9.3 Theories and Interpretations of Pacific Art

Pacific works often store knowledge, beliefs and social relationships, held by trained members of a community. Their meaning may lie less in the object than in its making, its performance and even its destruction. A memory created at a ceremony can matter more than the thing that was shown.

Outsiders long explained Pacific monuments with myths of lost races or ecological collapse. Today's interpretations combine archaeology and dating methods with oral traditions and the knowledge of the communities themselves.

Nan Madol (Pohnpei, Micronesia; Saudeleur Dynasty; c. 700–1600 CE; basalt boulders and prismatic columns). Off the coast of Pohnpei, builders raised nearly 100 artificial islets on a coral reef, crossed by canals. Their walls are made of long, six-sided basalt columns, which form naturally when lava cools and cracks. Builders stacked them crosswise, like a log cabin, and filled the spaces with coral and rubble. Walls on the royal mortuary islet of Nandauwas reach about 7.5 meters.

Nan Madol was the political and ceremonial center of the Saudeleur rulers, who made other chiefs live there under watch. One part held residences and administration; another held tombs and priests' quarters. How workers moved columns weighing several tons is still debated. Pohnpeian tradition says two sorcerer brothers flew the stones into place; archaeologists suggest rafts at high tide and levers. The Saudeleur were eventually overthrown, and the site was abandoned.

Moai on platform (ahu) (Rapa Nui (Easter Island); c. 1100–1600 CE; volcanic tuff figures on basalt base). Islanders carved nearly 1,000 moai from soft volcanic tuff at the Rano Raraku quarry. Most stood on stone platforms (ahu) near the coast, facing inland toward the villages with their backs to the sea. They are generally understood as deified ancestors watching over their descendants. Some wore red stone topknots (pukao), and eyes of white coral with dark stone pupils were inserted, perhaps to activate the figure's mana.

Interpretations have shifted. A popular theory held that islanders cut down their forests to move moai and caused their own collapse. Many researchers now stress other causes, such as rats eating palm seeds and, above all, European diseases and the 1860s slave raids. Experiments suggest moai could be "walked" upright with ropes, matching oral traditions that the moai walked. By the mid-1800s, all moai had been toppled. Several were later re-erected, and some taken abroad are subjects of return requests.

Malagan display and mask (New Ireland Province, Papua New Guinea; c. 20th century CE; wood, pigment, fiber, and shell). Malagan are ceremonies honoring the dead, held months or years after a death. Carvers make intricate openwork figures, friezes and masks, painted in red, black, white and yellow, with eyes made of sea-snail shell. Birds, fish, snakes and human figures interlock. The carvings are shown in a specially built display house during the ceremony.

When the ceremony ends, the carvings have done their job: they are left to decay, destroyed, or, since the late 1800s, sold to outsiders. Rights to a malagan design pass from owner to owner, so the image lives on in memory and can be made again. Scholars interpret the carvings as temporary bodies for the life force of the dead, released when the ceremony ends. That's why museums holding malagan face a puzzle: they preserve objects whose meaning depended on their disappearing.