Geology of Pu‘ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site, Hawai‘i

Part of the NPS Geodiversity Atlas, which describes each park's significant geologic features and processes. Geodiversity is the full variety of a park's natural geologic resources — rocks, minerals, sediments, fossils, landforms and physical processes — and its soils. The atlas comes from the NPS Geologic Resources Inventory.

The park's Geologic Resources Inventory report. Image from the NPS's page.

The site

Pu‘ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site lies on the northwestern shore of the island of Hawai‘i, about 56 km (35 mi) north of Kailua-Kona in the district of South Kohala. Established on August 17, 1972, its roughly 34 hectares (86 acres) protect the ruins of Pu‘ukoholā Heiau — "Temple of the Hill of the Whale" — built in 1791 by King Kamehameha the Great during his rise to power. It looks southwest over Kawaihae Bay along the Kohala coast, where blacktip reef sharks (Carcharhinus melanopterus) gather in large numbers.

The site also protects:

1. Mailekini Heiau, a luakini heiau (temple) later turned into a military fort;
2. the ruins of Hale o Kapuni Heiau, a temple dedicated to sharks, believed to be sacred ancestral guardians;
3. the Royal Court (Pelekane), where Kamehameha held diplomatic meetings with foreign visitors;
4. John Young's homestead, thought to hold the remains of the first Western-style house in Hawai‘i.

The ground beneath the temple

The site sits where the slopes of Mauna Kea and Kohala Mountain meet, on lava flows from both volcanoes. Its landscape inspired Kamehameha to found a religious center here: a prominent hill made an ideal setting for a great temple. The heiau caps the high point of a lava dome about 15 m (50 ft) high, overlooking the shore toward Kawaihae Bay and Pelekane Beach.

• Most of the site is basalt of the Pleistocene Hāmākua Volcanics, from the Mauna Kea volcanic center.
• The northern part holds Pleistocene flows of the Pololū and Hāwī Volcanics from Kohala, the oldest volcano on the island. The Kohala flows here are at least 120,000 years old.

Geologic map of the site, from the Geologic Resources Inventory. NPS.

Maps and reports

The site's Geologic Resources Inventory maps and reports are in the NPS DataStore, and a Soil Resources Inventory project has been completed. More: the site's home page.

Pu‘ukoholā Heiau and Mailekini Heiau from the air. Image from the NPS's page.

Sources

Based on "NPS Geodiversity Atlas—Pu'ukoholā Heiau National Historic Site, Hawaii," National Park Service, drawing on Thornberry-Ehrlich (2011) and Sherrod and others (2021); a work of the United States government in the public domain.