A day with archaeologists

There is a group of archaeologists from the University of Queensland and UC Berkeley staying at the Gump Station right now, and yesterday I went out in the field with them. They are excavating a series of houses from the period between 1400-1650 in the 'Opunohu Valley in the center of the island. The 'Opunohu Valley today is mostly filled with introduced pine and mape (Fabaceae: Inocarpus) trees, but when Europeans first arrived here, it was densely populated and cultivated with taro, bananas, and breadfruit. When I do my fieldwork in the 'Opunohu Valley, I often run across alignments of stones or marae (temples) in the forest, and yesterday I got to see what was lying underneath it all:
This is a cooking house with several earth ovens (cooking was traditionally done in separate houses from the ones where people slept).

Another, larger house.An earth oven found near the house above--note the line of charcoal in the far end. Traditional Tahitian cooking involves wrapping food in leaves and placing it in an earth oven for hours to bake. We got to have this kind of food on Saturday at a Tahitian feast at the Gump: it consisted of chicken wrapped in taro leaves, pork, taro, bananas, and fe'i (plantains), all baked in one large underground oven for hours. In Tahiti and Mo'orea today, these staples have been almost entirely replaced by baguettes and rice.Not yet excavated is this small marae uphill, much smaller than the ones restored for the benefit of tourists near the Belvédère. (It's hard to see in this photo, but there is a small Glochidion sapling growing in the left corner.)Here you can see the row of upright stones still standing along the far end of the marae (also visible in the above picture, if you click to enlarge it).

After I took a "break" in the middle of the day to bushwhack up a ridge looking for Glochidion trees, they set me to work clearing off the top 2 cm of a 1-square-meter plot, with a small trowel. The most exciting thing I found was a piece of rock that may have been cracked in a fire.