Menehune

Hawaiian tradition holds that the Menehune lived on the islands before the Hawaiians arrived. They were small, between sixty centimeters and a meter tall, and lived hidden in forests and valleys. Their skill was construction. They could build fishponds, irrigation ditches, temples, and roads in a single night if their numbers were sufficient.

The Fishpond

The Alekoko Fishpond on Kauai is a stone-walled aquaculture enclosure 274 meters in diameter, built with cut and fitted basalt blocks. Hawaiian tradition attributes it to the Menehune, who supposedly completed it in one night by forming a double line and passing stones hand to hand from a quarry several kilometers away. The fishpond is real. It appears on the National Register of Historic Places. Who actually built it, and when, is less clear.

One Night Only

The Menehune’s rule was that any project had to be finished between sunset and sunrise. If dawn arrived before the work was done, they abandoned it and the structure remained unfinished forever. Several incomplete stone walls and watercourses in Hawaii are explained this way. The rule served the narrative: it explained both the existence of impressive ancient structures and the presence of ruins.

The Earlier People

The 1820 Hawaiian census of Kauai recorded 65 people who identified themselves as Menehune. Some archaeologists and historians have proposed that the Menehune tradition preserves a cultural memory of the Marquesas Islanders, an earlier Polynesian settlement wave that was displaced when Tahitian settlers arrived around 1000-1200 CE. The “small hidden builders” may be the later arrivals’ way of remembering the people who were already there.