Located in the western direction of Pacific Ocean, as per the latest satellite imagery and LiDAR surveys, baffling details have come to light about Nan Madol.
Dubbed "Venice of the Pacific," the city has even been likened to the legendary Atlantis and has left historians and researchers dumbfounded for decades. Now, it looks like Nan Madol was more advanced than initially believed.
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The inspiration behind horror writer H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, researchers are embarking on the journey of learning just how advanced the city was, as they excavate its ruins and devise plans to safeguard the city in the middle of the Pacific Ocean as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
No ghost city in the Pacific Ocean, instead it's centuries of lost knowledge
The aerial surveys and satellite images have uncovered a "sophisticated and extensive landscape of cultivation features hidden under Temwen Island's vegetation,' Daily Mail reported.
Such a discovery has prompted researchers to rethink what they once knew about the tiny city, as it now looks like the societies were well-versed in navigating agricultural planning.
What looks like a ghost city is just years and years of filtered knowledge, visible in the ruins of the city, such as in its canals and stone foundations. Not too far away from Nan Madol, Baltimore's Cultural Site Research and Management (CSRM) Foundation's scientists discovered an extensive mapping of irrigation terraces. These were presumably once used to guide freshwater reserves through the city.
Leading the project and author of Mapping Archaeological Landscapes from Space, Dr. Douglas Comer said in a US State Department Release in July 2019:
"The consensus among archaeologists has been that there was no intensification of agriculture in Micronesia by means of formal field systems."
He also noted that the civilization of this tiny Pacific Ocean island, somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, had come to rely largely on fermented breadfruit as one of its only sources of preservable foods.
This also implied that they had come to hone their skills in cultivating taro, which in turn enabled improved food security and economic strength.
The first detailed description of the island dates back to 1874, penned by Polish ethnographer and oceanographer John Stanislaw Kubary, the Pohnpei State Government revealed. According to archeologists, the stone city was at its peak between 1100 to 1628 AD and fell under the hands of the local Saudeleur monarchs by the 17th century.
The local name of the Pacific Ocean island can be loosely translated to "the space in between," and it stands at a little more than one square mile, about a hundred times smaller than several Hawaiian islands, at that. According to Mark McCoy, an associate professor at Southern Methodist University in Texas,
"It now looks like Nan Madol represents a first in Pacific Island history. The tomb of the first chiefs of Pohnpei is a century older than similar monumental burials of leaders on other islands. To me, in its prime, Nan Madol was a capital. It was the seat of political power, the center of the most important religious rituals, and the place where the former chiefs of the island were laid to rest," he told Fox News in October 2016.
According to Rufino Mauricio, the only archeologist in Pohnpei, building Nan Madol could have entailed more might than the Pyramids of Giza, as it was the culmination of four centuries of hard work. They would've had to work with 750,000 metric tons of rocks, which translates to an average of about 1,850 tons a year. Good.is reported him saying,
"Not bad for people who had no pulleys, no levers, and no metal.”
In order to protect and safeguard the remnants of the city from its own untamed, erroneous vegetation, which can deteriorate the thick stone foundations, researchers on-site collaborated with the coordinated with the United States Forest Service and Arbor Global last year.
Locals of the Pacific Ocean island were trained on how to "use and maintain chainsaws, climb trees, prune branches, fell trees, and plant appropriate vegetation for the site," the US Forest Service revealed.
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