Archaeology at Tan Madol, Ponape

Airborne LiDAR Reveals a Vast Archaeological Landscape at the Nan Madol World Heritage Site

“…Riesenberg considered the Saudeleur Dynasty "a highly developed socio-political system that permitted the planning of the structures, organization of manpower to build them and to raise and feed the mass of labor necessary for construction" ( [24], p. 5). Subsequent research has corroborated this interpretation, with many other researchers noting the high level of social complexity implied by the construction of Nan Madol [2,[4][5][6][7][8]10,14,15,22,23,26,27]. Riesenberg's comment about the necessity of feeding laborers anticipates the findings on Temwen Island reported here.…”

“…Prior archaeological fieldwork suggests reasons for the differential preservation of Nan Madol islets that is apparent in the LiDAR models. The findings from this fieldwork indicate that the human occupation of areas offshore of Temwen Island predated the artificial islets and monumental structures that comprise Nan Madol [5,6,8,23]. Nan Madol's most intact, and many of its most notable, islets and structures lie along a southwest-northeast axis.…”

“…Archaeological investigations indicate that the bulk of Nan Madol's islets and structures were constructed from approximately 1200 to 1600 CE [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Oral histories support these dates and associate Nan Madol, at least in its later stages, with the Saudeleur Dynasty.…”

“…A good deal of ethnographic, ethnohistorical, and archaeological research has focused on Pohnpei [3,6,7,[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24]. In 1967, Betty J. Meggers and Clifford Evans, of the Smithsonian Institution, cleared vegetation and conducted excavations at several islets that had been identified by Saul Riesenberg as having had specific or noteworthy functions.…”

“…Between the idea of marine reworking of a sand reef islet and that of reef-flat occupation in houses on pilings, Ayres favored the latter as a working hypothesis. In any case, he did not think that the use of basalt boulders to construct the artificial islet foundations was necessarily linked to sea level change [6,7]. Columnar basalt was used as facing on some of the earlier islets, but might have been placed later to enhance the islets' prestige.…”