The Samoan Pyramid

by Maya Lynch

  Linguistics is the branch of science concerned with language. Linguists can trace how different words travel, how they change over time and distance. And by tracing Polynesian words back to their origins, the linguists concluded that all Polynesian people shared a common ancestor, and that this shared ancestor came from Taiwan.

  At some point in the ‘modern era’ linguists and archeologists began to tie their two theories together; the pottery of the Lapita people and the language originating from Taiwan. Together the two groups of scientists came up with a theory: The potters with their explosive expansion and the people bringing the language from Taiwan must be one and the same. The Lapita potters spoke Taiwanese. The idea, simply put, was that there was one single point of origin for all Polynesian people. The Lapita potters came from Taiwan, with their culture already fully formed and basically ‘grew up’ on the tiny islands of the Pacific to become Polynesians. The scientists called this theory ‘the express train out of Taiwan’.

  It was a nice story, one that a kind of made sense, but it was based on some massive assumptions and there was no real evidence to support it. It also ran counter to the oral traditions of the Polynesian people themselves, which held that there had been all manner of people living in and voyaging on the Pacific Ocean, back and forth across the seas. These people were all of different clans and tribes with vastly different origins, not a single group like the scientists argued. Of course, the other issue with the ‘express train out of Taiwan’ theory was that it clearly wasn’t much of an ‘express train’ at all.

  Archaeologists discovered that when the Lapita people reached Samoa, their rapid expansion came to an abrupt halt and no one could explain why. The archeological record shows an almost 2,000 year long ‘pause’ between the Lapita people arriving in Samoa, some time around 800 BC, and the much later pulse of settlers out into the Polynesian triangle that marks the ‘Polynesian Diaspora’, that didn’t happen until some time around 1,000AD. To put that ‘pause’ into perspective; the Roman Empire could rise and fall three times over in the space of 2,000 years. That’s how long it is. Everything that has happened to us since the advent of the roman chariot to man landing on the moon has taken place in less than 2,000 years.

  Undeterred by any of this, the academics remained locked on the idea that Polynesian culture had arrived in the Pacific already fully formed and hadn’t changed in over 2,000 years. They were still sold on the theory that there was a single origin for all Polynesian people, and that this single origin was the Lapita potters who had emerged from Taiwan and ‘grew up’ to become Polynesians. To account for the time-lapse, they gave the theory a new name. And what was the new name the scientists came up with to account for the two thousand years of missing history? ‘The slow boat to Polynesia.’

  The academics stuck to their theory that the Lapita and the Lapita alone arrived in Samoa, waited there for 2,000 years with nothing of any note happening and then for no discernible reason left Samoa and settled every island in Polynesia. A theory which you will remember, was founded on the assumption that the Lapita spoke Taiwanese, an assumption for which there was no evidence at all.

  Now, I’m not saying the so called ‘Lapita people’ didn’t make it to Samoa, there is clear evidence that they did. And I’m not saying that some of the descendants of the Lapita people didn’t go on to settle the vast expanse of the Polynesian triangle. I’m just saying that there is no way the Lapita did it alone, without meeting and mixing with other people in the Pacific as the oral histories of the Pacific people themselves describe.

  More problems emerged; the archeologists found no evidence of the Lapita pottery in Polynesia anywhere further east than Samoa. And if you are going to use the pottery to trace the movement of the Lapita people, as the archeologists had done, then it looks like the journey from the Bismarck Archipelago, through Fiji and Tonga, ended in Samoa. Samoa was as far as the Lapita got. But the scientists decided that really wasn’t going to be a problem. They decided that maybe the Lapita people didn’t need pottery anymore. Perhaps they left their pots behind in Samoa when they moved out into the Polynesian triangle. Again, it was a good theory, one that served their bias, but it was impossible to test.

  When you really get beneath the surface of these academic theories, it becomes clear that the ‘history of the Pacific’ as told by Western academia, with its unshakable notion that Polynesian culture had arrived in the Pacific fully formed, was heavily influenced and compromised by the colonial ideology that anyone who wasn’t white simply wasn’t capable of developing a culture at sea, regardless of what their oral histories said. The scientists just brushed the problems with the ‘out of Taiwan’ theory aside; the unexplained 2,000 year long pause in Samoa and the lack of any evidence of Lapita pottery in Polynesia. And they have stuck to their guns for the last 50 years.

  Perhaps the greatest affront to logic in all of this, is the fact that 20th century academics steadfastly denied the skills of the Polynesian navigators. In order to account for just how the thousands of islands were settled, the early researchers developed theories of Polynesian settlement that depended entirely upon the ‘vagaries of the winds and currents’ rather than the skills of the Polynesian explorers themselves.

  The prevailing wisdom in the twentieth century was that the Polynesian people could only have reached the thousands of remote of islands spread throughout Polynesia by a process the academics developed, laughably called ‘accidental drift’.

  The theory went something like this; a pregnant woman was fishing off the coast of the Solomon Islands when a sudden gust of wind blew her boat out to sea. She drifted for weeks, until eventually she reached an uninhabited island. She settled there and gave birth to her baby. Then that process repeated itself again, and again and again to countless numbers of hapless sailers until all the remote islands of Polynesia were populated.

  The theory was explicitly stated in the 1950s by the New Zealand historian Andrew Sharp who put forward the argument in his book ‘Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific’ that ‘the settlement was simply the product of many accidental voyages which had moved the Polynesians slowly eastward across the Pacific and then throughout the Polynesian triangle…Distant islands could only have been discovered and settled…by the chance arrival of unintentional voyagers - who, because of storms or navigational incompetence had strayed far off course while making a short crossing between closely-spaced islands, or who, after fleeing from their home island because of famine or defeat in war, had been drifting blindly around the ocean hoping to land on an uninhabited island.’10

  As unbelievable as that sounds to us today, ‘accidental drift’ was the accepted academic wisdom of the day. The reason for this steadfast adherence to an accidental model? If the Polynesians had settled the Pacific by design, then logic dictates that they had developed the skills to navigate vast stretches of open ocean long before the Europeans had managed to do the same. This was simply unthinkable, it went against the idea of the ‘natural supremacy’ of Europeans and it would threaten the very legitimacy of the European Imperial claims of ‘protection’ over the Pacific

  ‘Accidental drift’ then, became part of conventional wisdom. And this stubborn denial of the indigenous navigational skills infected every theory about the origins of Polynesia, both the academic and the alternative. Ethnographer Elsdon Best had the Polynesian people migrate from Egypt, through India and then drifting lost in the Pacific until they reached New Zealand.

  The explorer Thor Heyerdahl set out from the coast of Peru on a balsa wood raft in order to prove that he could ‘drift’ on the currents and trade winds into Polynesia. He believed that it was simply impossible that the Polynesians had sailed from the Western Pacific, into the prevailing wind, to reach and settle Polynesia, so he offered the alternate ‘drift route’ from South America. Even James Churchward’s book ‘the Lost Continent of Mu’ had a vast continent sink and literally disappear from underneath the feet of the Polynesians, rather than allow for
any indigenous navigational skills.

  Then, in 1973 the theory of ‘accidental drift’ ran aground. Three researchers; Michael Levison - a member of the department of computer science at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Gerard Ward - a professor of human geography at the Australian National University, Canberra, and John Webb - a professor of geography and associate dean for social sciences at the University of Minnesota developed a computer simulator that detailed and tested all possible drift routes into the Pacific. Their computer model included data on sea currents, weather conditions, rain fall and prevailing winds at different times of year. They tested “accidental drift” from every direction.11

  One of their computer experiments, for example, specifically examined “the likelihood that canoes or rafts could have drifted out to Polynesia from the Galapagos [from the east]. Only 1 out of 732 drift voyages (taken via computer) from the Galapagos managed to get anywhere near Polynesia. This imaginary vessel traveled almost due west to 127 degrees 11’W, at which point all the imaginary crew expired after 182 days at sea.”12

  Levison, Ward and Webb tested millions of possible scenarios in their computer simulator. The results showed that, regardless of which direction the sailors came from, east from Peru or west from Taiwan, it was not only unlikely that the Pacific had been settled by accidental drift, it was mathematically impossible.13

  The computer model proved that the Polynesians had settled the Pacific by design. Traveling on purpose, through explicit voyages of discovery, with no certainty of finding land. And not, as the early researchers had insisted, simply carried by the vagaries of the currents and winds. It showed that the Polynesian explorers must have had a highly developed system of navigation and that they must have developed it long before the Europeans did the same. Slowly, as the academics who had proposed it died off, the theory of ‘accidental drift’ went with them. This, as with the pyramid, seemed to me to be an example of Europeans imposing their own narrative of Polynesian history and burying the truth.

  7

  A Lead?

  The morning dew slowly burned away and with it went the memory of the cool night. After days without finding a single person willing to escort me to Pulemelei, I decided that I was going to have to take matters into my own hands. If it came to it I would head into the jungle on my own. I couldn’t come all this way and not make it. But to get to Pulemelei independently, I’d need to find out exactly where in the jungle it was, drive as close to there as I could and then hike in. The first step of that plan was to hire a car, and to get that I was going to need a driver’s licence.

  I had passed my driving test when I was just seventeen and I hadn’t given the highway code as much as a second thought since. So I was more than a little nervous as I walked up to the wooden shack that served as the road licensing department on Savai’i. What tricky questions were they going to ask me? What if I couldn’t remember the road rules?

  I asked the tall, stocky guy behind the counter what a foreigner like me needed to do to get a driving licence.

  ‘Eighty tālā,’ he said. I did the calculation quickly in my head. About $50.

  ‘Okay, here you go,’ I said, handing over the money, wondering if I’d have to wait for long before my test.

  He counted out the notes. ‘Sixty, seventy, eighty tālā. Perfect, thanks. Here’s your driving licence.’

  ‘Nice!’ I was now licensed to operate a motorised vehicle on the roads of Samoa. This was the first bit of good news in days.

  I took my newly penned licence to the rental shop next door. No one was home, bar a few squawking chickens, so after a few minutes I ‘dinged’ the bell and the same huge man who'd sold me my driving licence came lumbering in through the door at the back of the shop. I couldn’t help but smile. I really loved the way things were done in Samoa.

  ‘…Car?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes please,’ I replied, trying not to laugh. I resisted the urge to ask him if he was psychic.

  ‘Fill it in,’ he said, handing me another piece of paper.

  I started scribbling down my details. As I wrote down my home address it struck me how little time I had spent there in the last year. I’d been back and forth to Egypt and had spent a lot of time there between the revolutions. In Egypt there were always dozens of people happy to take you to the pyramids, I mused.

  I handed the completed form back.

  ‘Can you please tell me how to get to Pulemelei?’ I asked, trying my luck.

  A heavy silence descended…The man pulled down his sunglasses just enough for me to see his eyes. He looked utterly furious.

  ‘Nope,’ he said. The ‘P’ was very pronounced. ‘No-PEH.’

  ‘Oh… Sorry.'

  An exchange of funds wordlessly took place. $360 later we were done. I gathered my papers and the car keys. When I looked up the man was already gone. The screen door swung closed behind him. This pyramid wasn’t making me any friends, that was for sure.

  I stopped at the little petrol station across the street from the rental place to fill up my new car with gas. From behind me I heard someone say ‘Hey, Maya! How’s it going?’ I turned round to see Noah, the old Hawaiian surfer who’d given me a lift the other day. He was wearing long black surf shorts and a black t-shirt that said ‘old guys rule’.

  ‘Nice wheels!’ he said, pointing at the little beat up Honda Civic.

  ‘Noah, good to see you!’ I said. ‘How’s it with you?’

  ‘Yeah good. I’m just heading into town. How’ve you been? Did you find that guide you were looking for in the end?’

  ‘No, no luck.’ I said.

  ‘Really? Did you give them something? Food? Money?’ As it is almost everywhere, the wheels of Samoan society spin more swiftly when greased.

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm. Okay,’ he said thoughtfully, his head nodding up and down. ‘Where are you trying to get to anyway?’

  Initially I didn’t want to tell him about the pyramid, just in case. I could see no point in scaring him off too. I liked Noah and didn’t want to piss him off. ‘I’m trying to find one of the ancient ruins, but no one is keen to take me,’ I said ambiguously.

  ‘What’s it called? Maybe I know it.’

  He seemed to know what I was talking about. I decided to throw caution to the wind. ‘Pulemelei.’ I told him, sensing that perhaps there might be some knowledge, finally, for me to get at.

  ’Oh? Wow!..Pulemelei…’ he spoke the name like the word itself was an ancient treasure, ‘I haven't heard that name in a long time. Pulemelei!’ My instincts were right, he acknowledged the pyramid like a long lost love. ‘Jesus. How did that go down at the market? I bet you were popular!’ he laughed.

  ‘Yeah, not so much.’

  ‘You know what? I tried to find that place one time,’ he said, raising his eyebrows conspiratorially.

  ‘Really? So, you know where it is?’

  Noah looked at me as though he was trying to figure out if he could trust me. A moment passed before he took a deep breath and broke the silence.

  ‘You see that mountain there?’ he pointed towards the middle of the island, covered in dense jungle. ‘That’s a volcano. Pulemelei is on that volcano.’

  No way, I thought. Was that it? It was perched up there, watching me the whole time? ‘How do I get there?’ I asked.

  ‘Seriously, it’s a tough hike in there, Maya. You’ve gotta go through the jungle,’ he said. ‘No other way. And nobody’s worked that land for fifty years, not as long I’ve been here anyway. That’s thick jungle in there, true jungle. Overgrown and solid as a rock.’

  ‘Wait, Noah. So are you telling me that you’ve been to the pyramid? You’ve actually been to Pulemelei?’

  ‘Not exactly. I looked for it for a long time, but I never did find it. As close as I got was by the old waterfall at Afa Aau. But past that I really don’t know.’ Noah’s voice trailed off. He had a wonderfully peaceful way of talking, a soft voice that somehow always s
eemed to be leading to a silent abyss of calm.

  ‘Listen, what are you doing now?’ he asked.

  ‘Right now? Nothing really.’

  ‘Meet me at the bar up the road in half and hour, there’s something I want to show you.’

  Thirty minutes later, we sat down at a table in a quiet corner of the bar. I ordered a coconut water for me and a Vailima for Noah. It was just after 10:30 am. Noah started by telling me about the history of the bar: ‘Back in the seventies an English guy called Warren used to own this place. I really liked him. I used to come here most days after work and sink a couple of Vailimas. Nothing heavy, just a few beers, a chat with Warren. The island was sweet back then, slower, if you can believe that.’

  The barman came over with our drinks and put them down on the table. He acknowledged the old Hawaiian surfer like he was part of the furniture. ‘Noah,’ he said with a jutting nod of his chin.

  We sat and drank in silence for a few minutes before he fixed me with a stare and leaned forward in his seat. In a hushed voice Noah began to relay a remarkable story. ‘Listen, I haven’t told this story in years Maya,’ he said. His eyes flicked around the room. ‘Okay… It was in ’76. This one day I come into the bar, it was about two in the afternoon, a baking hot day like today. Warren tells me that there’s this old American guy in the back room acting weird, talking to himself, kinda getting on the regulars’ nerves. He asks me to help him throw the old guy out, but when I go and at him, he’s just this sweet old grandpa sitting there and muttering. He looks kind of confused. So I say to Warren: “Hey, let me talk to the guy to see if I can find out what’s going on, get him to calm down and then maybe I can give him a ride home.” We couldn’t just throw a confused old dude out onto the street, anyway. Not in that heat, he could have died.