In the Kōhala district, a peninsula on the northern tip of the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, are the remains of a 25-square-mile system of pre-contact agriculture. Called the Kōhala Field System, its network of mounds and shallow depressions is so extensive it’s visible on Google Maps: Zoom in on Kōhala and the archaeological infrastructure is apparent, interconnected ripples underneath the contemporary cattle fields.
“Like swells on the ocean, ” said Kehaulani Marshall. That’s how she described the land to me when I visited in 2019. Kehau is the executive director at Ulu Mau Puanui, a nonprofit organization dedicated to researching the Kōhala Field System. Their work is guided by culturally-centered science, or ʻike kūpuna, as Kehau called it. It’s an approach that focuses on learning through hands-on experiences to rediscover lost ancestral knowledge.
At its peak in the 1700s, the Kōhala Field System fed between 30,000 to 120,000 people. But the techniques of how to properly plant and maintain the rain-fed fields was lost after the arrival of Europeans. The spread of Western disease decimated the Hawaiian population, and when elders die, so does traditional knowledge. When Ulu Mau Puanui was founded, it was known that the area was a co-cropped with kō and ‘uala, Hawaiian sugarcane and sweet potato, but the knowledge of where to plant it and when had been lost.
