Stone Implements of the Ancient 



Hawaiians. 



A chapter Irralnio- a/so oj llic ancient Stone J I 'o/Vc, Sculpture and sitcli remains as are 

 at present knozcn either in Museums abroad or on these islands In' Willieim. 

 TT. BriglaeiiTi, A.M., Direflor of the Bernice Fauahi Bishop Museum. 



IN the Pacific Region it is not necessary to discuss the tools of primitive man: the 

 first known inhabitants of the Pacific islands were many thousand years removed 

 from i^rimitive man, and the delicate questions of tertiary or early quaternary 

 remains may be wholly eliminated. We need not, even for convenience, divide the 

 remains of tools used here into stone, bronze or iron periods. There were no such 

 divisions. Neither iron, copper, nor tin was accessilde to the islanders, and from the 

 time they landed on the bits of land scattered through this ocean, whether it be five or 

 twenty centuries ago, they used wood, stone, bone or shell for the purposes where modern 

 civilized man uses the metals or pottery, and this use was universal until little more 

 than a century ago when iron and foreign tools were introduced here and there among 

 the islands. Even on the Hawaiian islands metal tools were far from common in the 

 middle of the last century.* 



If in this region there was a counterpart to the fabled Atlantis of the lesser 

 ocean, in the diluvium that removed its possible inhabitants all their work perished 

 with them and the little islands which perchance serve as gravestones to the lost con- 

 tinent are unmarked by any inscription. The architectural or sculptured remains 

 today found on Rapanui, Tonga, the Marianas and elsewhere are the work of people 

 not remote from the present or historic inhabitants. There are tools of rude form and 

 careless workmanship from the Pacific islands; forms that unconnedled with their 

 more modern representatives would puzzle the antiquarian, but there is nothing truly 

 in the nature of incunabula. 



If then the mystery of the birth of primitive implements is not to be approached 

 on these islands; if the oldest of the tools cannot boast an age of more than twenty 

 centuries, modern indeed in the history of the human race, what have we left ? Simply 

 the rude implements of an intelligent people who had arrived at a certain stage of 

 civilization when they left their home and sought another in the Pacific. What they 

 had formerly must have been greatly modified by the new environment, but in their 



* In iSso Rev. Mr. Forbes .speaking of his district of Kealakeakua said, '.^xes are very rare There is not a native carpenter who 



owns a set of tools, to my knowledge on this island [Hawaii], the population of which is .,o,ooo or more. Jlere and there one owns a saw and 

 an adze ; rarely any however e-xcept canoe diggers, and the tools they have usually belong to .some chief for whom they work." Rev. H. T. 

 Cheever. Thr hlmul ll'fiiil of lli,- Pacijii-,x>- 221. TXevi \'ox\l, 1S51. 



[337] <5) 



