Posted on: Friday, June 7, 2002
High tech aids research of Hawaiian petroglyphs
Able to redirect wayward drivers or locate stolen vehicles (or sleeping park workers in their city trucks), global positioning satellites are now being used to pinpoint things that haven't moved for hundreds of years: petroglyphs.
It's "The Jetsons" meets "The Flintstones."
And for Hawaiiana and travel expert Lynn Cook, it's reason to party — literally. Cook's initial fascination with rock art came during childhood visits to the home of tribes in the Pacific Northwest. A graduate drawing course with Ed Stasack, professor emeritus of the University of Hawai'i art department, cemented that love, including Hawai'i homeland's ki'i pohaku, "rock pictures."
"He's fired up a lot of people," said Cook, estimating some 60 percent of petroglyph research and writings is attributable to Stasack.
Now, the endeavor to find, pinpoint by GPS and document new petroglyphs by computer has both researchers fired up.
"We've already lost a lot of petroglyphs because of Pele" said Cook, not to mention erosion, overdevelopment, vandalism and the "modern petroglyph," graffiti.
Comparing new GPS/computer petroglyph research methods with cartoons isn't that far-fetched, said Stasack. "Petroglyphs, as well as cartoons, freeze a concept in time. They represent values of the people, culture and social climate at the time they were made."
They are, in essence, a snapshot in time. Stasack recalls one Big Island petroglyph site that shows the primitive fighting implements of an ancient Hawai'i adjacent to another showing the muskets and cannons of an early 19th century.
Never far from Stasack's mind is the precept that he is "a guest, of sorts," in the culture, there to "document, not to translate, the experience."
Noted hula master 'Iolani Luahine has hinted to Stasack's "divine" purpose in poking around often sacred Hawaiian sites: "Do you know no Hawaiian would have done what he did," she told his wife, and fellow researcher, Diane. "This is a very sacred spot. Your husband would be dead (mythically) if he wasn't meant to do this."
"We make it a point," said Stasack, to retrieve information and present it to the kupuna. We serve to be the messenger — not interpret what the message means."
There are, he said, always more questions than answers as many of the unsolved mysteries of petroglyphs are unearthed, and presented back to their culture.
The addition of GPS and computers in the research offer the advantage of speed. Using older methods, art students coming as close to accurate reproduction as possible often took days. "It now takes us seconds."
With the addition of the Internet comes the added dimension of easy dissemination of information: "You'll be able to zoom in on a site and have an experience with it," said the researcher.
Cook, a noted travel writer, accepts assignments worldwide only if they have researchable petroglyph sites.
Her expertise has led to teaching assignments at The Kamehameha Schools and her Halau Mohala 'Ilima. But it's not geology or even anthropology she teaches. It's social studies, of things past and present. She presents research as fodder for students' career planning: photography, anthropology, geology, art, oceanography, writing. "I make them think about all this," she said.
She also makes them think about another question: "Why did (ancient Hawaiians) leave these markings in stone?" And why, for example, are there perhaps 30-foot renderings of canoe paddles on the Big Island, pointing to South Point?
"This is not graffiti. This is not accidental. Like (Hawaiian) navigational skills, this was very sophisticated."
Even the 4-year-olds assembled by her halau sat "absolutely entranced," and Cook found another application for the art form: the Petroglyph Party, where children and adults alike artistically reproduce better-known petroglyphs.
Her Petroglyph Party , productions auctioned off by Diamond Head Theatre, attracted interest from former Miss Hawai'i and hula dancer Debbie Nakanelua: "Yeah, instead of clowns — I want the kids to have fun — AND learn!"
