A Ghost World

Nan Madol
House and canal

The Devil's Post Piles, Mammoth Lakes, California

Venice of the Western Pacific

My brother and his wife generously send me their copies of Archaeology magazine and special issues from National Geographic, which allow me to escape to lost worlds while wishing the contemporary one would get lost.  The usual areas are covered:  the Mediterranean basin, China and Indochina, ancient Britain, the Meso- and Incan Americas, but I never tire of them and you can always learn something new as season after season, dedicated people dig and translate.  But who would have thought of an imposing stone city built on a coral reef far out in the Caroline Islands, the loneliest dots in a vast ocean?

 Pohnpei Island (one of the four islands comprising today's Federated States of Micronesia) has been settled for over 2,000 years, but one would think its housing would have been built of organic materials,constantly  replaced after a generation or two or after a typhoon, and leaving little behind.  From around 500 A.D. to 1500 A.D. it was the capital of an increasingly stratified society, ending with the centralized and all-powerful Saudeleur Dynasty, which ruled a population of around 25,000.  And did they leave something behind.

For hundreds of years, most intensely in the 12th century, a complex of stone houses and temples separated by canals was erected for the exclusive use of the ruling class.  Artificial islands were built on a coral reef in a lagoon off the main island for their regal isolation.  There is no food or fresh water there, so it was likely built much more for psychological effect than practical reasons.  One is immediately reminded of the Aztec and Egyptian pyramid builders and the high, formidable structures of the Inca. 

On Lake Texcoco at Tenochtitlan (today's Mexico City), the Aztecs built many such islands out of organic material, not stone, for the completely practical purpose of agriculture. Nan Madol, like today's gated communities and security-encased high rise condominiums, was built for the safety and status of an elite class only. And well-built it was, from 400,000 hexagonal basalt rock columns, shaped like logs, of up to 10 tons each which were quarried from the island's interior.  These formations are found elsewhere so we know what they look like.undisturbed (i.e., at Mammoth Lakes in California and The Giants' Causeway in Ireland). How they separated and transported and then raised them to such heights is a mystery; the orally transmitted myth has it that a magician flew them to the lagoon.  As good an explanations as we have, I suppose.

One can almost hear the long-ago king and his nobles telling the nameless people who built their private city and brought them their food (to turn Eva Peron's song in Evita upside down):  "We keep no promise; now keep your distance."