The Samoan Pyramid

by Maya Lynch

  When Scott had mapped Pulemelei in 1965 he had recorded finding 10 stone cairns on top of the main platform. Stone cairns are basically just a loose pile of stones and boulders, piled up to a heigh of about a meter. But when the pyramid was re-mapped in 2002, Wallin recorded about 40 cairns. And then she did something that seems to defy all explanation. She ordered the cairns be removed.

  It seems that the land owners allowed Wallin to do pretty much whatever she wanted at the site. She had been given carte blanche. I could imagine the curmudgeonly old archaeologist that had given Noah a map to the ancient city, would have been furious about this. In the seventies he had gained strict 'look but don't touch' access to the site.

  Strange decisions such as these aside, over the next two years, a clear picture of the pyramid complex at Pulemelei began to emerge. The evidence was clear that whether by accident or design, Pulemelei is aligned to the cardinal directions. The pyramid's alignment suggests an astronomical purpose. But just how the ancient builders constructed the pyramid remained a mystery.

  Archaeologists excavating at the base of the pyramid saw that the pyramid builders had first dug into the bedrock. They had cleared the site, prior to construction. This in itself would have been a massive undertaking. Using modern equipment we can estimate the task of clearing the foundations would take no less than three months, working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.18

  But for the ancient pyramid builders to clear the site ready for construction and then dig into the bedrock would have taken a concerted organised effort, possibly one that lasted for years. They would then have filled the foundation on all four sides by placing tabular basalt slabs upright in a shallow trench. This foundation would then have been filled by stacking huge basalt slabs horizontally on top of the foundation stones. These massive stone blocks cover the entire 60 x 65 meter expanse of the pyramid base to a height of about 4 meters.

  On top of this base platform the builders then added the second step. Again constructed from huge basalt blocks this second platform climbs steeply to a height of around eight meters. At this point the archaeologists excavated a layer of sand. Wallin believed that this was evidence of a prolonged period of activity here before the construction of final stage of the pyramid. On top of the layer of sand lies the third and final step of Pulemelei. The pyramid rises another 4 meters to its full height of 12 meters, the height of a five storey building. This third level has ramps 'cut' into its sides creating two sunken entrance ways. One leading up to the top of the pyramid from the east causeway and the other ascending from the pavement on the west side of the pyramid. Covering the top platform of the pyramid is a layer of small water-rolled river stones.

  About 50 meters to the north of the main pyramid connected by a raised walkway, is the platform known as the 'North Mound'. Oriented north - south, the North Mound is 30 meters long and 24 meters wide and only about 3 meters high. Its purpose is unknown. Surrounding the whole area are massive basalt floors, and huge roads, causeways and tracks leading away from Pulemelei and into the jungle in all directions.

  Despite some very interesting discoveries, when it came to putting a date on the site, Wallin and her team were stumped. This is because you can’t carbon date stone. A geologist can tell you when the stone was first formed, but there is no test that can tell you when the stone was moved into place. So Wallin and her team did the next best thing. They decided to use carbon dating on any organic materials they found, such as charcoal from the many fire pits that surround Pulemelei.

  On the south side of the pyramid is a stone terrace. Beneath this terrace they discovered the oldest settlement deposits. Under the stone pavement Wallin found at least one ancient occupation layer and possibly two. Dark charcoal stained soil suggested that there had once been a fire pit or an earth oven here. And so they dug. At about 50 centimetres down they found pottery sherds as well as a cylindrical stone lug or handle. At about 60cm down they discovered large pieces of charcoal. They could use the charcoal to get a carbon date for the site. At a depth of 83 centimetres they found another piece of pottery, wedged inside the earth oven. Wallin sent these samples to be carbon dated. The results came back at over 2,000 years old, but the samples Wallin had taken were from underneath the south terrace and it was obvious to her that this charcoal was deposited there before the terrace had been built. So the team tested charcoal from the many fire pits they uncovered in the area. As luck would have it they discovered a fire pit that was partially covered by the western side of the pyramid. Because the fire pit was below the level of the pyramid, logic dictates that the fire pit must have been in use before construction of the pyramid began. The charcoal in this pit suggested a date of around 700 AD. The team concluded that the pyramid couldn’t have been built any earlier than that date.

  But what of the intervening period? What happened at Pulemelei? What did the archaeologists discover? Well, that is perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the whole 2002 expedition. The charcoal from the south terrace gives us our earliest dates of around 150 BC The archaeologists found evidence of continued occupation for over three hundred years, up until some time around 200 AD But between 200 AD and 700 AD the strangest thing happens. There is no archaeological evidence for anyone at Pulemelei at all. No fire pits and not one pottery sherd was found. It looks like between 200 AD and 700 AD, the site was simply abandoned. In fact, right across the Samoan archipelago, the same story emerges. Right around 200 AD it seems that whoever had been living on the islands either left or died out. The archaeologists call this period the 'Samoan Dark Ages'.

  Then, after a break of about five hundred years, there is evidence of renewed activity at Pulemelei, starting with the fire pit under the western side of the Pyramid at around 700 AD So what happened in the intervening 500 years of the Samoan Dark Ages? Helene Martinson-Wallin and her entire team of well funded archaeologists were completely at a loss.

  The renewed activity at the site, beginning some time around 700 AD, marks the main period of pyramid building - this timeline puts the pyramid builders front and centre in the story of the Polynesian diaspora, the old ‘Polynesian problem’ of who settled Polynesia now had this mysterious group of pyramid builders at Pulemelei as characters central to the mystery. Construction of the pyramid continued up until around 1400 AD, when there is another change. From 1400 AD, it appears that the use of Pulemelei changes. Again this evidence of change occurring around 1400 AD is interesting because it coincides with the period when the oral histories of Samoa say that an invasion force from Tonga overran the island and ruled over Samoa.

  And then, finally, at some point in the 1500s to 1700s, and certainly some time before the Europeans arrived in Samoa, the site was abandoned. Let’s look at that timeline, get it clear in our minds.

  150 BC The earliest evidence of anyone at the site, revealed in the pottery sherds found under the southern platform.

  200 AD The beginning of the Samoan Dark ages, no evidence of human activity at Pulemelei, or anywhere else in the Samoan archipelago, for 500+ years which continues right up until…

  700 AD When we have renewed activity at Pulemelei as found in the fire pit under the western side of the pyramid. The construction of the pyramid begins some time around here.

  1000 AD The Polynesian Diaspora - Adventurers set out from the Central Pacific heading east to settle the thousands of tiny islands of Polynesia.

  1400 AD The Tongan invasion of Samoa and a change in the use of the pyramid.

  1500 AD - 1700 AD The pyramid is abandoned.

  Wallin had managed to construct the first proper timeline for Pulemelei. And she confirmed that Pulemelei is utterly unique. For two years Wallin and her team had excavated, surveyed and mapped the entire area. And while they couldn't answer the question of who had built the pyramid, they had provided us with a wealth of useful information and they were able to rule out some of the theories.

  Construction at Pulemelei began some time around 700AD -1000AD. That's hundreds of years
too early for it to have been built during the Tongan occupation of Samoa. And then there was the complete lack of human remains at Pulemelei. Stuart Scott had failed to find any graves when he surveyed the site in the 60s and Wallin’s team was no different. If this had been a tomb then the archaeologists should have found a body, or at least some evidence that a grave had once been there, which they didn’t. So this debunks the theory that Pulemelei was built to be the final resting place of the 17th century chief Lilomaiava Nailevaiiliili, as Baba had told me that the local villagers claim.

  For more than two years, dozens of archaeologists had scoured the site using high tech remote sensing equipment. Not one of them found anything even remotely like a grave. Pulemelei wasn't built by the Tongans and it wasn't built as the tomb of Chief Lilomaiava Nailevaiiliili, the 17th century ruler. It was something far more enigmatic than all that. My suspicions about this pyramid had been correct. The structure was magnificent, and it didn’t fit with any prevailing theories as to it's origin, or with the general narrative of the history of the region. The monument was an outlier in the ‘data set’ of Pacific history. A massive stone pyramid complex, built deep in the jungle, high up on the edge of a volcano, and no one knows who built it. Pulemelei was still very much a mystery.

  18

  Dread

  Baba settled down under the banyan tree, while I got on with what I came here to do. Shambling about the top of the pyramid, I went to the farthest edges. On the east and western sides of the pyramid edge are the ceremonial stairways, leading down to the paved area below. I took the compass from my backpack to check how the pyramid was aligned, but I quickly began to get some very strange readings. When I stood near the centre of the pyramid the compass read fine, but as soon as I stepped towards any of the edges the needle moved erratically. Something very unusual was happening here.

  Walking about the top of the pyramid I found two deep pits. Investigating them I saw no evidence of heat, no burn marks, no melting or cracking of the rocks that you would typically see in a fire pit. Perhaps these pits were used to hold poles, markers to some important alignment to the stars? I stood on the edge of one of the pits and saw that if I looked towards the other pit, the virtual line drawn between the two directed my view to the volcano behind me to the north west, in one direction and directly to the south east corner of the pyramid in the other.

  I looked at my compass again, but it still gave me a reading that I knew to be completely incorrect. The needle persisted in spinning whenever I moved. Even more strangely, I began to feel increasingly furious with myself, with my compass, with the heat, with everything. I just wanted to shout, to smash the compass on the floor in frustration.

  I knew that basalt is naturally magnetic stone, which could go some way to explaining my compass’s failure to find north or south, but there was something else going on here, something intangible that just wasn’t right. Something was filling me, slowly and steadily, with rage. I felt as though I were being possessed. The air bristled angrily and I started to feel unwell, it was getting harder to breath and my thoughts became confused. My head hurt, I could feel the air pressure, like the staticky sort of tension one sometimes feels just before a powerful thunderstorm. I put it all down to the excitement and exertion and the lack of water, but I couldn't suppress a swell of dread from deep down inside me. Then things got more bizarre.

  I sat down, struggling to gather my thoughts and control my breathing. It was then that I began to see purple flashes of light, like sheet lightning behind my eyes. Purple, then orange. They reminded me of a light leak in an old photograph. They were persistent, no sooner had I convinced myself that I had imagined them, the series of vivid flashes would start again. All the while, the powerful sense of dread kept rising. It is hard to explain now, but at the time I was very quickly overcome, sick with a sense of impending doom.

  After a several hours on top of the Pyramid I felt so overwhelmed that I told Baba we had to leave. We headed back down the eastern stairway and away from Pulemelei. Hot, tired and feeling thoroughly terrible, I wished to the heavens that it would rain. Mercifully, just as we were settling into our pace, the skies opened and a powerful rain poured down, soaking us through. I immediately started to feel better, and found that the farther we got from the pyramid, the more I improved. My breathing returned to normal.

  We trekked back and somehow the pace felt easier, like a weight had been lifted. We chatted as we crossed back over the river and by the time we reached Baba’s village we were laughing and joking. I felt completely normal again, if a little drained. I fumbled around in my bag to see what I could find as a present for Baba, the man who'd shown me the pyramid I so desired, and then promptly rescued me from it. I pulled out the packet of cigarettes and the twenty-tālā note. As I handed them over to Baba, thanking him profusely for getting me to the pyramid, and even more so for bringing me back safely, I noticed the bank note had a picture of a pigeon on it. Some pigeon mound, I thought. I hugged baba and thanked him again as he turned to head back home.

  I walked up the narrow track to the blue lake. There was not a soul around. I had this magical place all to myself. I slipped out of my stinking hot clothes and waded up to my waist in the cold blue water. I stood there watching the water squeezing out through the pores in the cliff face as the sun disappeared behind the mountain, that dark mountain silhouetted against a scarlet red sky.

  19

  Missing

  A short while later, I opened the door of the little Honda, chucked my backpack onto the passenger seat and slumped myself behind the steering wheel, exhausted. I turned the key, started the engine and steered the car along the potted dirt track and out onto the coast road. As I drove north towards my digs in Manase, my tired mind buzzed with question about the pyramid builders. Who were they? What on earth happened to them? And why don’t we know? The tiny villages of the coast road flashed by in the closing dark.

  On Savai’i today the population live in the small villages dotted along the coast road that winds round the island like a snake. No one lives in the jungles in the interior of the island. But in the past this wasn’t the case. The archaeologist Roger Green, the enigmatic Harvard graduate who lead the research team on Samoa in the 60’s noted that ‘It is not widely realised, particularly amongst the younger Samoans, that in ancient times a large part of the population had become accustomed to a life remote from the Sea: many people were living in the relatively cool upland valleys of the interior.’19

  At one time there was a population who lived and thrived in the interior of the island, in the great city at Pulemelei. But by the time the English Missionaries arrived in 1830, the jungle settlement had been abandoned. Why?

  The explanation for the why the ruins in the jungle were abandoned is often given simply: ‘When the Gospel came to the island, the people came down to the coast.’20

  This version of events seems to originate in the 1840s, from a book called ‘Four Years in the Pacific on her Majesty’s Ship Collingwood’ by Lieutenant Fred Walpole. Walpole visited Samoa in the mid 1840s and recorded the words; ‘Their villages were formerly in the interior of the island…[and when the Missionaries came] they moved down to the ships.’

  He himself was told the story by a English Missionary.

  Now, that’s a possible explanation, and on the surface of it this seems quite logical; an island population so attracted to the teachings of God and the enigmatic missionaries that delivered it that the local people abandoned their ancestral city and moved lock stock and barrel down to the coast. It’s the story the Missionaries told in the 1840’s and its the same story that you hear told on the island today. There is, however, one tiny problem with that story. There’s no archeological evidence to support it. In fact, the evidence points to something altogether different.

  The Archaeologist Roger Green came to the conclusion that Savai’i, at some time in the distant past, supported a far larger population than was on the island when the Europeans ar
rived; ‘It is evident,’ he said, ‘that Western Samoans in the 1840s needed to use, and were occupying only the coastal part of their islands.’ He goes on, ‘The one obvious explanation for the extent to which the landscape of Western Samoa has in fact been occupied, much of it continuously, for agriculture and residence over a long period of time, is a much larger population.’21

  Green was convinced there was a second group living inland at Pulemelei, long before the Missionaries arrived. He even estimates the size of this missing population; ‘It seems that only a population twice the size of that in the 1840’s…would require the amount of arable land which archeology indicates was once in use.’

  The population of Western Samoa in the 1840s, according to the records kept by the English Missionaries, was around 50,000 people. If we double that, we are given an additional 50,000 people that we simply can’t account for. If we rely on the explanation given by the missionaries, that the people moved from inland settlements to the coast, then we are forced to also conclude that the move was a disaster, because it seems to have somehow wiped out half the population.

  Another explanation put forward to account for the missing 50,000 is that they were wiped out by the diseases the European missionaries brought with them. But again, the archeologists don’t agree, the prevailing theory is that this second group were long gone before the Europeans even arrived . The archaeologist Gregory Jackmond explains; ‘…the apparent time difference, and the different densities between the sites may be evidence of a general loss of population long before the postulated decline ascribed to imported European diseases.’22