Ena Sroat is a Hawaiian Archeologist
Week 20 of 2021 | She's like Lara Croft! And has encountered spirits.
Fig 1. Meet Ena Sroat, archeologist from Hawaii researching cultures and encountering spirits. Nbd.
Who knew that people like Ena Sroat existed in real life? She’s an archeologist. And you don’t meet those every day! Much less one who’s a fourth-generation kama’aina, which means “child of the land” in Hawaiian. (If you say someone’s Hawaiian, meanwhile, that means someone of Hawaiian descent.) Oh. And she’s also had interesting interactions with the spiritual world. Mmhm.
First, we’ve gotta acknowledge her fascinating name. Ena, it turns out, is from the name of her Danish great-grandfather’s ship. (She’s got adventure in her blood!) The last name Sroat is from Germany, possibly “Schroeder” before immigration mistranslations.
Ena is a real life Lara Croft. She’s a Hawaiian archeologist who has so many stories, I was overwhelmed. In this interview, we talk about buried gold coins, artifacts of imperialism, spirits, the Hawaiian concept of mana (life force that transcends time and connects us to all our ancestors and descendents), and… whether time exists.
Head’s up, this a longer one. I say that with nerdy glee. Read it in chunks! Or scroll for the pics and read later.
(Thanks to our mutual friend Heather Hiatt for the introduction!)
Enjoy the interview!
Annie: Maybe you can tell me what it means to be an archeologist.
Ena: I kind of think of archaeologists as storyteller detectives, because you walk the earth and you're trained for things to catch your eye, just tiny little tidbits. You're only given a few clues, but you have to somehow build a story in a narrative that can tell the story of human history and interactions. It's being a mystery hunter and a storyteller.
Fig 2. Could you imagine Indiana Jones doing an excavation in a mall Claire’s? Ena describes this moment: “I did urban archaeology in a store in Honolulu. First, we dig into the surface using an excavator. Then, we hand dig due to the high potential for sites and burials.”
Annie: Our mutual friend who I know you from, Heather, is also from Hawaii and also of Caucasian descent. I thought that was interesting!
Ena: Well, Hawaii is really a melting pot. It was like London, basically. Back in the day, there were maybe 300-500,000 Hawaiians or more) that lived here. But after Hawaii became a vital provisioning port with the otter pelt trade with China, and later plantation industries, many, many nationalities came to the islands.
Annie: So, did you always want to be an archeologist even when you were a kid? How did you know that this was a job?
Fig 3. Trench! Heck yeah, this was the archeology content you asked for. These test trenches measure approximately 2 ft x 20 ft and are one of the early steps of a dig.
Ena: I have always been really passionate about history. I grew up listening to my grandmother's stories. She was a real extrovert. Oh, my lord. At 5 o'clock in the afternoon, in her apartment overlooking the ocean. She had the blue Danish eyes and everything was blue. Well, she would sit there and have her highball and talk. She had all these great stories about growing up in Hawaii and sneaking out of the house with her brother. They’d go down to the Moana Hotel when the ships came in, and all the young, good-looking officers would come in, and there'd be big dance.
Annie: Oh my, oh my.
Ena Sroat: She was a wild card.
I just love history. As a little kid, we moved to the windward side of a Oahu Island, which is the opposite side from Honolulu. So this is Haiku Valley, where the Stairway to Heaven is.
Fig 4. Wow, Haiku Valley and the Stairway to Heaven look incredible. (Images from Google.)
Ena: It was all jungle, all the way to the mountains, the stream. And so when I would come home from school as a barefoot little kid (‘cause I didn't wear shoes till high school), I would just wander off into the jungle all by myself for hours as a little girl. You couldn't do that anymore, but hours, I would spend outside rock hopping. I knew every rock in my stream, but there were all these ancient Hawaiian remains to the rock walls, there were artifacts and so—
Annie: So did you encounter any spirits as you were spending all this time in the stream?
Ena: You know, I didn't have any ghost stories per se on the stream. But I did on the property that I grew up in. It was an old Hawaiian plot, where a Hawaiian family lived in traditional Hawaiian times.
When I was a little kid, I used to stay up reading a lot. And I would just hear footsteps walking every single night, back and forth, back and forth, down the hallway. And it would never actually come in my room, but I would always hear it.
Or I'd hear things dropping in the living room — like, loud. The most distinct event that I remember was a funny one: I was sitting in the bathroom doing my business. And of course, I had closed the door very securely, but then I was looking at the door knob and it started to move.
Annie: Oh, no.
Ena: It wasn't just a little jiggle. It was like a full turn. And so I, of course, thought it was my older brother. I was like, "Bennett, don't open the door." And it kept going. I was getting mad. "Bennett stop it."
And then it opened ajar… and then stopped. I went into the living room. I was very mad. I saw my mom and asked, "Where is Bennett?"And she said, "Well, he's sleeping in his room." So I went storming in there, and sure enough, he was asleep. And there was no one else in the house. So that was interesting. Oh, and I forgot to say, I heard my name, “Ena,” too.
Annie: Was this a family home? Did your family live in it for a couple of generations prior?
Ena: No. So we moved in '76, but the house was here. It was a 1946 house, which is old by Hawaiian standards. But the land itself is old. The land itself has been passed down through generations through Hawaiian genealogy.
Right next to the house, we had a lot of big coconut trees. Sometimes the Tongans came to clear the coconuts. They were pointing out this one landscape area, and they said, "Well, this is really odd. The way that it's planted, and the types of plants that are being used make it look like it was a burial ground." From their Polynesian cultural perspective, that would make sense.
So even to this day, in the room where I sleep, the dresser— I don't notice it, but my significant other is very type A. So if things move, he notices. The dresser always is moving and he's like, "Oh man." So he puts it back. And yeah, so things like that.
Annie: ‘Well, come on spirits. We already redecorated. I don't need your interior design advice.’
Ena Sroat: It's not that much, but it's enough to be noticeable.
But also, there's another room that my cat, would go into when it was little, for the first four years. It would go up to the wall, and it would just look up for a good half hour. You could see his eyes tracking something, and I couldn't see anything. But he was obviously seeing something. And he was just like watching TV. So I figured he was seeing something.
Annie: ‘There's that cat spirit who I know! There's the raccoon spirit. Dang, that mouse spirit just keeps getting the best of me!’
Fig 5. Next up, typical archeologist stuff. Lava tube, anyone? This is a cave within a volcano, formed by lava flow.
Fig 6. An artifact: fishhook made out of a shell.
Annie: Can you tell me about a project that you're currently doing that's super exciting archaeology-wise? Did you have to dig and all that?
Ena: So to get from Honolulu to Waikiki, you'd have to walk along this backshore sand dune, almost like a ridgeway. And so there's a lot of burial sites there because the sand dunes were typical of burial sites, But I've been studying more the marsh land area, which was converted into salt pans in the early 1800s, late 1700s. So I've been doing a lot of that.
Ena: Right now, I'm having fun studying early immigrants to Hawaii and particularly, I'm studying the sampan, Japanese fishermen, 'cause they were all in one little neighborhood. So I'm coming up with occupation layers that have the Japanese beer bottles and tea cups and rice bowls.
Annie: Wow. That's so interesting. I love the idea of looking at a beer bottle and seeing Japanese on it, and using that as understanding a time of occupation. Right, is what you're saying?
Ena: Mmhmm. So Japanese beer bottles are interesting. The Japanese didn't really start drinking beer until after 1906, so that can help me date even when the bottle doesn't come from. Or if it says “Japan,” then it post dates 1921, because that's when the US mandated that all imports coming to the United States actually state the origin in English, rather than say Nippon or in kanji characters.
Fig 7. Japanese beer bottles from the early 1900s. The image is from a paper by an archeologist studying the same topic.
Ena: Another thing that I've been studying is the salt pans, which are absolutely fascinating.
Annie: Wait. Can you say that word one more time? Salt pans?
Ena: So they're called salt pans or salt works. For an archeologist, it’s perfect: the soil is a sandy clay, so it's pretty impermeable. They would take that and build berms [a strip of land bordering a canal], and then bring water through channels and fill it ever so slightly. And then they would dry it out, and create the salt.
Fig 8. Salt pans in the mid-1800s, south of Honolulu. Salt was used to preserve provisions, like pork, for sailors.
Ena: What was interesting is that the local Hawaiians began using them for their own cultural purposes. There's been a lot of burials that I found, traditional burials, that I found in the salt pans, which is interesting.
We were at a data recovery and got down to the top of a salt pan berm, and then all of a sudden, this glitter starts popping up and we had found a cache of gold coins from San Francisco!
Annie: You found a pile of gold?
Ena: Yeah, a pile of gold coins. It was a great find.
Fig 9. Woooow. Buried goooooold.
Ena: We think it was enough to buy a horse, which would be like buying a car back in the day. The interesting thing is that someone didn't come back for it, and the only reason you wouldn't come back for it is that something happened to you.
I just remember it was fun because I was the project director, and in order to keep everything safe, I had to bring the gold coins home that night. You're like, "Here honey, here's what I brought home from work today."
Annie: So did you have any spirit encounters that day?
Ena: No, I didn't.
Annie: They’re like, "Hey, I've been looking for those coins."
Ena: I think that person probably had worse things to go after since they didn't come for their coins!
Annie: How is being an archeologist different from what you envisioned it to be?
Ena: I think the cultural idea about archaeologists is of academic archaeologists. For example, you’d go to graduate school and then Jordan and do these summer digs. That is certainly a part of archeology, but that's not where most archeological professional jobs are available.
It's mostly in cultural resource management. Since the 1970s, a lot of native rights have come to the fore. So there have been a lot of federal, international and state laws to protect cultural heritage. When you have all this development and construction, in certain sensitive areas, you have to have archaeologists as well as environmental studies before the project can be approved. Hawaii has some of the strongest state laws in terms of this, since we have a living culture.
Annie: So can you explain the idea of a living culture?
Ena: We can study the traditional Hawaiian culture in the past, but it is still an evolving culture. So interpretation can be tricky, because you have just one slice in chronology, but then you have this cultural perspective.
And it's also interesting because you do have living cultural practitioners or people through their genealogies have passed down certain knowledge. So you can integrate that firsthand account with what you're finding in terms of the material culture [objects]. That way, you could maybe understand the cosmology or why they might have faced rocks in a north-south direction, or things like that.
Fig 10. The Zoom where it happened. Convo’s getting deeper!
Annie: Yeah. You know, I think growing up Chinese-American, my family has always been pretty superstitious. So we would have little mirrors hanging on the wall opposite windows, facing out, and I don't do that now. But maybe my life would be better if I did. I don't know yet!
But yeah, all that superstition, it comes from somewhere. And all cultures seem to have them — warding off evil spirits or that sort of thing.
Ena Sroat: Yeah, along those lines, in Hawaii, you have Ti leaves. It's a plant with long green leaves, and that wards off evil spirits.1 My house, being an older piece of property, is surrounded by Ti leaves. You'll see people tie it to their cars or bicycles, and wrap it around stones as an offering. So that becomes a protective talisman.
But I think for most cultures that are really still attached to the land and their ancestors, our idea of the spirit world is very different from their idea of the spirit world.
For instance, in the Hawaiian culture, your ancestors are very present and you would have dialogues with them for guidance. You’d have them within your house. You had your little shrine, but it really is a discourse. It's not like they're there and you're here.
You're still connected. There's this idea that an energy of life runs from past, present and future but in all directions. So there's no— the concept of time is real tenuous for them. So from your head, your “po’o,” that connects you to your ancestors. And then from your stomach, your navel, your “piko,” that connects you to the land and to your present family. And then through the genitals, you’re connected to your descendants.
There's this idea of Mana, which is a spiritual force that infuses everything, what affects you is not just a present thing. So if you're killed by a chieftain and your bones are used, desecrated and turned into a spittoon, that doesn't just affect you. It also affects your ancestors and descendants. They have a loss of Mana as a whole genealogy. So your ancestors are very present on a daily life, yeah.
Annie: That's a beautiful idea. So I took a DNA test, and actually.… I thought I was 100% from mainland China. I've never heard of anyone in my lineage who was anything else. And then when I saw my actual DNA result I was like, "Oh my goodness. There's a lot of everything in here." And that was really unexpected. Okay, so… (pulls up map)
Fig 11. Oh yeah, we got maps now. My ancestors certainly liked to travel and mingle, I see.
Annie: So it... There's... It even... I mean, it starts from here. It goes from Italy to China and Japan. So it moved.
Ena: Fascinating.
Annie: It moved a lot.
Ena: Maybe you had ancestors on the Silk Road
Annie: Merchants! Maybe my ancestors were traders of some kind. Well, that's very interesting. But it just made me wonder. Who were they, really? Because I'll never get to meet them. Who was this Armenian person that is tied to me by blood? And I guess according to what you're saying, according to that Hawaiian idea, they are still tied to me.
Ena: In Hawaiian culture, there's this idea of Mana, which is a spiritual force that infuses everything. That means that what affects you is not just a “present” thing.
So if you're killed by a chieftain and your bones are desecrated to be turned into a spittoon or something, that doesn't just affect you. It affects your ancestors and it affects your descendants. They have a loss of Mana as a whole genealogy. So it's very... Your ancestors are very present on a daily life.
And you know some modern theoreticians believe so too, is it's just a matter of you trying to access them, right? It's just starting a conversation. And learning how to listen. Yeah.
Annie: But will they speak English?
Ena: No. I don't think... I think it's more conceptual.
Annie: ‘I was gonna have a conversation with my great, great, great, great Turkish grandmother, but she didn't speak English, and I didn't speak that whatever language her empire spoke 400 years ago.’ Wow.
So what is your view of human life and death now, after everything you’ve done with burial grounds and artifacts of human life? And this Hawaiian idea of— what is the term again, of a web of connections everywhere?
Ena Sroat: Mana is the Hawaiian word for spirit. It is a sense of the energy that infuses all of matter. The more I've thought about it, there's so much similarity between quantum theory and a lot of energy medicine.
Your body actually sends out whole auras of energy. They can read your heart, the electrical pulse of your heart. I think it’s like 12 feet out, at least, with the instruments that they have now. There's all sorts of scientific evidence of the fact that you're not actually limited to your space here, that you're actually on a quantum level, like that your cells are connected instantaneously.
Now, I'm of the opinion, after all this experience with archeology and talking to Hawaiians and reading quantum theory and whatnot, and dabbling a little bit in energy medicine, I think that humans are part of something vast that we can’t really define or comprehend. I think it's more likely than not, because we all are energy, and there is no such thing as time.
Annie: Okay.
Ena: So to me, it must be absolutely fantastic, the interactions at all levels at all times. We're all one big web.
Annie: So you did just mention very casually that there is no time, and I was wondering if you could explain that idea, 'cause that is a shock to me. I know about the present, but the idea of no time, are you talking about the movie with Amy Adams with the squid...?
Ena Sroat: Actually, with quantum physics, there's no absolute time. It's a human concept.
Fig 12. This is a NASA artist’s illustration depicting “the metric expansion of space.” Um, so this is news to me, but according to the article where this image comes from (and get ready): “The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein's theory of general relativity.”
Annie: You know that Amy Adams movie that I'm talking about? Where she talks to these squid-like creatures, and all time is all at once?
Ena: I didn't see it, but that's the concept. It actually stems from Einstein's work.
Annie: What do you mean there is no time?
Ena: It's a dimension. Actually, it's a construct. It's not an absolute reality. Time is a warp. For instance, in quantum physics, it does say that the interactions are instantaneous. There's no spatial distance. So I could be on one end of the universe and another being on the other end of the universe, and what I think could actually affect that other being instantaneously, so there's really no space or time as we understand it. I don't understand it, but I do know that that the concepts of quantum physics are profoundly cosmological and surreal.
Annie: So I could be married and divorced and with triplets?
Ena: Yes. And there's actually quantum physicists that honestly and very seriously are considering this multi-universe concept. Yeah.
Annie: I don't know if I want triplets or even octuplets. Oh, my goodness. Or a universe where we’re all squids.
Ena: Yeah.
Annie: Wow. I feel like there would be so much more to talk about, but I feel like this has been juicy enough. Could you send some photos for the newsletter, maybe you in your archeology outfit, if there is such a thing? It's in my head, it's an Indiana Jones look.
Ena: Me covered in mud, yes. That's about it.
Annie: Lara Croft. Literally what Lara Croft looks like.
Ena: Yeah, with the hard hat on and the ponytail, yes.
Annie: Do you wear a hat?
Ena: When I'm on a construction site, I do, yeah.
Annie: Okay. Is Lara Croft an archeologist?
Ena: She's an adventurer.
Annie: My gosh. Okay, well, I'll stop the recording then.
Did you make it to the end? If you read everything, you are amazing. And probably wanna become an archeologist now, am I right?
Thanks so much for speaking with me, Ena. I’m going to invite her back for a follow-up in the fall. Could be volcanoes-oriented. Subscribe and comment with any questions you want to ask her!
Talk to you next week.
So. Evil spirits. I sent a follow-up email to Ena asking, “So why are there bad spirits? Why do they have to be mean if they’re already spirits?” She says:
“That’s a good question, and very perplexing—I don’t have an answer for that. For Hawaiians, a bad spirit could be someone who, because of their actions in life, had not been able to jump in the proper direction to be with their ancestors, and were then left to wander disconsolately.” Aw. We don’t want any spirits to wander. But… tbh, kinda petty of the spirit world to punish them? Like, we’re all dead, bro. Can we just enjoy our dead life with little to no drama?