Kahoʻolawe
The island of Kahoʻolawe is the smallest of the eight main Hawaiian islands and was never heavily populated. Kahoʻolawe is downwind of the high volcano of Haleakalā on Maui and so it lies in a rain shadow, as virtually all of the moisture borne on the tradewinds falls on Maui's lush northeast coast.
With little rainfall, agriculture on Kahoʻolawe was limited to ʻuala, or sweet potato, rather than the more preferred, but water-hungry kalo. While farming on the island may not have been productive, the waters near Kahoʻolawe abound with fish. The numerous fishing shrines that dot the island attest to its importance to Hawaiian fishermen from the larger nearby islands.
Exploring Kahoʻolawe in 1913, Bishop Museum archaeologist John F. G. Stokes came across an abandoned fishing shrine on the southern coast that contained items found nowhere else in Hawai'i or the Pacific.
The southern coast of the island of Kaho'olawe is dominated by cliffs, some of which reach heights of more than 250 meters (or 800 feet). Stokes stumbled upon a fishing shrine in a rock overhang at the bottom of a cliff face, filled with numerous stone and wood kiʻi, or images, wrapped in tapa cloth and set upright. Also found were a number of tiny kiʻi carved from sea urchin spines. These are unique to the Kaho'olawe fishing shrine, being found nowhere else in the world.
The site was used as both a shrine and a place to manufacture makau, or fishhooks. Stokes found hundreds of makau in various stages of production. Interestingly, there were very few metal fishhooks, suggesting that the shrine was abandoned soon after the early 1800s. After that time, metal brought by foreign vessels quickly replaced bone and turtle shell as the primary material used by Hawaiians to fashion fishing gear.