Walk across certain lava flows in Hawaiʻi and you will find the rock has been marked by human hands — figures with outstretched arms, rings within rings, and thousands of small drilled holes. These are kiʻi pōhaku, and they are among the oldest records the Hawaiian people left of themselves.
The short answer
Kiʻi pōhaku means “images in stone” — the Hawaiian word for petroglyphs. Pecked into hardened lava over centuries, they recorded births, genealogy, journeys, and prayers in a culture that carried its history through memory and mark rather than through a written alphabet.
Long before ships arrived, Hawaiians had no written script. Knowledge moved through moʻolelo (story), oli (chant), and hula. Yet across the islands — and most densely on Hawaiʻi Island, where young lava offered a smooth, dark canvas — people took stone tools to rock and left images that have outlasted nearly everything else they made. To stand before them is to read a message that was never meant for us, and that still, somehow, speaks.
What does kiʻi pōhaku actually mean?
The term is refreshingly literal. Kiʻi means “image” or “figure,” and pōhaku means “stone.” Together they name exactly what they are: images in stone. Hawaiians made them by pecking, bruising, and abrading the surface of basalt with harder stone tools, chipping away the weathered outer skin of the lava to expose the lighter rock beneath. The contrast is what makes a petroglyph visible — and what makes it fade as the exposed rock slowly darkens again over generations.
What do the symbols mean?
Honesty first: many meanings are simply not known, and Hawaiian cultural practitioners are careful not to over-explain what the carvers did not write down. But some motifs recur so consistently that their sense is well understood. Human figures — triangular torsos, stick limbs, sometimes dozens marching together — are the signature image. Circles, dots, and lines carry their own vocabulary. A single dot could stand for a child; a dot inside a circle for a firstborn; a dot within two circles for the firstborn of an aliʻi, a chief. Concentric rings with a central mark are sometimes read as a record of travel, the rings counting the members of a party who had journeyed around the island.
Later carvings show sails, horses, and even initials — proof that the tradition kept living as the world around it changed. The rock was never a fixed museum; it was a surface people kept returning to.
They wrote in stone what they carried in memory — not to be read by strangers, but to be left where the land itself would keep it.
Why the piko and the drilled holes?
At Puʻuloa, in what is now Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, the lava is dimpled with more than 23,000 markings — the largest concentration in the islands. Many are not pictures at all but puka, small cupped holes drilled into the rock. The name Puʻuloa can be read as “hill of long life,” and families with ancestral ties to the area came to place the piko — the umbilical cord stump of a newborn — into one of these holes. The act asked the mana of that sacred place to grant the child a long life and to root them, quite literally, to the land of their ancestors. Each puka was made to hold a single child’s piko. Read that way, a field of thousands of holes becomes a field of thousands of blessings.
Where can you see them?
The greatest fields are on Hawaiʻi Island. Puʻuloa, reached by a boardwalk trail off Chain of Craters Road, is the largest and among the most sacred. Along the Kohala Coast, the Puakō Petroglyph Archaeological Preserve holds more than 3,000 carvings, some dating back roughly eight centuries; their simple linear figures suggest they are among the oldest on the island. Petroglyphs appear on other islands too, though often in smaller, quieter clusters. Wherever you find them, the etiquette is the same: look, do not touch. The oils on human skin and the pressure of a foot or a chalk rubbing accelerate the erosion that will one day erase them.
How do petroglyphs connect to other Hawaiian art?
The same visual instinct that shaped kiʻi pōhaku runs through the whole of Hawaiian design. The bold, repeating human figure echoes the geometry of kākau, the traditional tattoo, and the patterned bands of kapa barkcloth. These were not separate crafts but one shared language of line, rhythm, and meaning — a way of marking identity, genealogy, and belonging onto skin, cloth, and stone alike. Seeing a petroglyph helps explain why so much Hawaiian art favors clean silhouettes and symbolic figures over realistic portraiture, and why the motifs of kākau-inspired design still feel so rooted and alive today.
Why do they still matter?
Because they are one of the few things ancient Hawaiians made that we can still stand in front of, exactly where they placed it, on the same lava they walked. A chant can be lost when the last voice that knew it falls silent. A petroglyph endures — weathering, yes, but enduring — a quiet insistence that people were here, that a child was born, that a family belonged to this ground. In a culture that measured wealth in genealogy and connection, that is not a small thing to leave behind.
Frequently asked questions
What is the Hawaiian word for petroglyphs?
Kiʻi pōhaku, meaning “images in stone.” Kiʻi is an image or figure and pōhaku is stone.
How old are Hawaiian petroglyphs?
Many are difficult to date precisely, but some at sites like Puakō are believed to be roughly 800 years old, and the tradition continued for centuries, with later carvings depicting sails, horses, and letters introduced after Western contact.
What do the dots and circles mean?
Some are well understood: a dot can represent a child, a dot inside a circle a firstborn, and concentric rings a record of travel. Others remain unknown, and cultural practitioners are careful not to invent meanings the carvers never recorded.
What is the piko tradition at Puʻuloa?
Families drilled small holes (puka) into the lava and placed a newborn’s umbilical-cord stump (piko) inside, asking the mana of the sacred site to grant the child long life and bind them to their ancestral land.
Can you visit and touch Hawaiian petroglyphs?
You can visit protected sites such as Puʻuloa and Puakō, usually by marked trail or boardwalk, but you should never touch, walk on, or make rubbings of the carvings — contact speeds their erosion. Look, photograph respectfully, and leave them as you found them.
Keep reading from the journal
- Traditional Hawaiian Art Explained: Kapa, Kākau & the Symbols Behind the Designs
- Kākau: The Meaning Behind Traditional Hawaiian Tattoo Designs
- Hawaiian Mythology: Gods, Guardians & the Stories of the Islands
- 20 Beautiful Hawaiian Words and What They Really Mean
- How the Hawaiian Islands Formed: the Pacific Hotspot