 Aloha, awingala. This is Hawaii is my mainland and I'm Kauai Lucas. Archeo astronomy is the study of how people in the past have understood sky phenomena, ways they've used these phenomena and what role the heavens played in their cultures. Archeo astronomy studies the symbolically rich cultural interpretations of sky phenomena, not just the numbers and and lines. Today Martha Noyes is my guest to talk about Hawaiian Archeo astronomy at Kukani Loko, a site in central Oahu as a way of setting the context for understanding current events like the controversy over building the 30-meter telescope on Mauna Kea, for instance. While a deep understanding of Hawaiian cosmogony is not really doable in 20 minutes, we can grasp the foundation. Aloha Kaua, Martha. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. So you, this has been a 12-year journey of exploration and discovery. It's been the most astonishing experience I've ever had. Obviously I'm not young. I've had many teachers over the years. Never have I had as amazing a teacher as Kukani Loko. Okay, well tell us a little, just a little, a little bit about how you started there. Yes, well. And then we'll talk about why it's so important. Okay. I knew only a little about Kukani Loko. I knew what everybody knows, where it is, that it was the royal birthing site, that it was famous, and that it mattered. I also did know that it was a Kani tradition site, which meant it had a relationship with the sun. I quickly learned that it had a relationship to the sunrise and sunset at the equinoxes. There were specific places in the landscape, Ka'au Makua and Mauna Ka'ala, where the sun rose or set on the two equinoxes. But that was about it. And how did you know that? We'll just take this one specific stick to kind of tie it into the landscape. Okay, so. That was somewhat general knowledge among people closely tied to Kukani Loko. Like Tom Lanchenko, of course, and his sister, Jolin Kalimapau. Also my nephew, Mahia Keale, or Keale Kupuna, and some others. So it was knowledge that's been passed down. People know that. And it's knowledge that is visually recreatable or observable every year, provided that the koalas don't have cloud cover, but they usually do. But still, you can always see the sunset over Ka'ala. Okay. So people knew that on the equinoxes, if you were at Kukani Loko, that's where it was. Exactly. And somehow there was also an orientation at Kukani Loko? Yes, I didn't know that right away. But once I had asked some Kupuna if they thought it would be okay or worthwhile for me to start investigating the astronomy there. And they said, yes. That was one of the first things I saw. I had a map, a survey map or a site plan that archaeologists had done showing the layout of the stones. And looking at that, I, whoa, I can see that it's aiming at the northern, north west, the setting of the June Solstice Sun. I checked it further and sure enough, the site at one end aims at the December Solstice Sunrise at Pu'u Kamana. And on the other end, to the June Solstice Sunset over Kamana Nui. And Kamana Nui is, is right there at that, there's an area there around Kukani Loko, which is called Kamana Nui. Yes, it, no, it's closer to Ka'ana. So it passes over there. There are more landscape markers closer even than that. But it was an interesting juxtaposition of Kamana for December and Kamana Nui for June, indicating a probable relationship of importance. So you were studying the Hawaiian names of heavenly bodies and traditions associated with them. Yes. And, and then somehow tying that into what you saw on the ground. And we have a, we have a, we have that site map or a site map that is a little rough, but we get the idea. And that'll pop up here. Yeah. So this map has is corrected for magnetic north, which means it's slightly off north south, slightly off east west, but basically a line going across from the far right to the far left at the center of the site crosses through the Pico stone and the birthstone. So it connects those two stones to one another. And in the, in the image behind us, we see those stones. Yes. The Pico stone is the stone with the serrations. Okay. And behind you is the birthstone. Okay. Way over there. There you go. There we go. Okay. And they are in an east west relationship. So extending that relationship to Fuukau Makua and the Equinox sunrise goes through those two stones and all the way over to Mauna Kaala at the western or 270 degrees away. So this is, this is a big deal because the west is origin. That's the region of Hawaiian origins. It's the region of ancestry. It and that makes it the reason region of lineage of genealogy, which comes into play with the stars and with birth. And with birth and with absolutely. Absolutely. Yes. The child born at that stone inherits all of that that is represented in that east west line. So as we were trying to having our little discussion prior to this and found ourselves hopping between different different disciplines in the western sense. It was such a good reminder of how our our training has shaped the ways in which we think. And so the exploration of phenomena and tying it into cultural practices, as well as understanding in a completely different system. Can you talk about that? Yes. It was fascinating. It was exciting. It is still fascinating and still exciting to understand what I was seeing. I mean I had data. But data to me, it didn't, what was it without context? But in order to understand context, I had to spend time trying to understand what a dog meant in pre-contact way. What was it symbolically? What was it literally? Flowers, laze, piercing. What did that mean to pierce? Connecting. What did that mean to be connected? What was an opposite? What was a union? All of these things. What was a female deity? And how was she unlike a male deity and vice versa? There wasn't anything that wasn't involved, cordage. I had to learn about the twisting of bits of cord to make cordage. About canoes. It was all part of what we would call archaeoastronomy or cultural astronomy. You can't take one apart. You can't take one strand out of the weaving and still have a mat. And so when people talk about the native Hawaiian religion, for instance, that's a very difficult concept to cut off from the other kinds of understanding as you've just explained, right? Because it was not separate. It's not divisible if Haumea is the star Aldebaran and she is a goddess of birth. She is the wife of many, the mother of many. She is also Papa. Papa took the name Haumea when she left Waqia. She is also associated with the breadfruit tree, but a specific kind of breadfruit tree, the low-growing spreading breadfruit tree. How do you make that religion and not science or not medicine or not astronomy? And then if you name the landscape for her, how do you make it not geography? It's a conundrum. It is a tea. Western science has been doing its utmost for the last couple hundred years, however. Yes, and it has taught us many of us well. It has, and then we have to go and teach ourselves. Right, right. So that's basically what you've been doing. So we're going to take a break in a minute and then when we come back, I'm wanting you to explain how some of these systems arise from the land and are translated to broader contexts of understanding. Okay, sure. Thanks. We'll be right back. Hi, I'm Cheryl Crozier-Garcia. I'm the host of Working Together on Think Tech Hawaii. It's a program where we discuss the impact of change on workers, employers, and the economy. So join us every other Tuesday from 4 o'clock to 4.30. We're live in the studio on Working Together in Think Tech Hawaii. Take care. See you soon. Bye. Aloha. I'm State Senator Russell Ruderman. I represent the Puna and Kau district on the Big Island and the host of Ruderman Roundtable. We're here on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 2 p.m. You can join us at thinktechhawaii.com. You can find a link there to a page where you can see past episodes, and we talk here about good government, environmental issues, and issues of the day facing the state of Hawaii. I'm Russell Ruderman. Please join us for the Ruderman Roundtable. Mahalo. Aloha. Welcome back to Hawaii is my mainland. I'm Kaui Lucas, and with me today is Martha Noyes, and we are talking about Kukaui Loko, and we are talking about the intersection of culture and science to put it in western terms. But just life, the way life was lived in pre-contact Hawaii, and using the overall umbrella term of archaeoastronomy. So Kukaui Loko, the birthing stones near Wahiowa in central Oahu, where you have spent a great deal of time, and just really deep research. So help us learn some of the systemic lessons of working in a place like that that is so heavily layered with meanings and lessons. Yes. Kukaui Loko is a very special place, obviously. And sometimes I would go out there armed with instruments, western science data stuff, and I'd get out there and I'd go, oh I don't want to, and I'd just kind of walk, and then I'd go sit down, and I wouldn't use my instruments, and I'd be there for 15 minutes or an hour or longer, and I wouldn't do anything except be there. And then I'd go home, and I'd think, oh okay. And then all of a sudden in the middle of the night I would understand something that I didn't know I needed to know, and I would jump out of bed and go to my computer and fire up maps and planetarium software, and I'd go, oh my god, that's amazing. One of those events was learning that the mountains, some of the mountains in the Waianae range, which is west of Kukaui Loko, were named for stars, not because the stars set there, but because of the evening that the stars rose, the sun set there. Wow. Yeah. That was my reaction, like, wow. So this is one of the bits of data that says the sky experts or the star experts really, really understood the relationships among celestial bodies. They knew that if the sun was here, this star was there. They knew where the architecture of the sky was at all times. This is something we don't continue to have those relationships in our mind. If Waianae is there, Taurus or Aldebaran is here, and if they're there and there, the sun is where. We don't know, but they knew. And let's talk about some of the rock formations too. We have a couple other pictures of the Kukaui Loko, and we can say, for instance, this one. Kukaui Loko has two, excuse me, the pico stone at Kukaui Loko has two of these concentric circles on it. One on the southern side of the widest part of the stone, and one on the northern side of the widest part of the stone. This one's on the southern side. You can see a pico there in that set of concentric circles, that little gouge in the center. The northern set of circles also has one. If you were to draw a line between those two central pukas, that line would be exactly true north to true south. Yeah, not from Polaris to the southern cross, because that misses true north and south, but exactly true north and true south. That, again, is not something they did casually. They knew what they were doing. It's a little bit more than that, though. The northern set of concentric circles above the widest point. The widest point represents the earth's equator. This northern set, its puca, is 20 degrees north of the line of the equator on that stone. We, Oahu, are 21 degrees north. I don't think that was an error. No, and somehow there's also a way of locating on the island places through the stones? Well, yes, astronomically through the stones, because landscape markers, places on the landscape where the stars rise or set, are named for the stars. They're named for all of the stars that the months are named for, but they're also named for dube of the big dipper and for the southern cross, and for some other stars that are not as well known as the calendar stars. Knowing where those stars are tells you where the landscape marker is. Knowing where the landscape marker is tells you its relationship to Kukani local. Explain how you came to see it as a way of recording knowledge. Because the landscape is named for the rise and set of stars and is named that way in such specificity that you know which star they're speaking of, and because the stars each have many names and those names all mean something, that information together is a library, or at least an encyclopedia. It tells us of the star's functions within the culture. It tells us... Can you give us an example? Yeah, sure. Aldebaran Haumea and Antares Lehua, who both have many other names, are two of the main stars involved in the structure and space of space and time. They do this by building a house, a celestial house. Antares is the pillar in front. Aldebaran is the pillar in back. They're equally important because even if he's the pillar in front, a single pillar isn't very good at holding up a roof beam. So it takes the pillar in back to partner to hold up the roof beam. So they structure time and space through these relationships that they have. One of the names for Antares actually says that. One of his names is Ikua, the lord of space and time. And in your book of star names, well, it's the catalog of them. It's not really star names. Can you tell us about how that came and... Yes, I knew that Hoi and stars had many names. The Pleiades aren't just Makali'i. They have other names. We tend to have learned only one name for those few stars we know. Is that because in different places in Hoi had different names for the same stars? That may play into it, I don't know, but it certainly is the case that star names referred to their functions. So if your function was fishing, calling a star called Pi, shrimp catching season, meant one thing. But if you were a navigator and it was Hoku Kelewa'a, the navigation star, and then there's much more esoteric material going on at the same time. So that the knowledge of the function of that star might be specific to one's profession, right? Talk a little bit about who would know what and how that relates to Kukani loko. Not just about everybody would know moon, the nights of the moon. They would know the months, the seasons, and the season breaks, which are very close to when the Pleiades rise, very associated with the Pleiades. They may know Venus because it's so bright. They may know other things. Other more specific profession related things were not necessarily restricted, but at the higher levels of knowledge restricted to the profession. And the greatly esoteric knowledge would have been restricted to the priestly astrologers, sky experts, the other sorts of grand intellects that would have managed this kind of knowledge. So at Kukani loko, was there a hail associated with it? Or is it absolutely kind of its own? I'm not sure hail is the word that fits what was going on there. No, it doesn't seem to be. But temple, maybe. There was certainly, beyond the birth, addition to the birth things like Kukani loko was a pu'uhonua. And as a pu'uhonua, that means that not everybody who was in the vicinity was royal. Because not everybody who needed to go to a pu'uhonua and could go or got there was royal. So there probably was some sharing of, even if it was inadvertent, knowledge. But also Kukani loko seems to have functioned as a college, as a university. The way the site is laid out and the way the stones are set up for multiple purposes, the pico stone for locating Kukani loko, for locating the stars in relation to Kukani loko, for measuring in 10-day segments the passage of the sun throughout the year and on and on. This seems to have been educational. Wow, okay. So in our last two minutes, thank you, by the way, for giving us a broad stroke. Look at, and I think anybody watching will understand that there are infinite layers of meaning to everything, and I am profoundly grateful for you for simplifying it to a point where it's, there is something to be taken from this and yet appreciating that there is, you're very much just skimming the surface. So you mentioned about your book, that if people are interested there might be some way to find it. Yes, if you want to own a hard copy, you can get it at amazon.com or at native books, but I put it on academia.edu as a PDF-free download. So I'm not doing it for money. There's nothing bad about that, but thank you for making it so widely available. That's really a great service. I so want people to be excited by this kind of work and to engage in it themselves. So in our last minute, what do you think for you is the most important thing moving forward in your relationship with this work? Sharing it, giving it away, showing people how to do it. How does one do it? The doing of it is, the physical doing of it, the data gathering is very easy. It takes a few tools, your cell phone can help you. Interpreting the data is a little more taxing, but it's also where the ecstasy, the realization, the recognition, the understanding of what an immense kind of knowledge reservoir was here is. So to those people on TripAdvisor who said, uh, not much there. I'm going to post a link to this show. Yes. Thank you, Martha. Thank you. Aloha.