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Pacific Rim Rock Art with Rachel Hoerman and the Huliaupa'a Community - Rock Art 136
417 Plays8 days ago
In this week’s episode, Dr Alan speaks with historic preservation specialist and project coordinator of Huliauapa’a, Rachel Hoerman. Along with community members Andree-Michelle Conley Kapoi and her teenage twins, Anais and Oisin, who are involved in the Stewardship and Protection Plan Project for the kiʻi pōhaku at Nu'u Refuge, Kaupō, Maui, they speak about Pacific Rim rock art and heritage stewardship in Hawai’i.
Transcripts
- For rough transcripts of this episode go to https://www.archpodnet.com/rockart/136
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Transcript
Introduction and Foundation Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network. Hello out there in archaeology podcast land. This is Dr. Alan Garfinkel. I'm the president and founder of the California Rock Art Foundation. And what we do is we identify, evaluate, manage and conserve rock art both in Alta, California and in Baja, California.
00:00:21
Speaker
We conduct field trips, we have trainings, exercise, we do research, and in every way possible we try to preserve, protect, and coordinate treasures of Alta and Baja California rock art, of which there are many, and diverse. We also work closely with Native Americans and partner with them to recognize and protect sacred sites.
00:00:42
Speaker
So for more info about the fabulous California Rock Art Foundation, you can go to carockart.org. Also, i'm I'm open to give me a call, 805-312-2261. We would welcome sponsorship or underwriting, ah helping us to defray the costs of our podcasts, and also membership in California Rock Art Foundation, and of course, donations since we are a 501c3 nonprofit scientific and educational corporation. God
Dr. Rachel Herman on Hawaiian Rock Art
00:01:09
Speaker
bless everyone out there in podcast land.
00:01:16
Speaker
You're listening to The Rock Art Podcast. Join us every week for fascinating tales of rock art, adventure, and archaeology. Find our contact info in the show notes and send us your suggestions.
00:01:33
Speaker
Howdy, all you folks out there in archaeology podcast land. This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel, for the 136th episode of your rock art podcast. We are blessed and honored to have Dr. Rachel Herman from the University of Hawaii speaking with some of the descendants of the cultural resources as well, who will be speaking in blessing and prayerfully conveying their thoughts and concerns and feelings about these heritage resources. This is a very unusual and remarkable program. You don't want to miss it. Dr. Rachel, can you hear me? Aloha. Yes, I can hear you. Welcome.
00:02:23
Speaker
Thank you. So let's kick it off. How do we ah engineer the blessing and the ah introductions? Yeah, i I would defer to Andre and her children about introductions and anything else they want to share. I think it's just really whatever they feel compelled to share. yeah And I'd love to follow them if that's okay. That'd be great. Aloha. I am Andre Conley Kapoi and I am an archaeologist and an ethnographer on the island of Maui.
00:02:56
Speaker
I live in the up country region of Maui. I've been conducting archeology and anthropology here since 1989. And my husband is native Hawaiian, as are my children. And i my lineage traces back to eight generations of San Francisco. And before that, I am on both sides from County Cork, Ireland. Oh, my word. How how fantastic is that, Andre?
00:03:26
Speaker
So, and here's, I have twin 17 year olds and they're gonna both introduce themselves. Aloha mai kakou. My name is Ani Slilinoi Kanlika Pouye and I am 17 years old. I am from Maui, Hawaii and attend Kamehameha Schools Maui as a senior. I have been involved with the revitalization of NUU since I was a young girl. What began as helping my mother clear archaeological sites has now evolved into me documenting these same sites. NUUU is considered sacred as reported in historical records and ethnographic interviews. so It has always been a special place for me and my Native Hawaiian family lives there now.
Cultural Significance and Conservation of NuU
00:04:00
Speaker
Wow. And then aloha, my name is Osheem, and I'm also 17 years old and I also attend Kamehameha Schools Maui. Yeah, we've been going to Nu'u since we were kids and this project came along and I was blessed with the opportunity to go and film and hopefully create some content um for Hawaiian Island and Trust.
00:04:23
Speaker
fabulous. Would the children or Andre care to give us sort of an introductory blessing or a song or however you think it would be a possible to sort of open up our conversation in a positive way?
00:04:38
Speaker
Yeah, aloha, this is Anais again. I just wanted to offer a pule or a prayer, so if you could show your reverence and bow your heads. Eh kia kua mahalo nui for this opportunity to share our manao and speak with these scientists and anthropologists. Please watch over each and every one of us as we speak and share our manao on this topic. Mahalo nui. Amen. Thank you. Thank you so much. Dr. Rachel.
00:05:06
Speaker
And yeah, mahalo nui kakko, ohana kamle kapoe. That was beautiful mahalo. Aloha nui kakko. I'm Dr. Rachel Herman. I'm a settler who calls Kailua Oahu home, calling in from the same place. I currently trace my family roots to Eastern Europe.
00:05:23
Speaker
I want to take this space to acknowledge this pa'aina is recognized by Hawaiians as their ancestral grandmother, Papahanaumoku. I recognize that Her Majesty Queen Liliuokalani yielded the Hawaiian Kingdom and these territories under juris in protest to the United States to avoid the bloodshed of her people. I further recognize that Hawai'i remains an illegally occupied state of America.
00:05:45
Speaker
I further wish to recognize that generations of Hawaiians and their knowledge systems shape this place and its resources in sustainable ways that allows me to enjoy them today. For this, I have gratitude, and as a settler, I seek to support the varied strategies that Hawaiians are using to protect their land and communities. And with aloha and humility, I commit to dedicating time and resources to working in solidarity with them. Mahalo. Fantastic and wonderful. What a remarkable way to begin.
00:06:15
Speaker
our discussion. So Dr. Rachel, I guess we can start off with a bit of background on your most active research project. What I can do is give you kind of a background to how we all came to work together at NuU and the research project.
00:06:34
Speaker
Some background and context is that it's Nu'u Kaupo, the land of division of Kaupo and Maui. This is a ah storied cultural landscape from Mauka, upland, upland, to Makai, seaward, down to the ocean, down to the beach. And the Ki'ipohaku, the rock art, are just one fragment, just one component of this greater cultural landscape. ah And it was like so many places in Hawaii, in danger of development. And then Hawaii Land Trust was able to broker purchase of the land. And now it's under what everyone or many folks hope is permanent conservation. How big an area is this? I believe it's 90 acres total that Hawaii Land Trust is stewarding in this space. And then the place we're specifically talking about is 11 acres Makai of the road.
00:07:30
Speaker
But you know, Andre might have more insight into that because she's been working there with her Ohana far longer than I have. Andre? Yeah, prior to the Hawaiian Island Land Trust purchasing the property, it actually included more acreage on the mauka on the upland area as well. And then when Hawaiian Island Land Trust purchased the property, they just purchased the lower portion, the Mackay, the ocean side of the road property. And I think the acreage is about that. It's almost, I think, 100 acres. And then the up land division, I'm under the impression that that portion was
00:08:14
Speaker
the some of the lineal descendants of that land were able to get that portion of the land back. Fabulous. What are the cultural resources that exist on that property physically that we might see if we were to visit this place?
00:08:30
Speaker
Nu'u, the portion that we're working in, is an old fishing village, and it goes back to the pre-contact pre-contact, pre-1778. We talked to talk about sites that are pre-contact and post-contact, and pre-contact is before Captain Cook Arrival in 1778.
00:08:50
Speaker
The sites that are in the Nu'u area consists of habitation structures. There's a He'i out on the point. There's an old salt house from where they would have salt old salt pans for curing the fish. There's a fishing shrine or a fishing koa that is by the petroglyphs and pictographs. There's a huge panel of the rock art.
00:09:19
Speaker
and they consist of both petroglyphs, which are, you know, the incised pectin rock, and then there's actually pictographs which are not as common here, but they're created from mixing breadfruit sap, ulu sap, a lye, a red mineral, and kukui nut oil, and then they would do these paintings on the rocks. And so the type of rock that is exposed that has all these petroglyphs or rock art on it. It's called alla and it's also um the scientific name is it's columnar basalt. ah What is the subject matter of these pictographs and petroglyphs? Are any of these realistic or are they just mainly abstract?
00:10:06
Speaker
You have, I mean, Rachel can chime in also the petroglyphs that are there. Some of them have, there's the, my favorite one is a bird man, which is half bird and half human on the bottom. And I've actually seen the only other place, and I've been working here as an archeologist and ethnographer on Maui for 35 years and the only other place that I've seen the pictographs are up inside the crater inside Haleakala the crater and Inside there there's also a bird man that I found and those are the only two bird men that I've ever found on Maui So they have bird man. There's a whole array of arc of the petroglyphs.
00:10:53
Speaker
You know, there's some that are animals. There's the some that are depicting, I think, stories. And then you have the petroglyphs that actually there's different time frames from them. So actually some of the petroglyphs on this site actually show some lettering, which seems to be associated with when the Bible was brought into this area. It's that same type of font.
NuU Rock Art Details and Preservation Challenges
00:11:20
Speaker
And so you have these petroglyphs extending over a long period of time. What what animals are being depicted? Yeah. there Well, we found recently during fieldwork, I think Andre and her, the twins were not out when we found this, folks. But like a couple of days after you guys came out and were doing recording with us, we used D-stretch, at which is, I think in the rock art world, folks are really familiar with it.
00:11:48
Speaker
to image some paintings and we found numerous pictographs of dogs. So Elio, yep. And then there may be other animals depicted as well, or as Andrei described, there were kind of, there's these anthropomorphs or half human, half animal figures.
00:12:07
Speaker
Most of the Kiipo Haku, both the pictographs and petroglyphs, are figurative, so they're kind of representative versus realistic. However, some of them do have kind of fleshed out, rounded, more realistic bodily forms.
00:12:23
Speaker
There's lots of superposition too, which is really interesting and lots of patterning where you have a petroglyph and a pictograph and they're depicting the same thing or they're laying over each other. So there seems to be a kind of touch up or one kind of rock art made over another kind and it's the exact same form. So that you see that pattern a lot throughout. There's really these clusters.
00:12:46
Speaker
of Ki'i Pohaku on La Massif, and the clusters are fascinating because they're all really different stylistically. ah Whether or not that correlates to time, it's hard to say, but there are historical records that we have, ethnohistorical records actually, so from a local person in the 19th century saying to a group of local visitors and the Bishop Museum, so some foreign researchers in there as well, but they had a local guide.
00:13:14
Speaker
telling the local guide that, yeah, these were from when I was a child, and they were old when I was a child, and that person was really, really old. So it's probably, yeah, at least to the 18th century, but very likely before, given that and and all of the motifs, except for the text that Andre mentioned, the typescript that we call it,
00:13:34
Speaker
they don't have historical motifs mixed in them. So at other Ki'i Pohaku locations in Hawaii, places that have Ki'i Pohaku, you frequently see goats, horses, guns, ships, you know, things that show that this place was being used through time and also after foreigners came to Hawaii. But Nu is really unique in the rock art that's depicted is is all traditional looking. So these are more traditional forms. It doesn't mean that they weren't making the traditional forms in the historical era, but... Right, right. What colors are represented in the pigment? Yeah, like a rust red brown. Okay. Yeah. Interesting. just Interesting. Yeah.
00:14:24
Speaker
I know in the States, a lot of times with the weather patterns, a lot of this material either washes away or is degraded very quickly, especially the paintings. Is that an issue or no?
00:14:38
Speaker
There's definitely degradation that's occurring and Andre and her family may be able to speak to that as well because they've been going to the place and stewarding it for so long. But I can say, interestingly, the recipe that Andre mentioned, we've seen it in other places throughout Maui and also in Hawaii where but presumably it's not been tested, but presumably because it's kind of the same color, the same consistency, same looking application.
00:15:06
Speaker
And we know in some spaces, like there's a series of pictographs at the base of an intermittent stream. And people have shared, folks living next to it, that that stream has flooded three times, rushing over the Kiipohaku. Wow. Yeah, they thought for sure they would be gone and they weren't, they persisted. And they're still there. yeah yeah so that Fantastic. Well, let me let me close close out this first segment and we'll see in the flip flop gang.
00:15:37
Speaker
Welcome back, gang. It's Dr. Alan Garfinkel. We're in the second segment of ah the episode. We've got our friends here from Hawaii, Dr. Rachel Herman, and some of the individuals that have worked on a specialized project there in Hawaii that were rated to the Hawaiian Land Trust.
00:16:01
Speaker
So let's, Andre, let's hear from some of your associates here and ah learn a bit more about so what you've done and what the activities were involved in the historic preservation and conservation of cultural resources. Thank you for that. Aloha again, I'm a machine. And so our involvement in this project started months ago. I don't know. yeah But um when we were asked to go out, I believe the reason for documenting all of the petroglyphs and pictographs was because of the vandalism that has been going on down there.
Community and Youth Involvement in Preservation
00:16:39
Speaker
A lot of the rock art has been
00:16:42
Speaker
either scratched or people have created their own rock art. So we wanted to figure out a way to preserve it and also give a message to the community that go down there for camping not to vandalize. So that is actually our specialized project within this project is creating videos or like a PSA about not vandalizing the rock art.
00:17:08
Speaker
How much rock art is there either by panels or by individual elements there at this site? Yeah, there's about, I should mention that the National Park Service has land that abuts the Hawai'i Land Trust land. And so the massive, of course, does not adhere to property boundaries and it's present in both spaces. On the Hawai'i Land Trust side, there's about 125 individual Ki'i Pohaku, about 12 locus of them, or loci rather.
00:17:38
Speaker
But there are other instances of kind of more singular Ki'i Pohaku as well. And then on the National Park Service side, there's probably an additional 30 motifs, but quite a bit less than on the Hawaii Land Trust side.
00:17:53
Speaker
Andrea, I wonder if Fanias wants to speak or share anything? Please. Yes, aloha. So my name is Aniz Khanikapoy and I'm 17 and a senior at Kamehameha Schools Maui, again. I was fortunate to be invited by Dr. Scott Fisher from Hawaiian Island Land Trust and Rachel to assist with the Kiipohaku Project, which my brother said was a couple been in the works for a couple months now.
00:18:17
Speaker
which includes a documenting the rock art using video and light art technology, as well as conducting field documentation of the rock art. I was able to learn from Rachel about the basics of rock art documentation, including kilo, or observation, and actually measuring the Kiipohoku with the basic standards. I plan to pursue a college degree in anthropology, specializing in archaeology, and much of my childhood has been spent observing the changes that Nu'u has gone through. And like my brother said with the recent vandalism of the rock art, I believe that it is because of the lack of education and awareness that led to this. ah So getting the community involved and educating them is one way that we can help protect these petroglyphs. And with my so personal and spiritual ties to this place, I am honored to be included in the stewardship. Involving the next generation and the community is a crucial component of this project to me. When people learn about the history and value of these sites, they will want to protect the rock art and surrounding sites.
00:19:14
Speaker
I'm grateful to Dr. Scott Fisher, Hawaiian Island Lanches, and Rachel for valuing the youth perspective and especially one of Native Hawaiians. Having Ohana in the area emphasizes the importance and kuleana that I have to restore a document and culturally steward this sacred place or vahi pana. Mahalo. to Tell me a bit about the types of vandalism. Are we talking about scratching? Are they painted? In what way are they being vandalized? If I could learn a little bit about that.
00:19:45
Speaker
Yeah. Do you want me to chime in? Please. Sure, Andre, go for it. So I have, I've been down at, yeah as I said before, I'm an archaeologist and I have been going out to the Nu'u area for decades now. And so I've really witnessed any type of vandalism that's been happening. And honestly, there hasn't been since the time that I started going out there. Only up until like two, maybe two years ago, there was only one person that wrote on one of the panels, I think he wrote like, Tom is near. That was the only vandalism that we had. And then about, I think it was about
00:20:38
Speaker
two or three years ago there was a group of people and I know that the people that were there at that time were I think they were a group of they went down there and this never happens and I remember what the weekend that they went down and it was a really windy weekend and they were windsurfers or kite surfers and there was a petroglyph that was done by an adult that was they did a a kite surfer. And then most of the vandalism that I've seen now, which they've opened up the area to camping because Hawaiian Island Land Trust is doing this other restoration. They're taking out all the non-native species and um planting a bio shield for, I worked on this too, but it was like a paleo tsunami project with Scott Fisher. And
00:21:33
Speaker
When they have these people coming in for the weekends and camping, we've noticed in the last two years a lot of, it looks like children doing it, kind of just scratching and doing these you know really simple kind of you know you can tell they're kind of just one line of scratching and trying to make petroglyphs and so part of the project that my son was talking about that he wants to do is to create like a little video to be shown to people that are going to be camping there for the weekend and they could share it with their children
00:22:08
Speaker
of the importance of these historical sites and the laws, you know, associated with defacing any of these sites or doing, you know, destroying them or adding to them. And then we were also talking about with Rachel some type of preservation where Rachel's going and documenting all the pictographs and petroglyphs and then maybe having some type of program where people at go after people have been camping and just go check and make sure that there's no additional... Yeah, something sometimes some ah type of monitoring. Yeah, some type of monitoring for the program. Have you thought of or has it been recommended that there be some actual interpretive signage?
00:22:53
Speaker
and We have talked about it with Hilt. and There is already signage that's on a tree down there that acknowledges it's a Hawaiian space and a Hawaiian cultural landscape and asks folks to be respectful. Okay. I think some of it, yeah, it's so, but there's not.
00:23:09
Speaker
you know interpretive signages and this is you know dates and things like that. But I think it's possible, but also there's a a lot to do on this landscape to kind of steward and preserve it. So it might be lower priority. A thing too in Hawaii is that all spaces, there's there's just so much human pressure, not so much from the local community, but from tourism and visitors.
00:23:35
Speaker
So all of the places here have a lot of human pressure and visitation on them. And when there's signage, it tends to go online. It tends to increase visitation. And there may be local components to graffiti and vandalism, of course, as there are everywhere. But, you know, I've seen online like a lot of Hawaii rock art sites that are not publicly known that folks have dropped a pin on.
00:24:01
Speaker
and I've seen them vandalized through time. So there's definitely that component that I think adds some danger to the Ki'i Pohaku and some of the social networking or just the identification of the place and its photography and the sharing of that vis-a-vis location would gain additional notoriety. Okay. That's right. Or a sign that's fixed somewhere that's like, here's where this is where the rock art is in case you can't find it. Here's where the rock art is. Yeah, you can't find it.
00:24:31
Speaker
Do you want to speak more about this particular site or would you like to talk about in a broader way Plow and Borneo and what you have perhaps ah you know associated with those locations as well?
00:24:45
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I wonder, Andre and her family, I think this might be an awesome time if you were open to it, but it's okay if you're not, to kind of talk about your hopes for the future at NUU. Yes. You know, what does successful stewardship and preservation look like there? And, you know, Oshin, if the PSA is successful, what does that look like?
00:25:08
Speaker
Anais, when you're an archaeologist, what are you hoping but you know a project could be? What would Nu'u look like? I would love to discuss that. And then we could talk about other things, too, if if Andre and her family have to puka out.
00:25:22
Speaker
yeah this is Yeah, I think it's great for to talk about this. So our vision for the future is that people are respectful of these sites, first of all, and second of all, that they know the cultural significance of these sites.
00:25:39
Speaker
I feel like a lot of the locals and tourists that come here are not well educated on the subject matter. So hopefully with the video and with the constant preservation, they're educated and we can have people that visit Nu'u or who stay there overnight that they know what's going on there and they know the importance of keeping all these sites in memory and keeping them clean and well maintained.
00:26:07
Speaker
Hi, yeah, this is Anais again. So for me, my hope for Nu'u and just every cultural site here on Maui is that it just stays the way that it is. You know, I see growing up, there's a lot of places that change over time. And I like to say that ah while I was growing up, I felt like Nu'u was growing up with me. There's a lot of things that have happened in Nu'u, like the vandalism, but there's a also a lot of beautiful things that have happened. Hawaiian Island Land Trust and Dr. Scott have done a lot too.
00:26:35
Speaker
preserve not only the petroglyphs and the pictographs but the sights and the wetlands and helping the native birds thrive there and getting rid of the egret birds. So yeah, my hope is to just create a more aware, a culturally aware environment for people that are visiting and people that are going to stay there, whether they be local or tourists, and that they really just understand the history. You know, I have so much aloha for everybody. And my goal is never to keep anybody out, but to just educate and allow people to learn and use Nu'u as a space so to learn about all the cultural sites, archaeological sites, and Hawaiians as a people.
00:27:10
Speaker
So I have a question that you alluded to in your conversation. Tell us about the landscape context of this site. In other words, what made this place so significant ah environmentally, the landform, the resources, the particular aspect of the geography that may have been special?
00:27:36
Speaker
Aloha. So my kids are pointing to me. So the thing that is so special about the Nu'u and Kaupo area, it was an area that it was heavily populated. There was a larger population.
00:27:55
Speaker
earlier on in that area. And one of the things about Kalpo is that Kalpo, our island is divided in pre-contact times. They divided it into these like triangular pieces, like pie shapes of the island.
00:28:14
Speaker
We're on a vol you know a volcanic island and they cut the island in these land sections. And the area that we're in is that we're in a little triangle of Nu'u and Ahupua'a of Nu'u and the greater Moku, the district of Kalpo. The next district that is next to us was actually the thing that's significant about Kalpo is that it the other part of the island was over, it was under rule of Hawaii, the Big Island. So we were in an area where you had one part, you know, all of Maui was under one ruler and then there was a portion of it, the Hana area that was under the rule of the Big Island. And so there was a lot of warfare that happened.
00:28:58
Speaker
at Kaupo and in Nu'u and that's one important aspect of the area and another um aspect is that this was an area that was just it's a traditional fishing village and then we also have there's an ads quarry that's also on the mauka on the upland portion of this area and so You know, during earlier times, it was an important area for fishing. And then later on in historic times, Nu'u was, there's a landing there that they used to, you know, when it they were raising cattle in the area and post-contact times, they would, there's an old landing there and the clipper ships would, or the ships would be off shore and they would swim the cattle out to them. And before we had roads in that area, they would, that's how they would get the cattle out and to sell. They would swim the cattle out.
00:29:52
Speaker
Yeah. Wow. And often I think the sharks would come. ah ah Oh my word. Wow. Wow. Well, that's, that's amazing. Thank you. All right.
Dr. Herman's Research in Borneo and Palau
00:30:09
Speaker
I think we've done in the second segment and I'll close it out and the see you on the flip-flop gang.
00:30:18
Speaker
This is your host, Dr. Alan Garfinkel for the ah Rock Art Podcast. And we're talking to Rachel Herman about Maui, and but also she's going to be talking a bit about Palau and Borneo and all the issues surrounding historic preservation, cultural resource heritage values.
00:30:45
Speaker
kick it off for us, Dr. Rachel. ah Yeah, thank you. I want to say aloha, send my aloha to all of my colleagues in Sarawak and Malaysian Borneo. I did my dissertation research there from 2012 to 2016 and since 2016 have been a research fellow and collaborator with the Sarawak Museum Department.
00:31:08
Speaker
and their brand new Borneo Cultures Museum. So it's been a really fortunate partnership. I'm really grateful for the opportunity to work with them. Some of the best years, not in Hawaii, some of the best years of my life have unfolded in Borneo and it's because of the communities and my colleagues there. My colleague and I have a couple of publications coming out this year, actually, so it's an active of collaboration and partnership. And I'm just really deeply grateful for all the care that folks extend us when we're out in the jungles in Borneo and for the opportunity to partner with them. They recently, through a huge state initiative, and it was also involved local community, local government officials got NIA National Park on the UNESCO World Heritage List for its cultural resources, which include a massive cave of rock art.
00:31:57
Speaker
So, I had a very manini role, a very small role in that, but really it was the folks there valuing their heritage in that way and recognizing rock art as valuable. And it was just a privilege to be part of all of that. Fabulous. So, tell us a bit about Borneo. what What's there? What did you do? And and how did you do it?
00:32:22
Speaker
Yeah. So, so actually I was trained or I came to Hawaii to study Southeast Asian ceramics. I learned Cambodian and to be a ceramicist in Cambodia. And the folks there were wonderful. My advisor was wonderful, but I just didn't love it like I should to, you know, when you're sitting at a table and like 7,000 shirts are sitting in front of you and it was like, oh yeah, and wow, I don't love this. But it was me, not, not anybody there or everybody there was wonderful.
00:32:53
Speaker
So I pivoted to doing rock art research. And i wanted I also wanted to work in a space where research was welcome, where it was not extractive, and where collections were not generated. Because I think there's a ah huge ethical dimension to collections. And of course, when you're just starting out your career, you don't have typically a lot of finances or control over collections. So I just didn't want to contribute to an issue.
00:33:20
Speaker
ah And Borneo kind of ticked all of those boxes. They wanted help with things. They were fantastic partners and there were opportunities to do rock art research there. I should also thank Paul Tasson, who's a rock art researcher in Australia, a professor at Griffith University. And he gave me an opportunity to work with him in Australia. And then I was able to transport some of those.
00:33:40
Speaker
skills and some of that knowledge to Borneo, so I have to thank him as well. And he worked in Borneo as well. But the rock art there, you know, it's the third largest island on the planet. It is extremely special. It's this huge limestone car stick outcrop that also has pieces of ancient supercontinent that were vomited up throughout different geological epics. It's really a special place. Very nice way of saying that I like that.
00:34:07
Speaker
Thank you. Yeah, yeah. and a Tremendously biodiverse on the edge of the Ring of Fire, although there's not volcanic deposits from active volcanoes on Borneo, just from the earth vomit that I mentioned previously. And that's just in the north. But it's just a deeply special, deeply ancient place. We now know that humans have been on Borneo. Actually, the first radiocarbon dating was done on Borneo in the 1950s.
00:34:32
Speaker
And so we have some of the most deeply ancient kind of evidence for modern humans. Some of the oldest rock art on the planet is also on Borneo and there's a tremendous diversity of rock art. Yeah, on Borneo and in neighboring Indonesia as well. So I think It's just this really special place. Folks have been making rock art there at least 37,000 years ago, but probably much older. And also, they made rock art through the 1950s there. We have ethnographic evidence that it was made through the 1950s. And there's active, living, vibrant, indigenous cultures there. There's also folks who immigrated you know centuries ago. So Borneo is home at this juncture. So it's just this really dynamic, amazing space.
00:35:17
Speaker
And when you go there, people, it it's just a true community. And if if you come in in the right way and you are able to show respect, they they take such good care of you in in ways that are just astounding, considering kind of how hard and harsh the jungle environments can be. so it's a deeply special place. I have as much aloha for it as I do for Hawaii, which is a lot. Is Borneo covered with jungle? It is getting heavily depleted of a lot of its junk. In all honesty, it's there's a lot of illegal logging that occurs.
00:35:50
Speaker
and so We went on a recce with the World Wildlife Fund and the Sarawak government in 2016 and we found, you know like i'm talking about like logging, illegal logging infrastructure like roads installed, massive roads, spaces that were supposed to be old growth forest and then we would get back there and it was a palm oil plantation.
00:36:11
Speaker
so It is or was at one time heavily rain forested. It is being cleared quite a bit. And now Indonesia is moving its capital to the eastern part of the island. There's Malaysian Borneo, there's Indonesian Borneo, and there's also the salt note of Brunei. So three countries share the island. And Indonesia is going to, I mean, they're moving their capital to access. For one of many reasons, Jakarta is just impossible, but I think a lot of it is accessing the natural resources that are still in the on the Indonesian side.
00:36:42
Speaker
and developing them. Yeah, so it was, but it is actively, I would say it's fair to say it's being deforested right now. Has that been difficult to discover the archaeology and rock art because of the vegetation or has it at ah places ah been visible?
00:37:03
Speaker
Yeah, you know, so in 2015, a colleague from the Sarawak Museum Department and I went to, we we were doing a survey trying to find additional rock art because there's all these tantalizing indications that there's more, you know, accounts from people.
00:37:21
Speaker
records or even photographs on file at the museum that showed different rock art panels. You just don't know where they are. So but we were kind of on a mission to find the ones that we could. And a lot of them are in these limestone car stick outcrops that kind of rise from the landscape really beautifully and dramatically. Those are getting mined actively. And so you just get to this point where it's a plane where they've leveled all of the car stick outcrops and then suddenly the jungle begins and it's a line.
00:37:49
Speaker
We were able to talk with some mining folks that let us go look in caves before they leveled and destroyed them. You know, who knows what else was being destroyed in that space. But so the rock art, we did discover a new rock art site that when I say new, like new to official records, the local villagers knew it was there. It was on their radar as kind of this haunted, graffitied place.
00:38:12
Speaker
And so I definitely want to recognize locally it was known as is so often in science, right?
Ethical Research and Indigenous Involvement
00:38:20
Speaker
But the officials were not aware of it. So we went in there and verified that it was actually rock art that is likely older than 50, 60, 80 years. And it's a bunch of charcoal drawings on the interior of a cave. So not apparent from the outside, but Yeah, there is some rock art that's more visible. There's petroglyphs on Oceanside boulders at Santobong, for instance. And where did you focus your energies when you were in Borneo? Yeah, in the state of Sarawak.
00:38:53
Speaker
which is the Malaysian state that is in Borneo. So we went to Nia Cave. There purportedly is additional rock art at Nia Cave, and we went to try to find that. And we even knew the cave chamber that it's in, that it was massive. So it was really, we didn't find it, unfortunately, but we did see additional cave paintings that had not been recorded officially kind of on a ceiling. I'm sure the swallow's nest harvesters and other local people who frequented the cave were well aware of that as well. But again, you know, officially, it was kind of the first time that it had been noted. Fantastic.
00:39:31
Speaker
And how about Palau? Yeah, it's an insanely beautiful place with a really amazing heritage. Palau, the islands are mostly, again, limestone karst, heavily jungled. Palau is a matriarchy, which is always wonderful to travel to as a woman. And they still have yeah these these really wonderful traditional systems in place.
00:39:58
Speaker
ah and traditional practices. And so the culture is really, really strong. And when you go there and work there, there's kind of the the official, you know, work with the State Historic Preservation Office, also the Council of Chiefs, and then a so ah series of matriarchs also have to approve everything that gets produced.
00:40:19
Speaker
So for the Rock Art Network, which is a global network of 30 to 50 rock art specialists, researchers, academics, custodians, stewards that I belong to, it's a Getty Conservation Institute, Bradshaw Foundation partnership. And now we're a nonprofit. So I said, I was on the air board and now I'm on the board for that, a burgeoning nonprofit looking for strategic partnerships with other rock art organizations, I might add. But we have as part of our network,
00:40:48
Speaker
Altamira in Spain and Pilar, who is the director there. So she offered her space at Altamira, which is run by the Spanish government and there's a research complex and it's you know the kind of visitation center for Altamira, the rock art site, as a gallery space and wanted to feature rock art from different world areas to share with the Spanish folks that visit as well as international visitors.
00:41:14
Speaker
And so that was just a really cool, generous offer. And I talked with folks in Palau, a fellow researcher that I work a lot with there and kind of her network of folks who are there. And there's professional photographers. There's a local guy who's a professional photographer. He contributed images to the exhibit.
00:41:34
Speaker
A local woman did a lot of ethnography for us, like really quality, amazing ethnography, so aloha to Sylvia for that, and Jolie for all of her connections, Dr. Jolie Liston. And we did this kind of community-based, government-approved project about the rock art, and it was displayed at Altamira.
00:41:55
Speaker
And we're hoping then to find funding so that we can produce the panels, which Altamira has very generously given us for free. So we have the electronic files for free, ah produce them so they can be included in the Palau National Museum. Fabulous. Wow. Yeah. No, that's wonderful. Well, ah in, in signing off, let's talk about ah sort of the cutting edge direction that rock art studies are taking and how we try to integrate and partner with the Indigenous folks and collaborate on our scientific studies.
00:42:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think, and I hope Andre feels free to pipe in here too. I guess what I would want to say about that, yeah, and is that I really think to be ethical in Hawaii and in the Pacific, it really, you have to decentralize the agenda of the researcher, the career of the researcher, the prestige, the ego of the researcher. You have to really be meeting a community need. The partnership has to be meaningful.
00:43:05
Speaker
more needs to be given than to be taken in every sense of the word at every time. And it's really a lifelong commitment. If you can do it, you have to have good intentions and also actions that are ethical. And you're never going to get it 100% perfect, I don't think. But it cannot be extractive here, like so much research and so much sciences and other spaces. It doesn't work. That perpetuates the kind of violence and the extraction that is problematic, that takes from these places, that endangers them frankly. And so my strong feeling is that to do it well here in the in Hawaii and in the Pacific, it has to be in partnership with people who are dedicated to conservation and stewardship because all of the environments are under such incredible stress here. They're in incredible danger. And if you're not working to help those conservation efforts, then what you're trying to do is lost. You can't parse out the landscape. It's part of this cultural landscape. There are relationships and significances. And in those spaces then, really to me, rock art becomes, rock art research is, you know, this Western toolkit.
00:44:17
Speaker
And it can puka in, it can be brought into kind of indigenous values of place, which you can't determine, but you can help support. So it really has to be meaningful partnership. Andre.
00:44:29
Speaker
Aloha. Yes, I'm just, you know, when Scott Fisher and Rachel reached out and Scott has reached out to my children and my older, I have my oldest one is at Dartmouth out at New Hampshire. She's in her third year and he's just, you know, they've always reached out to include them. And I just think that, you know, I've been doing archaeology here, like I said, for over 30 years and so much of the research we do, you know, we map, record, document, write up a report, it gets put on a shelf and to just reach out to, I think it's just so important in, you know, all over the world to just reach out if there is still the living community and the indigenous people that are associated to the archaeological sites or to these rock art, you know, and to these rock art sites to just find a way to include them
00:45:23
Speaker
in the process. And that's something that I just hope we see, you know, more of moving forward. And, you know, for my children, because you just never know how it's going to also like impact, you know, their life choices and their careers. You know, both my daughter wants to be an archaeologist, you know, and my son wants to be an ethnographic filmer.
00:45:46
Speaker
And so when you reach out to these, you know, to the Indigenous and even just to the community, you know, kids that might not be Native or just reaching out to the kids to participate on any level, you know, even if it's, you know, one day out of the 30 days of doing research, you just never know when you're going to make a huge impact on this next and generation. and And like they were saying, you know, just to also, you know, like a lot of the, you know, vandalism is, I think it's really just being done out of ignorance. I think when you educate people and teach them about an area and teach them, you know, share your mana and your knowledge about the culture, that they're going to have some type of, you know, ownership to it and want to help protect and protect these sites and be a part of it.
00:46:40
Speaker
And I just think that reaching out to the community and to the youth is should be a part of everybody's research moving forward. That's fantastic. Well, I think it's time to close. This has been a remarkable program and I'm blessed and honored to have have you and Dr. Rachel and the youngsters on board in sharing their enthusiasm and passion for the study of cultural heritage. And with that, I'll say, you know, maya do. Mahalo for including us. Thank you so much. Mahalo. Thank you. God bless.
00:47:35
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Rock Art Podcast with Dr. Alan Garfinkel and Chris Webster. Find show notes and contact information at www.arcpodnet.com forward slash rock art. Thanks for listening and thanks for sharing this podcast with your family and friends.
00:48:07
Speaker
The Archaeology Podcast Network is 10 years old this year. Our executive producer is Ashley Airy, our social media coordinator is Matilda Sebrecht, and our chief editor is Rachel Rodin. The Archaeology Podcast Network was co-founded by Chris Webster and Tristan Boyle in 2014 and is part of CulturoMedia and DigTech LLC. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.