Science: Diggers, Jan. 27, 1947

• Share

(4 of 4)

Nearest and most probable source of the stone (a "cyclopean" basalt naturally divided into columns as it cooled from molten lava) is 15 miles away by sea. The heavy masses must have been ferried across to Nanmatol on rafts or dugouts, and horsed into position by main force and primitive awkwardness.

Nanmatol has never been properly studied. When Germany owned Ponape before World War I, a few scientists made sketchy reports. Nonscientific visitors have written up the mystery without solving it. Some archeologists believe the ruins to be 3,000 years old, and attribute them to "Protomalayans" or "Protopolynesians." Another theory favors kinky-haired Melanesians from the New Guinea region, who build less ambitious islands off their own coasts today.

No one has guessed what social force (the lash or superstition) called forth so mighty an effort, or what happened to the people who built Fortress Nanmatol. Director Peter H. Buck of Honolulu's Bishop Museum (whose mother was a New Zealand Maori) hopes the U.S. will clear up Japan's neglected mystery and retell the tale of the daring, industrious primitives who sailed the Pacific sea reaches millenniums ago.