discuss just about anything, but when I mentioned the pyramid people either told me that they had never heard of it, or just clammed up. When I persisted, the people who would speak to me about the pyramid were extremely forceful in their opposition. I was repeatedly given an intriguing theory that whatever was discovered by archeologists at Pulemelei would upset the ‘Fa’a Samoa’ - the traditional balance of Samoan society.

  I wondered about the implications of this being true. How could the pyramid be a threat to Samoan traditions? Perhaps the source of the strongest opposition to exploring Pulemelei was a clue to answering that question. A trend had emerged: by far the most vehement of the anti-Pulemelei people I spoke to were churchgoers.

  In case you aren’t aware, Samoa, along with many cultures that have been on the receiving end of European colonialism, is highly christianised. Growing up on the west coast of Scotland had taught me quite a bit about extreme christian devotees, but I had never encountered anything quite like what I found in Samoa. I had an Irish Catholic grandmother who went to mass every day, twice a day, seven days a week, every week for her entire life, but in terms of dedication even she had nothing on some of the christians I met on Savai’i.

  One afternoon, while out on the hunt for a guide, I saw an old wooden shack that looked like it could be a community centre and decided to try my luck inside. I made my way through a large wooden door with blue paint peeling off it in large flakes. Inside, I saw a group of elderly Samoan ladies. They were sat around a trestle table, dressed up in pretty floral dresses and sun bonnets. The women turned in unison to look at me. Nice hats, faces like thunder.

  ‘Um, hi! I’m looking to find someone who can take me to Pulemelei,’ I said. Big mistake. The words had barely left my lips by the time a sturdy Samoan grandmother had sprung from her chair, stomped across the room and grabbed me by the scruff. Before I could react, she’d lifted me almost right of
f my feet. ‘Demon,’ she muttered. ‘Demon. Demon!’ She threw me back out the door into the street. The door slammed.

  I stood in stunned silence for a few seconds. ‘…Far out.’ I said to myself in amazement, smoothing my ruffled clothes. ‘Far-fucking-out…!’ I laughed quietly and turned back to the street, shaking my head. What was I getting myself into?

  The reaction of this formidable grandma was extreme, but by that point, not completely unexpected. Every church-goer I met was dead against me, or anyone else for that matter, going to the pyramid. The most typical argument was that the site was pre-christian, and therefore must be demonic. I was stunned.

  Helene Martinson Wallin, a Swedish archaeologist, reported in 2006 that when she was running the research program at Pulemelei arguments, disputes and fights about the pyramid were commonplace on the island. Someone even had their house burned down over it.

  I was immediately suspicious of the origins of this fanatical christian opposition to acknowledging Pulemelei. Religion, in my experience, was often co-opted as a potent tool of control. Who was it that had originally convinced the Christians that this piece of Samoa’s history was inherently evil? Why? One thing was for sure, the superstition around the ancient site was deeply ingrained. It had even seeped into the deepest levels of Samoan folklore. Pulemelei had become tapu.

  'Tapu’ means forbidden. But here on Savai'i it means more than that. Here tapu means magically, supernaturally, even demonically forbidden. And when I tell you that tapu is the root of the English word 'taboo' you can begin to get a feeling for what I’m talking about. A lone female Scottish adventurer wanting to explore a site that was known to be ‘tapu’ was sure to face a monumental uphill struggle.

  Once declared tapu, a place is no longer considered part of the natural realm. It descends into another dimension, where strong supernatural powers take over. A dark domain ruled by spirits and demons. The famous Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson lived out his last years in Samoa. In a letter written in the 1890s Stevenson described the tapu placed on an abandoned house.

  ‘…Such ruins are tapu in the strictest sense; no native must approach them; they have become outposts of the kingdom of the grave…their feet should leave untrod these hearthstones of their fathers…The sanction of the tapu is superstitious; and the punishment of infraction either a wasting or a deadly sickness. A slow disease…’3

  In another of Stevenson’s letters he tells the story of a young woman he saw breaking tapu who then ‘…instantly sickened, and died in the two days of simple terror.’4

  In Samoa tapu carries with it a malevolent threat. Violation of tapu will result in supernatural retribution. Retribution exacted on the person breaking the tapu and retribution on anyone that choses to help them.5

  The tapu curse on Pulemelei remains in place.

  6

  The History of the History

  In many ways I could understand the resistance I came up against. European explorers, missionaries, archaeologists and anthropologists - people who looked a lot like me, had exacted a terrible toll on almost every island in the Pacific. The more I had learned about the history of the pacific the more clearly I could see the story behind the story, I guess you could call it ‘the history of the history’ of the Pacific.

  The islands scattered throughout the Polynesia are tiny and the distances between them can seem almost endless. But when the first European explorers entered this immense sea in the 1500s, they found that almost all of the islands, more than ten thousand of them, were already discovered and settled.

  The explorer Thor Heyerdahl describes the situation the early European explorers found when they arrived in the Pacific in his book Kon Tiki: “When the first Europeans at last ventured to cross this greatest of all oceans, they discovered to their amazement that right out in the midst of it lay a number of small mountainous islands and flat coral reefs, isolated from each other and from the world in general by vast areas of sea. And every single one of these islands was already inhabited by people who had come there before them-tall handsome people who met them on the beach with dogs and pigs and fowls. Where had they come from? They talked a language which no other people knew. And the men of our race, who boldly called themselves the discoverers of the islands, found cultivated fields, and villages with temples and huts, on every single habitable island. On some islands, indeed, they found old pyramids, paved roads and carved stone statues as high as a four-storey house in Europe. But the explanation of the whole mystery was lacking. Who were these people, and where did they come from?”6

  The European explorers became obsessed with answering this question; where had the Polynesian people come from? It became a question that they, rather problematically, referred to as ‘the Polynesian problem’. What the explorers found in the Pacific was evidence of an ancient megalithic culture. A culture with a shared language and a shared cosmology. Evidence, perhaps, of a once-great ocean empire. But the ‘problem’ for the early European explorers was that this was too much for them to accept. There simply couldn’t have been a lost Polynesian empire, it was not an acceptable idea to the colonial mindset. The only palatable explanation for the European explorers was that the Polynesian people had entered the Pacific with their culture already fully formed. Perhaps an offshoot of a great caucasian culture, but one which had now descended into savagery? Yes, that sounded better. The Europeans thought that the Polynesians had probably entered the Pacific by accident, perhaps lost on a boat, having drifted off course. The idea that an empire could have emerged, essentially independent from outside influence, and developed its culture ‘at sea’ was completely implausible to them.

  After the explorers came the researchers. These early researchers assumed that the Pacific they saw in front of them was the same as it had ever been, unchanged and never greater than the day they arrived. Patrick Vinton Kirch discussed this viewpoint in his book ‘On the Road of the Winds: An archeological History of the Pacific Islands before European contact.’

  “Underpinning this bold but erroneous statement was the unquestioned rejection of any in situ cultural change or development in Pacific Island cultures…[in the eyes of the researchers] All was static and timeless in Oceania; truly these were a ‘people without history.”7

  The early researchers were enamoured with Darwin’s theory of evolution, but their interpretation of the theory was quite different to the one we have today. Right up until the end of the second World War, Darwin’s theories were used to support the racist idea that there was a natural hierarchy of man. A hierarchy that put Englishmen at the very top and Australian Aborigines at the very bottom. And so the early researchers were only interested in developing classifications for the people they met on the islands in order to place them somewhere on the scale between English and Aboriginal. They set about measuring the size of people’s heads, and the distances between their eyes in order to form some classification for the people they met on the islands.

  This European desire to classify humanity as though collecting butterflies in a case was nothing new. In 1831 The French explorer James Dumont d'Urville categorised the entire Pacific ocean into three regions; ‘Polynesia’, from the Greek meaning ‘many islands’, ‘Micronesia’ meaning ‘little islands’ and ‘Melanesia’ meaning ‘black islands’. The notion that the Pacific could be split in this way was based entirely on the way people looked and not on any real historical or cultural boundaries.

  The oral histories of the Pacific speak about an interconnected ocean empire, a sea faring culture, traders who were adept in two-way voyaging between the islands. But in the early days of European contact the researchers didn’t want to listen to the oral histories, they didn’t even want to dig for archeological remains. Instead, they set about making wild assumptions about what lay beneath the ground. Ralph Linton, typical of the early researchers, was working in the Marquesas islands in the early 1900s when he reported that the islands “…offer few opportunities for archeological research
…so far as we know no kitchen middens or shell heaps exist in the islands.”8

  Linton made this assessment without ever having put a spade in the ground. Decades later the Marquesas would offer up one of the richest archeological records in the whole of Polynesia. Something Linton could have discovered, had he only decided to look. At the beginning of the 20th century the researchers’ narrow vision blinded them to the fact that they were faced with the remains of a once great ocean empire, an empire that had already played out out its dramatic trajectory of rise and fall, long before the first Europeans stumbled into the Pacific. Dr Henry Gibbons of the University of the South Pacific said it best when he remarked that the efforts of those early researchers might have been “…somewhat akin to the efforts of someone who arrives in time for the second act of a play, and then attempts to work out the plot without even realising the first act has already taken place.”9

  The evidence was right in front of them. But they simply hadn’t allowed themselves to see it. The reports that the early researchers sent home were not only bad science, they were dangerous, because they were used to legitimise European imperialism in the Pacific; perpetuating the myth of Europeans as the ‘protectors’ of the ‘savage races.’ A protection that has cost the Pacific islanders dearly.

  In 1950, at the end of the second world war, the United Nations declared all theories of race to be unscientific and prohibited their practice. With that began what archeologists call ‘the modern era’. But things didn’t change overnight. Around about the same time as the archeologists were uncovering evidence of the Lapita pottery in the Pacific, another branch of science was trying to answer another question: ‘Where did the Polynesian people come from?’ When these two branches of science collided, well, let’s just say, it wasn’t pretty. Enter the linguists.