PU'U LOA

A Big Mix

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There are so many different types of petroglyphs here that it looks very confusing at first. It's important to remember that these are not stories and they are not historical recordings. The ancient Hawaiians had an oral tradition for telling stories, and because their language does not have a past tense they showed little or no interest in history as we think of it. The ancient Hawaiians were not crazy, and no one in his right mind would trudge out into the middle of a lava desert and spend the day under a hot sun with no water around to record an event that specialists with trained memories could recite whenever the information was needed. These are magical symbols carved for magical purposes.

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