There’s a secret on the North Shore, just a few steps from Pipeline, that’s generally covered in sand. But when a swell big enough slams into the fabled 7 Mile Miracle, that sand is washed away and a set of ancient petroglyphs are exposed. And on March 12, those petroglyphs saw the light of day again.
“It’s kind of crazy that I was able to come down and see the petroglyphs, this is super exciting,” North Shore resident Robert Lanfranchi told KHON2. “It looks like it’s laying out some sort of story, hard to tell what might have been going on or why they decided to carve what they did in this spot, but whatever it is, it’s incredible.”
This is not the first time the symbols have been exposed, but it’s a relatively rare occurrence. The last time was back in January, right after the Eddie ran, but that was only for a few short hours. Prior to that, the last time anyone saw them was in 2016.
Although no one knows for sure what they mean, experts have theorized that they may have some sort of spiritual meaning.
“They’re man-made images, called kiʻi pohaku, literally, ‘stone images’ that were carved and I would say through pecking, using harder stone tools on the softer sort of substrate rock,” explained Dr. Kekuewa Kikiloi, associate professor at the Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii Manoa. “We can probably assume that they depict a story, just because of human nature, but then some people have sort of hypothesized because the name kiʻi generally means statue, it might be some kind of spiritual function that they are thought to possess. Like how you have wooden images at museums, those religious images, kiʻi, are thought to fetch the spirits of the ancestral gods to that place and to that image, and so the image in the rocks may serve as a similar function, but we’re not entirely sure.”
The age of the petroglyphs is also a bit of a mystery. Dr. Kikiloi told KHON2 that they “could date anywhere from 80 AD to 1778.”
By the afternoon of March 13, however, the petroglyphs were once again hidden from view. As the high tide came up and the sand filled in, they disappeared from sight. And with Hawaii’s winter season nearing its end, it might be quite some time before they’re seen again.
