Mystery Monday: 23,000 Carvings in a Hawaiian Lava Field. But Why?

Mystery Monday: 23,000 Carvings in a Hawaiian Lava Field — But Why?

A story carved in stone about family, ancestry, and the hopes parents have carried for generations.

On Hawaiʻi Island, inside Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, there is an ancient lava field covered with more than 23,000 petroglyph images.

It's called Puʻuloa.

Some of the carvings resemble people. Others appear to be canoe sails, circles, geometric shapes and designs whose full meanings may have been known only to the people who created them.

But among all those images are thousands upon thousands of something much simpler.

Small holes carved into the lava.

And that's where this Mystery Monday takes an unexpected turn.

The Mystery in the Lava

More than 16,000 carvings at Puʻuloa are associated with piko — the Hawaiian word for the umbilical cord or stump, with deep connections to genealogy, family and ancestry.

Hawaiian families would place a newborn child's piko into one of these small depressions in the lava.

Why?

It was connected to their hopes that the child would be blessed with a long and prosperous life and remain connected to their ancestral land.

Even the name of this extraordinary place carries meaning.

Puʻuloa means “long hill,” with the deeper meaning “hill of long life.”

Suddenly, I didn't see those thousands of marks as simply ancient carvings anymore.

I saw families.

Parents.

Babies.

Generations.

Hope.

Maybe We Haven't Changed That Much

Hundreds of years ago, families stood on this Hawaiian lava field thinking about the lives their children had ahead of them.

And that is the part of this story that stayed with me.

We live in a completely different world.

We travel thousands of miles in hours. We carry little computers around in our pockets. We can stand on the other side of the world and talk to someone back home instantly.

Yet one thing hasn't changed very much at all.

Parents still look at their children and grandchildren and hope for the same thing:

May you have a long life.
May it be a good life.
May you always know where you belong. ❤️

Perhaps that's the real mystery hidden among the 23,000 carvings at Puʻuloa.

Not how different the people who created them were from us...

but how very much alike we still are.

And THAT is one of the reasons I love discovering the stories behind the places we travel.

Because sometimes we travel somewhere expecting to discover another culture...

and instead discover a little more about ourselves.

Until our next story,
— Gina Renee

Where Every Trip Becomes a Story.