Correspondent's Notebook

The Pacific’s mystery temple

13 November 2009

It is not very often in a reporter’s career that he or she gets the opportunity to trace the steps of Indiana Jones. However, Australia Network’s Pacific Correspondent, Sean Dorney, recently returned from one of the most mystifying places in the Pacific Islands – the ruins of the temple city of Nan Madol on Pohnpei Island in the Federated States of Micronesia.

Between the 12th and 16th centuries, Nan Madol may have housed some 5,000 people on a maze of artificial islands constructed over a reef. We join Sean as he heads off by motor canoe with a Pohnpeian guide, Sochky Stampson.

In the 30-plus years I have been covering the Pacific there is one place I have often hankered to go and investigate.

It’s an intriguing place called Nan Madol – which translated means “Places in Between”. That’s a reference to the fact that Nan Madol is an ancient complex of manmade islands separated by canals and built on a reef on the south east coast of Pohnpei, the island that hosts the capital of the Federated States of Micronesia.

Archaeologists say Nan Madol probably reached its zenith in about the 12th Century AD. Approaching it from the sea is the recommended route to appreciate what it must have been.

STAMPSON: We are in Nan Madol. This is Nan Madol. And Nan Madol is divided in two parts – upper and lower. This upper side, where we are, belongs to the royalty.

This is a temple. And it’s, it’s the place where they buried the chief. It’s a burial tomb – inside.
Nan Madol – it’s about 200 acres. In this 200 acre there are about 108 islands. Each island they have names and purposes. They have place for food storage, temple, clinic island, assembly hall, different kinds of purposes.

Many of these manmade islands have been overgrown by mangroves.

STAMPSON: They use the basalt rock on the outside and they use the coral inside. They fill the inside. If you look through the wall you can see the coral inside.

At one end of Nan Madol there is a pool next to the islet that was the hospital.

STAMPSON: It’s a clinic. And you see the pool afront us it’s a place where when the people are cured by their sickness then they do a final rinse in there.

The question is how did these Pacific Islanders transport the rocks and the huge basalt beams here? The mystery even stumps the President of the Federated States of Micronesia, Emmanuel Mori.

MORI: Even I, I’ve been wondering how did they manage to carry all those, you know, rocks! They’re thousands of pounds. And I just, I just can’t! Somebody has to tell us how did they move those huge rocks from wherever they manufactured them to that place?

DORNEY: The most impressive structure in the complex remains the temple. There’s a small fee, three US dollars a head, to go inside.

My guide, Sochky Stampson, told me he has shown people like George Lucas, co-creator of the Indiana Jones character and movies, over these ruins – the focal point of which is the central burial chamber.

STAMPSON: They found 16 skeletons in there.

It was a tomb reserved solely for the priest emperors. No women were ever buried here. So it appears that this was a major religious site for something like 400 years.

STAMPSON: Some of the people, the Pohnpeian, they haven’t even seen this place. Some they very, they very superstitious and they’re afraid to come to this place.

But many outsiders have been fascinated. Another mystery is what brought about Nan Madol’s demise.