What an exciting day in the field! After breakfast we immediately left for the Ka’a’awa Valley and plotted our course for the day. Jeanette pointed out the terraces she found during her team’s geology survey the day before. Shelby and I were very thankful for the help after yesterday’s initial survey which turned up very few results. Once John arrived at the site, the three of us made our way through the cattle pastures, crawled under the fences, and hiked up the south wall of the valley to reach our destination. We were unsure of what exactly the terraces would look like but they were unmistakable once found. The terraces were not as distinctive as I had imagined, but the linear changes in elevation against the grass landscape were identifiable from the ground.

After we had plotted the feature with the Trimble GPS unit, we continued up the hillside and found another location that was possibly prehistoric in nature. Due to the deep cut in the hillside and the recent infrastructure nearby, we were unable to identify whether or not the site was the result of the fairly recent construction of the well nearby. After we had tagged the well and adjacent rock features in the GPS, we headed back down the hill in order to investigate another ridge of the wall.

When we got close to another densely vegetated area, I noticed some of the trees had a bright pink plume sticking out of the canopy. This was the same tree that I had noticed at the rock platform from the other day, so naturally we had to investigate further. My instincts were correct and we wound up in the middle of a large rock feature at the source of the dense woody vegetation. Because of the canopy and the location close to the valley wall, we were unable to record a point for the feature; however, once we crossed to the other side of the rock mound, we found another possible terrace and plotted a point adjacent to the feature.

Dense vegetation surrounding a large rock feature

Again, we made our way down the hillside in order to head back to the vans for lunch. Along the way, we found one of the rock walls that Dr. Lipo had told us about. We hiked alongside the wall to obtain the coordinates for the linear feature, which ran approximately 50 meters up the side of hill.

After lunch, we hiked the north wall of the valley in search of the heiau that was pointed out to us previously by John Morgan, the owner of the Kualoa Ranch. Although we did not find the feature, we did find another large rock feature hidden under dense vegetation. It seems like most of the non-terrace features are covered in dense vegetation which is helpful in identifying where potential anthropogenic features are located, especially when the surrounding landscape consists of low grasses and light vegetation.

We had a few snags transferring our ground control points from the Trimble units into the computer, but after a few attempts and a little help from our friends, Shelby and I successfully imported our data and created two maps which show the features that we have identified and our areas of investigation for tomorrow.  Now that we have the momentum from finding multiple large sites, I am looking forward to finding new study areas to map tomorrow.