An ancient sinkhole that many say holds archaeological evidence to Hawaii’s earliest Polynesian past is a topic of concern for one city-run panel.
The Oahu Historic Preservation Commission meets today to discuss Ordy Pond at Kalaeloa — formerly Barbers Point Naval Air Station — and how the panel might “research the constraints” and “provide recommendations for the long-term care and best use of the site.”
The old pond, which sits on Navy lands, was originally planned to be handed off to the state.
But in early June the Hawaii Community Development Authority ruled against accepting 213 acres of Navy lands, which included Ordy Pond near Tripoli Road, due to cost concerns for conservation and environmental cleanup of the property.
The pond itself is a place where the Navy reportedly disposed of ordnance- related scrap for decades, which led to it being named Ordy Pond.
And although the city panel is investigating the pond site’s future, the Mayor’s Office says it has no plans to own it.
“To our knowledge, Ordy Pond is on the property that the Navy (Base Realignment and Closure program) offered to HCDA, and they declined to take it,” Scott Humber, the mayor’s communications director, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser via email. “No offer has been made to the city, and at the present time we have no interest in the property.”
Under a separate action in June, the city took ownership of about 400 acres of former Navy-owned land at Kalaeloa that would supposedly go toward public recreation use, the city says.
That land acquisition, consisting of six parcels, was in the making since the city, along with the Navy and the National Park Service, first applied for the land in 1999. The transfer of the Navy land to the city did not cost the city anything.
Still, the potential research of the Ordy Pond site is tempting to those in the scientific community.
Among them, Thomas S. Dye, a Honolulu-based archaeologist and historic preservation commissioner, recently published a white paper on the subject.
In his July 6 document titled “The Significance of Ordy Pond,” Dye described the sinkhole as a unique formation that can trace some of the earliest Polynesian settlements on the island.
“Sediment cores from Ordy Pond have yielded a wide range of materials used for historical studies; two of these — charcoal and pollen — have been particularly influential in determining the timing and environmental effect of Polynesian discovery and settlement,” Dye wrote. “Charcoal is absent in sediments below 6.4 (meters), indicating that natural fires were unknown on Oahu in the early Holocene. Above this, microscopic charcoal flecks identified in the sediment are interpreted as wind-borne particles from the smoke of cooking fires lit by the early Polynesian settlers. The age/depth model yields an estimate of A.D. 884–1121 for the charcoal at 6.4 (meters).”
“The estimate from Ordy Pond supports the current consensus archaeological estimate of Polynesian discovery in A.D. 940-1130 that also considers age determinations for plants and animals introduced by Polynesians,” he wrote. “Further study of Ordy Pond using modern techniques might add considerable detail to historical inferences about the events surrounding Polynesian discovery of Hawaii. Ordy Pond is significant for the information on Hawaiian history it has yielded and is likely to yield.”
In the same document, Dye notes that Steve Athens, a retired archaeological consultant and a chief investigator of Ordy Pond, agreed via email that the pond site is “worthy of preservation.”
“As you know, it is a more or less unique repository of detailed information about environmental changes and the dating of those changes that occurred throughout almost the entire Holocene, including the advent of the earliest Polynesians to Hawaii,” said Athens. “Indeed, Ordy Pond harbors a 7,500-year detailed record of those changes in its laminated sedimentary record. … There is much more information that could still be obtained (e.g., a full pollen study of the entire core, the DNA fingerprint of human presence in the sediment, and other studies).”
The commission meeting begins at noon at the Frank F. Fasi Municipal Building, 650 S. King St., sixth-floor conference room.
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Star-Advertiser staff writer Andrew Gomes contributed to this report.
