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I'd like to welcome you to the Church History Library's "Men and Women of Faith" lecture series. Our lecture this evening is entitled, "Iosepa: Utah's Pacific Islander Pioneers through an Archaeologist's Eyes," presented by Benjamin Pykles. We are pleased to be able to hold our lecture series in this historic Assembly Hall. In the past few lectures, I've mentioned a few things about the Assembly Hall. And tonight I'd like to tell you just a little bit more about it. Now, back in the 1980s when they were remodeling the Assembly Hall and upgrading some of the aspects of it, one problem that was faced by the architects and designers was to be able to design a building which would accommodate both musical acoustics and the spoken word. Usually this presents a dilemma, because a building that's right musically is not necessarily right for the spoken word. The sound system for the Assembly Hall is quite innovative. During the remodeling, the dilemma concerning where to place the new speakers proved to be a challenge. Dean Jones, the senior design engineer, who worked in the engineering support services for the Church at that time, has stated, "We couldn't have anything visible in terms of speaker clusters or clusters in the ceiling, which you just couldn't do in such a gracious, lovely, old building. We also wanted the hall to remain as live or sound-sensitive as possible because of the music that would be produced here. Finally, we decided that the best approach would be to get the speakers as close to the people as we possibly could. Unfortunately, in the case of both the Tabernacle and the Assembly Hall, the pioneers placed the benches so tightly together that we couldn't attach the speakers to the pew backs. Your knees would knock up against them. So we had to come up with another solution." Their solution was to locate the speakers, more than 800 of them, under the benches. He continued, "We put them at an angle so that the sound originating from those speakers would bounce off the floor, then off the back surface of the bench directly in front of the listener, and then back into the chest area of the listener." It actually has a double bounce. They also designed the system so that it can be shut down in areas where people might not be seated. This arrangement reduces the echo in the room. Brother Jones concluded, "We did one more interesting thing. We put in a series of time delays with our sound to create the illusion that all sound actually originates at the rostrum. We delay the sound from the under-pew speaker for a few milliseconds so that the sound coming from the talker actually arrives at exactly the same time as the sound from the speaker. This has the effect of making the listener and the mind think that the sound they hear really is coming from the talker's mouth. It works extremely well." So basically, you just think you're hearing me, when actually I've already finished speaking. Ingenious, don't you think? This evening, we are so excited to have Ben with us and the lecture that he is going to present. Ben Pykles was born and raised in San Diego, California. After completing a bachelor's degree in anthropology at Brigham Young University, he earned a PhD in anthropology with an emphasis in historical archaeology from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

He was an assistant professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Potsdam before joining the Historic Sites Division as a historic sites curator in July 2011. He is the author of Excavating Nauvoo: The Mormons and the Rise of Historical Archaeology in America, which was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2010, and which also won the Best First Book Award from the Mormon History Association in 2011. He is married to Chelsea Pettit, and they are the parents of four children. During his five years as a professor in New York, he researched and conducted archaeological excavations at Iosepa, a turn-of-the-century Mormon Pacific Islander colony in Skull Valley, Utah. We are pleased to have Ben with us tonight. Ben. [APPLAUSE]

Thank you for that very kind introduction, April. And thank you, Sister Burton, for that prayer. I needed it. It's wonderful to be in this historic building with you. It's a special treat to talk about history in such a historical place. And so I'm very grateful for the opportunity that was extended, the invitation to come speak with you today. I want to get something out of the way quite early here. When I tell people-- normally, I meet someone on an airplane or in another setting, and they hear that I'm an archaeologist, they often will say one of two things. They'll say, that is so cool, just like Indiana Jones.

I'll have to say, I'm sorry, that is not what real archaeology is like. I've never carried a bullwhip. I've never wielded a machete, or ran around running from Nazis, or anything like that. The other thing that they will say, almost inevitably, is that is so great. I always wanted to dig up dinosaurs, too! And unfortunately, that one is also not true. Those are paleontologists, not archaeologists. So I'm sorry if that disappoints you. And I won't be offended if some of you want to leave now if you thought we were going to talk about dinosaurs or Indiana Jones. Truthfully, I won't be offended. But we should talk a little bit about briefly-- my purpose tonight is twofold. I want to give you a brief introduction to what archaeology is, just so that we're on the same page, and so that you can see the contributions that historical archaeology, in particular, which is my discipline, can make in the study and understanding of the past. And two, most importantly, this is the series "Men and Women of Faith." I hope that we will all leave tonight with a much deeper and greater appreciation for the Latter-day Saints who lived and settled at Iosepa in Skull Valley. They are remarkable individuals, and I hope to do them justice tonight in what I have to say. You heard April say that my degrees were in Anthropology, and that is true. That's because archaeology is a subdiscipline of anthropology. There's typically four different disciplines under the umbrella of anthropology. Most typically when we think of anthropology, we think of cultural anthropology, which is the study of living humans and their cultures. But there's also the dimension of anthropology called physical anthropology, which studies the human body, human sickness, the human skeleton, even, those aspects of the human condition. There's also linguistic anthropology. You can imagine what that is, the study of human languages and how they've evolved over time. And finally, there is archaeology, which is the study of humans, not dinosaurs. Mostly, I think I have a definition here, the study of humans through their material remains, their artifacts, their features, even their homes that they left behind. Now, my studies have focused specifically on what's known as historical archaeology, which I prefer this definition. It's simply the archaeology of the modern world or the last 500 years of human history. A lot of times people think, why do we need archaeology if we've got history? The historians take care of that part of the human past. Why do we need to do archaeology? They think of archaeology as things that are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years old. Well, there are several answers. All historical disciplines, including archaeology, are after-- this is an Indiana Jones pun, excuse me-- the Holy Grail, the past. We know that the past existed. We know there were real people there. We know that there were real things that happened. But unfortunately, we can't jump in our time machines and go back in time and experience that firsthand. So we rely on the things that have survived in the present. Historians and historical archaeologists like myself, one way of doing that is by using the historical record, the documents, the diaries, the journals, the newspapers, the photographs, all of these written, paper-based documents that survive into the present. But you'll see that that leaves us with plenty of gaps. Those records can be biased. They can be incomplete, inaccurate. And often, we have to fill in those gaps with our own understanding and knowledge. In historical archaeology, we also contribute to that understanding of the past with the archaeological record, the artifacts that we excavate, the different material remains that were left behind. We also contribute to that record with oral histories, talking to people, talking to the descendants of those that lived there, talking to people that know something about the culture that you're studying or the human group. And finally, if we're lucky enough, we can even use ethnography, which is a typical tool of anthropology, to go talk to living peoples, maybe living in the same culture as you're studying or people that have a similar culture. And you study their way of life in the present in hope you gain insight to how they lived in the past. You'll notice, though, that even with all of those various sources of data, you're still left with an incomplete record in the end. There are still holes. There are still gaps. And we, as archaeologists, or historians, or anyone studying in the past, have to fill those gaps in. And we do that with our own subjective knowledge, we have to fill it in. So the point is, is that even though we'd like to get right at the real past, we can't. And no matter how much we study, no matter how much we know, there's always going to be a little bit of wiggle room there for the researcher to interpret it.

People, like I said, always ask, why do archaeology of something so recent as Iosepa? After all, it's only 100-and-some years old, 1889 to 1917. Don't we already know everything about your Iosepa from the journals, the diaries, the newspaper articles, the photographs? And the answer is no. And so I often talk about the four C's of historical archaeology. These are things that historical archaeology can do to contribute to our understanding of the past. And one is simply confirm what we already know. That may not seem very glamorous, but it is important. Maybe a second line of evidence that helps us understand what we know about the past. But it can also complete. A lot of times, the historical record is incomplete. Either records have been burned or lost, or they're inaccurate, which brings me to the third C, correct. People write down all sorts of things. Sometimes they're not truthful in what they write. Or they think they're truthful, but they don't understand that they're representing things from a particular perspective or opinion. And we inherit those, as historians or people living in the 21st Century. And if we take those things at face value, we may come to an incorrect understanding of the past. If you can contribute archaeological remains to that and other strands of evidence, it often helps correct those misunderstandings and helps us get at a more correct, more true understanding of the past. And I would not be honest if I didn't add this one. Sometimes, what we dig up and what we find in the ground simply just confuses us. And that's just the truth of it. It's difficult sometimes to make sense of what we find. It doesn't match up with what we think, we expected to find. And often, it's in those tensions that the real understandings come to light in the end.

My purpose tonight is not to give you a full, in-depth history of Iosepa. I wish I could do that, but I want to really highlight some of the archaeological things about Iosepa. But I will briefly give you an overview of the town so that we know what we're talking about. I love this little fact, that there were Latter-day Saints in the South Pacific several years before there were Latter-day Saints in what is now Utah. Some people don't understand that. But the first Latter-Day Saint missionaries left Nauvoo in the 1940s and arrived in the South Pacific by 1844, the same year that Joseph Smith was murdered in Illinois. And they began proselytizing.

They didn't get to Hawaii, the Sandwich Islands, until the 1850s. And among those were faithful men like George Q. Cannon and others that began proselytizing among the European populations that were in the islands, and weren't having much success. And so they turned their attention to the native islanders. And the gospel began to spread quite well among the native population. As was true of most converts in the 19th century, they were encouraged to emigrate to Zion here in Utah. The Hawaiian government, though, at the time, had a ban on immigration. The native islanders were prevented from coming to the continental United States until about the mid 1870s. And at that time, the ban was lifted. And these converts that were waiting in the islands began to come to Utah. And they first began to settle not far from here, actually, at the Warm Springs, the hot springs here on Beck Street here in northwest Salt Lake. And they began to settle there, a small group. Maybe 75 or so at its peak. And unfortunately, they weren't well integrated into the white European-American society of Salt Lake City. They had a different skin color. They wore different clothing. They spoke a different language. And they had different customs. And unfortunately, the existing population, they weren't as integrated as they'd like to be. The First Presidency at the time, Wilford Woodruff and Joseph F. Smith as his counselor, were concerned about this. So they formed a committee, a committee of three European Latter-day Saints, three Polynesian Latter-day Saints, and they set out looking for a place which the Pacific Islanders could call their own. They looked at ranches all the way from Logan and Cache County, all the way down to the shores of Utah Lake in Utah County. And ultimately, they settled on a ranch in the Skull Valley, which became Iosepa. This was an existing ranch owned by a brother named John T. Rich. And it was decided this is the best place because it had the existing facilities. It was also the right price. They had existing buildings, they had lots of livestock that was part of the sale, lots of good spring water coming from the mountains to the east. It seemed like an ideal situation, and the price was right. So the Church put up the money to purchase it. They did so, actually, by forming an independent company, which was called the Iosepa Agricultural and Stock Company. This came at a time when the Church was being persecuted by the federal government. In 1887 there was a law passed by Congress called the Edmunds Tucker Act, which essentially dis-incorporated the Church and prevented the Church from owning any more than $50,000 worth of assets. This became very difficult, but the Church got around this by setting up small corporations headed by faithful Latter-day Saints. And those corporations acted independently of the Church on paper, but in reality, much of the funding, and the influence and leadership was coming still from the Church leadership. These Pacific Islanders arrived at Iosepa in the Skull Valley on the 28th of August, 1889. And from that day on, they always celebrated this day, the 20th of August, as Hawaiian Pioneer Day. We're getting ready to celebrate Pioneer Day coming later this month, and they would celebrate it in August. This was the day that they arrived in their new homeland. Here's a picture of some of the Latter-day Saints at Iosepa. And I hope you notice something right away, that there are no grass skirts, for example. No leis, nothing that would call your attention to the Pacific Islanderness of this group. And I find that very interesting as an anthropologist. And we're going to talk about this a little more, how these people took what was available to them and made it meaningful in their own very significant ways, drawing upon their newfound faith, Mormonism, and drawing upon their traditional cultures from the Pacific Isles. Here's another photograph. Very good-looking bunch, children, adults, all ages. Iosepa was around for 28 years. And by the time that the settlement was closed, they were some individuals that had were born and raised in Iosepa and knew nothing else. That was their home, and they were sad to leave. They set out a town. This is the plat map. The original map is found in the Tooele County Courthouse. And we're going to talk about this map at some length a little bit later in the presentation. But I hope you notice, right off the bat, that it looks pretty typical for a Mormon settlement, gridded layout, large central square. And like I said, we'll talk about that again. Like I said, they set up a stock company. Unfortunately, their enterprise began right as the depression of the 1890s began, also. And this proved difficult for them to make a profit. Several individuals had purchased shares in this company, and the Church had invested a lot of money. And it took several years before they could even begin to recoup all of the investment. And that actually had something to do with why the settlement was ultimately closed in the end.

They were successful towards the end. And then something remarkable happened. In 1915, Joseph F. Smith, who was then the President of the Church-- and by the way, I should have said this earlier, Iosepa is the word Joseph in Hawaiian. And this settlement is named after him. Not Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of Mormonism, the first prophet, but Joseph F. Smith, his nephew, who was an early missionary to the Sandwich Islands at the age of 15, and who was beloved by the Pacific Islander Saints. They loved him. He was, in many ways, their champion for most of his life. And by 1915, he was getting quite old. He was the President of the Church. He actually passed away just a couple of years after this. And I genuinely believe that he was concerned for the welfare of the Pacific Islanders and what would happen to them after he passed away. There were other factors, the economic factors, and the cultural factors. But he, with his counselors and the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, decided to build a temple, one of the very earliest outside the continental United States, on the island of Oahu at Laie. And that was announced in 1915. And when that announcement came out, as we can imagine, some of the Pacific Islanders at Iosepa wanted to go back and help build that temple. And so they did. And it started a movement. And by 1917, there were a few remaining. And even at that time, Joseph F. Smith encouraged them to go back, and even offered to help pay their passage back. He said, it's time for you to return to your homeland, build up the Church there, and gather in those islands. This is a very interesting change in the history of Mormon practice. For most of the 19th century, all of the converts were encouraged to gather, first in Kirtland, Missouri, Nauvoo, ultimately Utah. And then towards the turn of the century there, the turn of the 20th century, things started to change. And the emphasis on gathering to a single place changed. The Saints were then encouraged to start gathering in their own stakes of Zion, and building up the Church in their respective areas. And this is ultimately what happened with the Iosepa saints. So in 1917, the townsite was sold to another livestock company, the Deseret Livestock Company. And over the next several years, that company, as they began to use the land, they pushed down several of the buildings, converted the land back to grazing pasture. And that's kind of how it is today. It's still owned by a ranch company, Ensign Ranches. And they use it for grazing cattle, growing feed for those cattle, and ranching on the land. So that's the story of Iosepa in a nutshell. And probably the most important thing I can tell you about this story today is that it is not a forgotten story. And this is one of the most wonderful things about Iosepa. Many of you here tonight I've met at Iosepa on Memorial Day weekend, when people from all over the state and even from the islands gather every last weekend of May for a celebration of the heritage of these Pacific Islander Saints. Here's a picture of some of them. They gather at the cemetery that is still there at the settlement. They decorate the graves with the flags of the island nations. They've constructed a pavilion there in the shadows of the mountains overlooking the townsite and the cemetery. And they celebrate. They celebrate their past and their heritage. And they remember their ancestors. They sing, they pray, they dance, they do traditional arts and crafts. They hike up into the mountains and remember their faithful, wonderful pioneer ancestors. And I would encourage all of you, if you want to experience something very remarkable, to take a trip out to Iosepa next Memorial Day and experience that for yourself.

And in case you want to do that, let's talk about where it is. Where is Iosepa? Here is the southern tip of the Great Salt Lake. And you can see I-80 skirting around the southern tip of the lake. And over on your left, you begin to see the Salt Flats beginning. That is the Skull Valley. There's not much in the Skull Valley today. At the very southern end of the valley is the Dugway Proving Grounds, where the Army tests its ordinance. And little farther north of there is one of the Goshute Indian reservations. There's a small number of Native Americans that still live on that reservation. And just a little bit north of there, about 15 miles south of I-80 is the Iosepa settlement. Like I said, it's still ranch today. You can see the bright green circles sticking out in the otherwise fairly arid landscape. These are the crop circles of the Ensign Ranches. There are still a few houses from the original Iosepa settlement there. Not very many, maybe just one or two. This is about the location that we're looking at, with the approximate townsite and the cemetery. And here's a view from the mountains in the east looking west over the valley. It looks fairly arid. And it would be without the spring waters that are channeled down into the valley floor. And actually, once it gets water, it becomes quite beautiful, and quite lush, and quite verdant.

As I began my research at Iosepa, I knew that one of the biggest obstacles was going to be to try to figure out where things were in the landscape, because as you go there today, other than the cemetery, which is very well-preserved and nicely maintained, there are not a lot of evidences of the previous settlement. There are a few foundations that still survive, and that are overgrown with the sagebrush and the cheatgrass. Here are a few of them. This is a foundation that's actually right at the center of the public square. And this was the foundation of their schoolhouse and meeting house where they met. Some other small features, this is an abandoned root cellar where they would have stored their vegetables and other things. We do have some photographs from the Utah State Historical Society about what these homes looked like. These are typical four-bedroom, bungalow cottages that were very typical of turn-of-the-century America. Actually, typical of the Hawaiian Islands, also. But the challenge was, you see these things in the landscape, but you have no idea where you are. And so the challenge was, can we figure out where we are? Can we figure out where the central square was? Can we figure out where the blocks and the lots were? And this became problem number one for the archaeological project. What I did is, when we got a hold of this map in the Tooele County Courthouse, I happened to run into the deputy county surveyor, Matt Clark. He was a tremendous help. I showed him this map and asked him if he knew of any way that we could take this map and figure out where things were out on the actual landscape. And he noticed something that I would have never noticed, just because I don't have that surveying background. If you look on this map, we're looking just south of the public square there. And there's an annotation on this map, two of them, actually, that I had seen, but I had no idea what they meant. It says stone monument, and there's a little circle. That's one circle, and it says stone monument. And then there's another one at the very bottom of the map. And they're aligned in a true North-South position. Matt immediately knew what that was. And he said, Ben, those are the original survey markers that the surveyor who laid out this townsite placed over 100 years ago. He says, often those survive. He says, we should go out there and try to find them. If we can find them, we'll be able to use the dimensions on this map, and begin to plot out all of the different corners of the different blocks, and lots, and streets, and be able to, literally, recreate the town plat on the landscape. So we went out. We had some dimensions and some angles. And it was not long before we found that first stone monument right exactly where it should have been. This was remarkable, very exciting. It's a square stone. It's got the crosshairs, an X incised in the top of it. And that was placed over 100 years ago, and still standing in its original position. We got very excited. We were halfway there. So we went searching for that southern stone monument, knowing that if we could get that one also, we would be able to do what we wanted to do. We didn't find it right at first, but we did find some other remarkable things as we were surveying around out there and looking for this stone, this very small stone. We uncovered this original fire hydrant in its original location. Originally, Iosepa had several fire hydrants installed in 1908, about. The Church had invested a large sum of money to bring pressurized water into the town site. In fact, I believe it is one of the earliest towns in all of Utah to have such a system. Many of these have been hauled off over the years, salvaged as souvenirs. There's actually one up at the cemetery site that someone had placed there as a marker and a monument. I also believe there's one at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Laie that serves as a token, remembrance of this settlement. But this one had been preserved because it had been overgrown with sagebrush. And we just happened to notice it as we were looking very carefully for this other stone monument. And it's wonderful that it's there. It's this last surviving token monument of what the town once was. We also found things just on the surface other than the stone monument. This, actually, was quite remarkable. This is an ice skate. And I hope that the same image comes to mind that came to my mind when I first found this, this notion of Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders ice skating in the Utah desert. I tease people that that's going to be the title of my next book. But I don't think that's forthcoming. It's about the size of my foot, actually. About a size 12 or 13. And you can say, well, how do you know that comes from the Iosepa Saints? Well, I can't say for certain. But there is a patent date on that ice skate, and it does date to the early 1980s when the Iosepa Saints were there. And we have records from the historical record of the Hawaiians flooding the fields with that pressurized irrigation, letting it freeze in the wintertime, and actually ice skating in the Skull Valley. So, a wonderful artifact that tells a really wonderful story. Ultimately, we did find that second stone monument. It was buried by a few inches of soil, and had been pushed over just slightly by some kind of agricultural activity. So it took us a long time. We were poking the ground with sticks and instruments trying to hit something, and ultimately we found it. This is what it looked like when we uncovered it and pushed it upright. Here it is. And once we put it upright, and we took the measurement between the first and the second one, it was just perfect. Exactly the same dimension and angle that was recorded on the map. And when we had those two in place, we were very excited. We knew now, for the first time, that we could use this map to navigate within the town site, and start to understand where things were, where people lived, where the public square was, all these different things. This became the critical moment when I knew that we were going to be able to do something here. So what we did is we teamed up again with Matt Clark of the Tooele County surveyor's office. And they have some wonderful equipment. It's not the GPSes that we have in our cars or that we take camping with us. Those ones are accurate to maybe 15 feet. These ones are accurate to below a centimeter accuracy. And we took those instruments out. You know how they work. They work with satellites and triangulate your position. We took those out, and we started plotting the different corners of the blocks and lots all across the townsite. And it was amazing how the landscape just came to life. Things that we had walked over for months and months, little dips, little rises, little depressions that we just thought were natural features from the wash coming out of the mountains all of a sudden started making sense. They were lined up with the corners of streets, and blocks, and lots. And we said, wow, this was a really interesting place. They were leveling the land off to get flat building surfaces. They had leveled out their streets and put ditches down the sides of them. And all of a sudden, like I said, the landscape came to life. At the same time, I had been doing a little bit of research here in the Church Archives just across the street from Temple Square here, and had uncovered the Church owns a few in their collection, just a handful of original deeds from the settlers. And this is a list of those. It shows where they lived, what block, what lot, even sometimes the type of structure that they had. So this was great. Now we knew where these blocks were, where these lots were, and now we even knew who lived on them. I showed this list to a group of Pacific Islanders early on in the project, and was so excited when several people in the audience said, that's my ancestor, that's my ancestor, that's my auntie, that's my uncle. And I got to know many, many of the descendants of these people that way. And that has been, and continues to be, a great blessing. And wonderful friendships have emerged from that. So we plotted those. We went out and we marked the corners of those lots that we knew that we had deeds for, understanding that that would be the richest way to uncover additional data about these people. We knew their descendants now, and we would start investigating their properties. And it turns out that we started-- I'm getting ahead of myself. What I want to do now, is I want to talk a little bit specifically about this townsite, the way it was laid out. And like I said earlier, it is a very typical Mormon settlement, with a central public square-- it's almost 17 acres in size-- and with two broad main thoroughfares; one going North-South, one going East-West. This should be reminding you of our very own here Salt Lake City. It's laid out in the same way with the Temple Square and the two broad axes and wide streets. Obviously, this is patterned after Joseph Smith's plat for the City of Zion, which he developed for Missouri in 1833, and which became the pattern for almost all Mormon settlements throughout the 19th century and even into the 20th century. Each one's a little bit different, but the key principles and the key features remain the same: central public square, or squares, in this case, gridded axes for the streets and avenues. So what's interesting about Iosepa-- here on Temple Square we call our central square Temple Square, and that is meaningful to us. The Pacific Islanders called their central square [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] Square, which means to look for or seek God or the heavens. And you start to understand the parallels here between a Temple Square and an [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] square. In many ways, this is symbolic of having God, and this search and quest for God in the heavens, this desire to be with God at the center of their lives, the center of their community. This really is a reflection of the kind of people that they were. You start to look at the streets. What is fascinating about this, is you have this typical Mormon base, if you will, this plat. And on top of it, the Pacific Islanders superimposed their own meanings. Meanings that they're drawing from not only their religious tradition, but their traditional cultures, as well. And this comes out in the naming of the streets and the features. The avenues, which all run East-West are named after specific places in the Hawaiian Islands. Many of these places are where the settlers came from, where they were baptized, and where they lived and immigrated from when they came to Utah. The northernmost and the southernmost avenues are places on Maui, Wailuku and Kula. The next innermost ones are places on the big island of Hawaii, Waimea and Hawaii. Going further in, we have two places on Oahu, Honolulu and Laie. These are the names of the avenues. And finally, and appropriately, the main East-West avenue is Iosepa, named after, again, Joseph F. Smith and their settlement. Same principle is true for the streets that run north and south. These are named after people, significant Pacific Islander Saints who played a significant role in the history of the Church in the islands and here at Iosepa. The main North-South street is named after Jonathan Napela. This was a remarkable man. He was a judge in the islands. And he was one of the earliest converts to be baptized by the missionaries. He soon got with George Q. Cannon and helped translate the Book of Mormon in the Hawaiian language. He taught the missionaries how to speak the Hawaiian language so they could be more effective in their proselytizing. And he was actually one of the very first Hawaiians to come to Utah. He got special permission from the government to come and visit in the 1860s, where he received his endowment in the Salt Lake Temple here, was ordained an elder, I believe under the hands of Brigham Young, and went back to the Hawaiian Islands, and spoke glowingly of Zion here in Utah. And actually created quite an excitement among the people to want to gather. And it was only a few years later that the Hawaiian government lifted that ban. And they came in numbers, and continued to come throughout the duration of the town. Other streets are named after-- unfortunately, the census records are incomplete. The 1890 census, as most of you know that do genealogy, most of that 1890 census was destroyed by fire. And so we don't have that. That would have been great to have that early census. The settlement was founded in 1889. It would have been wonderful to have that census the year after to see who those very earliest Saints were. We don't have that. I suspect these are surnames, last names of some of the settlers. They happen to be also names of one of the chiefesses in Hawaii, and some of the families, as well. Here are two interesting street names on the other side of the Napela Street. These are religious names, one from the Bible, Solomona, and one from the Book of Mormon, Nepi, which is Nephi. Going further, you have additional names of significant people that settled in Iosepa. I'm not going to try to pronounce their last names. I'm not that good. But the gentleman there, John William, he was one of those three that was on the committee established to find the settlement which would become Iosepa. And he actually owned stock in the company. And he was a significant leader and figure in the colony. Finally, two other significant families. The streets farthest there to the east are named after families that lived at Iosepa, as well. So the point here that I hope I'm getting across, and this is a pattern that we're going to follow for the rest of tonight's presentation, is that they were taking things that were available to them, the Mormon template. That's what they had to do. That's how Mormons laid out their town. But taking these things that were available to them, and making them significant and meaningful in their own very special ways. You can imagine that as they walked through their town site, and looked at the names of these places and these people, that they were remembering their homelands, remembering their beloved ones. And these brought back meaning and memories to their lives that made this place significant to them in very special ways. We started our archaeological excavations on this block and lot. Block 10, Lot 1 was owned by a fellow and his family named John K. Mahoe. And these are some of the decedents of Mahoe. Their names are Sadowsky. And I got to know them quite early on. And we've become quite good friends. And they said they were coming tonight. Are the Sadowskys here? There's Mike. I hope you get a chance to talk to Mike later today. Mike is a great, great grandson of John Mahoe. And it has been a true pleasure to get to know Mike and his family and to share some of this with them. It's really what makes it all worth it.

This is actually the only picture that I know of of some of the Mahoe children. This was provided to me by Mike's family. Two of the Mahoe daughters are pictured in this image. They had eight daughters and one son. A couple of those children died while living at Iosepa and are buried in the cemetery out there. Notice here that they are dressed in more traditional Hawaiian clothing. They've got leis and flowers. They're in dresses, and they're dancing in the Hawaiian style. This is significant. It wasn't just one or the other. They did not abandon their traditional culture just because they came to Utah and adopted Mormon theology. They used it in ways that were meaningful and significant to them to make this place truly a home for them. So what we did with the Mahoe property is we teamed up with some geologists down at Brigham Young University who have this special equipment called ground penetrating radar. And just very briefly, I'm not going to get to archaeological on you here, this is an antenna that shoots radar waves into the ground, which is really nothing more than a light wave. And as those light waves encounter different things in the earth, it could be a different type of soil, different compaction, it could be a buried rock or a buried foundation, it could be a buried well, It bounces off those things and returns to the antenna. And that antenna is connected to a computer, which records the speed at which that light returns, and then converts the speed into a depth. And so this gives you an image. It's not very fancy. It's not like Jurassic Park, where you see a perfectly articulated velociraptor skeleton. It's simply a blip on the screen here. You can see there's a buried pipe. And what you see on the computer screen is just that little V-shaped image. But you stitch all of these images together, and you come up with some very interesting things that help you know where to dig. That's another question I always get, how did you know where to dig? Well, this is one way that we do it. We run the radar antenna across a certain area, going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Takes a long time. You have to be very patient. Here's a smaller antenna that we used. It was on a stroller cart. Makes it a little bit easier. Ultimately, you'll end up with an image like this. This is as if you were a bird looking down onto the ground. And you see these bright red areas. These are the areas where the radar was encountering something underneath the soil and reflecting back at a certain depth. This is at a depth of 2 and 1/4 feet. We were very interested in these different anomalies, and especially this one outlined in yellow, because it was particularly bright, particularly strong, and kind of in a circular shape. And we wanted to investigate that. So what we did is we came out with students from the university that I was teaching at in New York. We came out twice. In 2008, this is the group that came out then, and again in 2010. And we initiated excavations at the townsite, having first received permission from the landowner. And it was like any other archaeological dig. Some people have these very glamorous ideas of what archaeology is, the Indiana Jones thing. Most archaeology is very boring, hot if you're in Skull Valley, and tedious. You're on your hands and knees. You're scraping a little bit of soil at a time. You're scooping it up into your scoop. And you're dumping it into your screen so you can sift out all the different artifacts. And you're slowly uncovering, bit by bit, hopefully something that is of interest to you. These are images from 2010 when we were trying to investigate what we thought was the home of the Mahoes. Still think that that's what we had, but unfortunately, very, very little remains. We were looking at this wall feature. You can see this kind of alignment of stones. Here's the students sifting for the artifacts. You can see that it gets so boring that they have to name their screens. This one they named Mr. Sifty. So anyhow, it is exciting. I don't want to give you the wrong picture. It's exciting when you find something, of course. But a lot of it is very slow and meticulous work. Very careful, because we're trying to maintain control of where things are found. It's not just digging it up so we can see it, and take it home, and put it on our shelves. It's understanding where things were found so that we can look at patterns, and depths, and understand the history that's represented by those artifacts. Students do get tired by doing this work. This was one of the students on the day that we filled in all of our holes that we had dug. And that's one of the hardest days, because you are just exhausted. You're just shoveling all day long. And it's surprising how much dirt you can move in a month's time and you have to put it all back in one day. So this poor guy was exhausted, but he recovered soon thereafter. A lot of people tease historical archaeologists because we don't dig in the jungles of Mexico or Guatemala, or face threats of other archaeologists around the world like Indiana Jones and the Nazis and whatnot. But we did have our own threats out there in Skull Valley. Often, we'd arrive at the site in the morning, and there would be scorpions occupying our holes. And we had to shoo them away, pick them up on our shovels, and place them elsewhere. Lots of black widows at the Iosepa townsite. They loved the gopher holes. And they spin their funnel webs down those gopher holes. And it's not difficult at all. If you've never seen a black widow, just go visit Iosepa and be very careful. Bugs that I have never seen before or since. I have no idea what these are. Maybe there's an entomologist in the audience who could tell us what this is, but very odd looking bug. And all sorts of different critters, including field mice. And the reason I threw this in here is because rodents are notorious for messing archaeology up. What they do is they burrow into archaeological sites, and they create little tunnels and channels. And they often will introduce artifacts from higher levels into lower levels. And that screws us up, as you can imagine. We're trying to understand where things are just exactly in the soil. For example, in this particular instance, we found the cover of a pocket watch. It was actually right inside one of these holes. The student that found it didn't discern that it was in a mouse hole. And she brought it over to me. She said, I just found this. And we were at a depth where we were not finding anything. And we knew that we were beyond the area of artifacts. And I said, "What?" I said, "How did you find that? That should not be there." I said, show me where you found it. And she took me over to the place. And sure enough, we scraped around in that area. And low and behold, it was right inside a mouse hole. This mouse had found it, a nice, big, shiny something, and he brought it down into its burrow for us to find. So we have our own problems, too, even though we're digging sites that are only 100 years old. That's the point. Everywhere we excavated in Iosepa, we found about 12 to 15 inches below the surface, this solid layer of cobblestones. And at first, this was very puzzling to us. We didn't know if this was some kind of pavement that the Pacific Islanders had laid down, or if this was something natural, all the stones that had washed down from the foothills of the Stansbury Mountains over the years and formed this layer. We ultimately determined, as we tested various areas, that this really was natural. These were just natural cobblestones that were deposited by natural means. And this actually helped us quite a lot. We knew that when we got down to that level and all the stones were exposed, that we were past the point where the artifacts were that were associated with Iosepa. Here is that house site that I was talking about. You can begin to see the line of stones there. The students are sitting at the one end. This is before we started digging in that area. But as we went down, that wall started to appear a little bit more clearly. And here it shows up quite nicely with the big stone at the corner. And this is about all that was left of the foundation. It wasn't complete. We had that one wall, a couple of corners. We didn't have the back wall and much of the side walls. And so this was all that was left. And you think, well, gosh, that seems boring. Well, it can be. But to us, this is exciting, because this is evidence of the past. And this was the home where the Mahoes lived. Surprisingly-- well, actually not surprisingly, it might be surprising to some-- Not a lot of artifacts underneath the home. It's only things that fall through the cracks of the floorboards and things that accidentally got discarded or trampled down. So not a ton of artifacts came out of this area. Here it is at the completion of excavation. A lot of those stones that are higher up, those were ones that are just natural deposits, not in a line like that wall that you see there. And this is the extent of the excavation in 2010. They moved a lot of dirt. And that's why that one student was so tired at the end. This is 2008, and this is what I'm going to spend the rest of the time talking about tonight. You see that solid layer of cobblestones, about 12 inches to 15 inches below the surface. Those were everywhere except that one area right there in the corner of the top right of your screen. You see that there are no stones in that area, and that's not because we removed them. They never were there. And as we went down deeper and deeper, that became a feature that was very interesting to us. And it actually ended up being the privy pit for the Mahoe family, meaning their outhouse. And it was full of artifacts. This was like an archaeologist's dream come true because it is all of the things that we use to understand the past. And so, yes, my children always tease me that I dig up other people's trash, and I'm a trash digger, and all these things. But it is true. This is the bread and butter of archaeology. Lots of wonderful things in here, broken bottles, broken dishes, food remains, clothing remains, lots of wonderful things. All of them have a story to tell about the Mahoe family and about life at Iosepa. This pit ultimately went down about six feet. And actually, we only excavated half of it. That's a typical practice in archaeology is leave the other half for future researchers so they can come back and test your conclusions and your thinking. Here's a student towards the bottom. He's holding one of those metal enameled cooking pans that help us understand some of the vessels they were using to cook and serve in. People often ask OK, what did you find that was Hawaiian? We want to just pigeonhole things by the people that use them. And we want to know, OK, well, these were Hawaiians living here mostly, Samoans, and Tongans, and Tahitians, and others, New Zealanders. But what came from the islands? And truthfully, there are only two things out of hundreds and hundreds of artifacts that came out of that pit. Two things that I could say with some certainty came from the ocean. I don't know if it came from Hawaii, but most likely it did. This is one of them. This one actually did not come from the pit. This was one found at the house site. And it is a very small cowrie shell, perforated as if to hang from a necklace. And what is wonderful about this, is that if you go up to the cemetery today, you will still see these cowrie shell necklaces being draped over the headstones and on the grave sites. This is a traditional practice, and it's meaningful. And here we have evidence of it going way back, even to the beginnings of the Iosepa settlement. The other artifact that did not come from the desert of Skull Valley is this. This is an abalone shell. Sometimes we call it mother of pearl. It's about the size of the palm of my hand. And it was obviously carved in the shape of a heart. And it had been painted. We can't make out the design because much of it had deteriorated. And we don't know what it was used for. We'd like to think it was something special, but at the same time, it had been thrown away. So we don't know if it had broken and so that's why they threw it away or what happened, but obviously, this is something that I can say came from the islands. So if nothing else came from the islands, then who cares? Why do we care? Well, there's a lot of wonderful things to be said and stories to be told about the rest of the artifacts in that pit and at that house site. And this is one of my favorites. When we pulled this out of that pit, it just looked like any number of dozens of other bottles that came out of that pit, broken bottles. This is just a broken piece of a clear glass bottle. Thought nothing of it. Students put it in the bag. We took it back to the motel that we were staying, and we washed it up in the afternoon, as we typically did. And the student that was washing this piece said, "Dr. Pykles, this bottle has writing on it." I said, "Oh great." Often, bottles will have the embossed writing on the base, or on the top, or whatever. And he said, no, this one has a patent date on it. I said, "Oh, even better." We love patent dates because, thanks to Google Patents, you can type in the date and often figure out what this was. And sure enough, we did that for this particular piece. And it turns out that this is a fragment of a nursing bottle that was patented on June 19, 1894, by a guy named William Decker in New York state. Wonderful, right? Nursing bottle. That would be interesting in and of itself, but when you add the story of the Mahoe family to this artifact, all of a sudden you understand how wonderful this little piece of glass is. This is a nursing bottle that would have nourished and fed one of those eight daughters and one son, maybe multiple, that were born to John and Emily Mahoe while living in Iosepa. And one of my favorite memories of this is showing this artifact to Mike and his family after they came to visit one day, and letting them hold this artifact that his great, great grandpa and great, great grandma would have held at one time, and maybe even had fed his great grandpa. So this is Mike and his family. And this is why I love historical archaeology. You know, we can get excited about digging up neanderthal sites or other things that are hundreds of thousands of years old, and that is exciting. I don't want to offend any of my prehistoric archaeology colleagues here today. But it's only in historical archaeology where you get this very personal and even intimate connection with the past, because in many ways, it is the archaeology of us. And it's wonderful to have those experiences. So what else was found in this pit? A lot of dishes were found in this pit. And I want to spend some time talking about these dishes. And please don't lose me here. I'll go quick, I promise. But I got to get a little bit archaeological on you so that you can understand the significance of this. There were, if I can read the screen, a total of 257 pieces of broken dish in that pit. And when you glue them all back together-- this is one of the fun parts of archaeology if you have the right temperament and mindset. It's like a three-dimensional puzzle, and it takes months to do this. You lay out all the different fragments, and you literally just try to start gluing them back together. And when it works, it's wonderful, because this dish starts to be recreated right before your eyes. 257 fragments, when you reconstructed them, they reconstructed into 63 complete or partial vessels, teacups, saucers, plates, bowls. And that last figure there, the 42, the number of indexed vessels-- this is where we get a little bit archaeological. Do not read this chart. You'll fall asleep instantly. Some archaeologists have done some great work going through old sales catalogs, old Sears Roebuck catalogs, old price indexes from the companies that made this pottery, and they've been able to create a scaled value for these different dishes. And you'll see that Category 1 there is just your plain, common whiteware. No decoration, just a white dish. And they look at these sales catalogs and say, OK, in this decade, 1910 to 1919, these were selling for about $2 a dozen or something. And so they assign that a value of 1. That's the base. That's the cheapest kind of ceramic. And it goes all the way up, and you see at the bottom of the screen, to porcelains. Really nice dishes with intricate designs, sometimes gold gilding, all these different things. And those are assigned-- again, it's not just arbitrary. It's based on the actual prices that they're seeing in these catalogs. But in this case, the porcelain was assigned a value of 5. So what we did, we were able to get an age for most of these vessels. Not all of them, but you see on the slide, about 42 of the 63 we were able to do this for, and assign a value to them based on their relative price. And this opens up a whole new avenue of interpretation and significance for these ceramics. We could look at them and say, oh, they're pretty. This is nice. This is the kind of dishes they had. And this is how they ate. And that's all significant and important. But as you start to look a little bit more closely at the patterns represented in these artifacts, a new story emerges that I think is quite significant. You see that there's a distinction here. All of what we call tablewares, which are your plates, your bowls, and things that you would typically eat at your typical family table, were plain white. That's why they have the index value of 1. That's that common whiteware. No decoration, just white. Very basic, very inexpensive. On the other hand, all of what we call teawares, that doesn't mean they were drinking tea in them, but these are the presentation wares that you use for special occasions, all of those dishes were decorated in some fashion. And most of them were decorated with these floral patterns. I think I have a picture here. Here's four examples. Now you ask yourself, OK, who cares? What's so big a deal about that pattern? All of the tablewares are plain white. All of the teawares, this is without exception. There was not a single plate that had any kind of design on it. And there was not a single teacup that was just plain white.

Having never excavated a Hawaiian site before, my initial interpretation of this was wrong, but I want to share it with you because it's an interesting contrast to what I think is really going on here. If we were to find this pattern on the East Coast digging up a Euro-American site, Virginia, wherever, New Jersey, in fact, we found lots of dishes like this in New Jersey when I was in graduate school, we would think-- and this is what Europeans do. This is what Americans do. You would think that this is the way that the users of these dishes were displaying their status to their guests. You have your friends come over for tea, and you bring out your very nice china so that they can see how special you are, and how rich you are, and how wonderful you are. That's how many people work. And that's what I first did. I put forward that interpretation. I talked to Mike's cousin, I believe, in Hawaii. And I sent him the paper. And he got back to me and said, I don't think so. I'm like, really? I said, I thought that was right. He's like, no, I do not think so. That is not right. And I started reading. I started reading about Hawaiian culture. I found an ethnography, actually, by an anthropologist who had studied Hawaiians on Oahu in the 1950s. And this was a part of Oahu that was kind of remote and isolated. And the people were still living in many of their traditional ways. And I found this quote from one of the Hawaiians that this man talked to. And he said, "We are like crabs in a basket. As soon as one begins to crawl out, the others reach up to pull him back." And this is a statement that communicates a fundamental value of Hawaiian society and many Pacific Islander societies, and that is, they value interpersonal relationships. And you do not do anything that would elevate yourself among your peers, nothing. That is taboo. That's considered arrogant, conceited, prideful, and you just don't do that. If they see you doing that, they will reach up and pull you back down so that you remain equal with the rest of community. It's this unity. It's this egalitarianism. So the only instance, the only time when it is acceptable to put on a display like that is when it's going to strengthen and enforce your relationship with other people. That's why they throw big luaus and festivals. It's a way not to show how rich they are. It's a way to say, I value your relationship so much that I'm going to bring out my very best for you, because I love you, and you are my brother or my sister. And so that is what, I believe, is what we're seeing in these dishes. And it is remarkable. You would think that, OK, these dishes were made in Ohio, most of them, truly. East Liverpool, Ohio, that's the center of American pottery manufacturing. And so you're like, OK, well, this is just boring old American pottery. And it may be if you just look at the surface. But when you start to look and try to understand how they were being used by the people that purchased and used them, you start to get insights into wonderful values, cultural values of the people that were living there. So I love this part of the story. And it tells me a lot about the Mahoe family and about all the people living at Iosepa.

I see that we're almost out of time. I'm almost done, I promise. But I'll end with this next set of slides. We're shifting gears to a different type of artifact. This is a large boulder that sits in the Stansbury Mountains east of the site. And you can see that if you're standing at the boulder site, you can look down in the valley and see where the town was. And on this boulder are a number of petroglyphs pecked into the rock. Images carved by the Hawaiian people to represent, and signifying, many things. I just want to quickly go through some of these because some of them are very significant. These are the categories that we archaeologists come up with to make sense of what we see. I don't ever claim that this is what the Hawaiians were doing. This is just a way for us to categorize and organize them, and try to make sense of them. But there are some that we have no idea what they are. Perhaps some of you in the audience today would be able to see that and say, I know exactly what that is. If you do, I would love to hear it. But this could be a jellyfish. It could be something else. We just don't know. And so we had this one group of petroglyphs that we just couldn't understand. Others are anthropomorphs, a fancy term for human figures. The tradition of making rock art in lava flows or lava tubes on basalt rocks on the islands is prolific. You go to the Hawaiian islands and you can see rock art all over the place. So it's not foreign. It's not a foreign idea to peck images into rocks. But as far as I know, there's not another place in the state of Utah where you have Hawaiian petroglyphs in a desert setting, or anywhere at all. You can see that the images are slightly different. The ones in Hawaii have these squared-up shoulders and legs. The ones on the rock at Iosepa are your more traditional stick figure. But nonetheless, there's continuity there. There's one of a person in the boat. There was a small lake in the Skull Valley where they would stock it with carp so that the Islanders could catch fish and eat it. And those carp are still there today, by the way, and they get quite large. Here's an image of a group of human figures standing in a circle holding hands. Rock art is notoriously difficult to interpret, and I'm sure that we could come up with a hundred different interpretations. But the one that I prefer, and I think that resonates with most of the descendents that I've talked to, is that this represents a concept in an Pacific Islander culture known as ohana, which is the notion of family. And not family in the sense of mother, father, children, although that's part of it, but extended family, community. This notion of unity that we're all one and that we're together. And if you imagine this group of Pacific Islander Saints going to the deserts of Utah, having to band together to make that desert blossom as the rose, this becomes a quite meaningful symbol of what they were doing. There are others that are pictures of the landscape. Here is a beach scene with a palm tree and a wave crashing on the sand. A couple of seagulls in the air. We do have seagulls in Utah, but we don't have palm trees. We do have a beach, but not very big waves. So what you're starting to see, that they are taking memories and images of their traditional homeland and putting it on this rock as a way to remember and commemorate, and perhaps communicate messages and stories. This one is one of my favorite. You see that it's a sphere or the earth, and you have two palm trees growing out of the top of it. And that squiggly line going down the center, we think that is the Western coast of the United States with Baja, California, there at the bottom. And then you see the three dots to the left. We believe those are the Hawaiian islands. And then the one dot to the right, which represents Utah or Salt Lake City. You have a cultural map here, where they're documenting their traditional homeland and their new homeland. And they're tying them together symbolically in this image. Again, this theme of taking a new place, making it their own, making it a home where they can live, and thrive, and flourish. Some of them are animals. Some of these animals, obviously, exist in both Utah and the Hawaiian islands. This is a jack rabbit. It exists in both places. Dogs, also. And then there's this group of animals that we came to understand represent what are known as amakua. And amakua are really deified ancestors. Hawaiian theology is fascinating and wonderful. They believe that we existed as spirits before being born, and that as spirits we lived in the underworld, or po. And as you're born, you come to the surface. You take a body. And when you pass away, your spirit continues to exist. And it goes back into that underworld. But that spirit of your ancestors can reappear to you, can manifest itself to you, and often in the form of certain animals. And it's the animals that can traverse between different spheres of the earth, like a lizard, where they go underground and then come up above ground. It's these animals that can traverse these different spheres that often are taken to be representative of their ancestors. So sea turtles are another example of amakua. They go in the water. They come up onto the beach. They lay their eggs, and then go back in the water. Sharks are a particularly sacred animal to Hawaiians. If a shark surfaces to a Hawaiian on a boat, it's often a very sacred experience. And they take it as a representation of their ancestors manifesting themselves saying, I'm still here. Don't forget about me. I'm watching you. And whales, the same thing. So you can imagine this. You have these images that they're putting up on this rock. And you can see this rock, if you know what you're looking at, from any place in the townsite. And they're putting these depictions of their ancestors up on this rock as if to say, we're watching over you. We have not forgotten you. You may be thousands of miles away from us, but we are here with you, watching you. And you can see why the gospel of Jesus Christ, the restored gospel, was accepted so freely among the Native Islanders. There are some wonderful connections and parallels between traditional Hawaiian theology and Mormonism, such that you could borrow elements from both, and represent it, and continue to be faithful Latter-day Saints. Celestial objects, here is the sun. This one is actually part of that larger landscape with the palm tree and the sea birds. And you see the circle of people there to your right. This one we initially thought might have been a starfish. But then I started doing some work after starting to work for the Church History Department, and came across this picture of the Honolulu chapel. And above the front door of the Honolulu chapel you can see there is a carving of the all-seeing eye of God. And I believe now that this glyph is what this is depicting. This is the all-seeing eye. And again, it's this connection that just as their ancestors are watching over them always and they're present, so is their Heavenly Father watching over them, and looking out for them, and blessing them. This is perhaps one of the most interesting ones. This is on the very top of the rock. And it is Ursa Major. It's the Big Dipper. And you know that the Hawaiian people and Pacific Islanders were seafaring people. They used the Big Dipper to locate the North Star and to navigate as they crossed miles and miles of open water with no land in sight. This was a way for them to guide themselves. But you also remember that Mormons carved their own Big Dipper in stone on the west tower of the Salt Lake Temple, and for much of the same reasons, because the temple in Mormonism is a place of guidance. A place of finding one's way in life, finding God's path, and pursuing it so that you can navigate successfully through this mortal existence. So again, we have these parallels and these connections where they're drawing upon their traditional cultures, but also upon their newfound Mormon faith. Blending these in new and special ways to make that place meaningful and significant to them. So this is the theme. You're familiarizing a foreign landscape. You're taking what's available to you. And you're using it in ways that makes this place special, makes it a homeland. I love this story of Iosepa. And I'm working with a school right now in Salt Lake, because they want to take this story and make it relevant to the current Pacific Islanders living in Utah today. I can't think of a better story to inspire young Pacific Islanders to do what their ancestors did, and literally make the desert blossom as a rose, and to follow prophetic leadership, and to do what was asked of them. As they went back, many of these Latter-day Saints became leaders of the Church and Laie and elsewhere in the islands. They did help build that Laie temple, which is a beautiful place, just recently restored. And they left a legacy that is rich, and wonderful, and inspiring, not just to Pacific Islanders, but hopefully to all of us. I will close with this slide. I like to close with this slide because I think it's a good message that we can all learn from. Early on in my research, I discovered these two words, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]. And these are the words for past and future. But what you learn about Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders is that it's not just chronological time. It's, you are orienting yourself in time almost, time and space. It's a slightly different notion, whereas you face the past because the past is the time before you or in front of you. And as you look to your ancestors, as you look to that legacy that they left, you cautiously and slowly back your way up into the future, which is the time after or behind you, as you look to the past for guidance. It's my testimony that we can all do that. We look to these men and women of faith for inspiration, for understanding of how they did it, so that we can follow in their footsteps. And I leave that with you in the name of Jesus Christ, amen. [APPLAUSE]

Thank you. We are about 15 minutes over time, but I think they still wanted to have a brief question and answer period. So I am happy to try to answer any question that I can. Did you locate the town garbage dump? Did you work there? We did not. We did not search for it. We did not search for it, either. But one thing I failed to mention was that by looking at the artifacts that were in that outhouse pit, we discovered that they were all deposited at, actually, we think, at the very end, as the Mahoe family was leaving, 1915, 1917. They couldn't take everything with them. They took what they could, and everything else went down the hole, leaving us a wonderful record of their lives. So we didn't find a town garbage dump. They could have had one. Often, people just buried their own trash on their private lots at that time. But it may still be out there. But please don't go digging for it. It's private property. [LAUGHING]

Hi, Ben. What did you do with the artifacts from the excavation? Those artifacts have been given to Brigham Young University's Museum of Peoples and Cultures. In conversations with the Sadowskys and with the landowner, we decided that that was the place that was going to be best, where they have an active student body of archaeologists that could continue to study these, put them on display in their museum, and continue to tell and write about the story of Iosepa. So that's where they are. And if you are interested in seeing them, I would encourage you to contact the museum and ask if you can see those. I hope that they'll put them on display soon. Ben, you talked about a celebration on the 28th of August when they go back to celebrate the day that they moved out there. And then you also talked about the celebration the end of May. Can you tell the difference, or when should we go out? Which date should we go out? Today, you should go out the end of May. Historically, they would celebrate the 28th of August. That's Hawaiian Pioneer Day. But today, they go out on Memorial Day weekend. And they celebrate at that time. So if you want to go out, that's when I would do it. I'm Ben's father, and I wanted to remind him and ask him again if it's true, didn't you tell me once that at one time in history, Iosepa was voted Most Beautiful City in all of Utah? That's true. In 1915, they were awarded-- it was not the most beautiful, but the most clean city of all Utah. And they were given an award. And individuals were even given awards for the cleanest lots in the town. In the little paragraph describing the lecture tonight, I purposely used the phrase "make the desert blossom as a rose," because it was literal. That's not just metaphorical in this case. There are accounts of the streets being lined with yellow roses at Iosepa, and tree-lined streets. And they had these pressurized water systems. And it must have been just a beautiful place, fruit trees, and gardens, and lots of beautification. But unfortunately today, it's pretty deserty. But again, through the archaeology, I think we can try to recreate some of that. What was the population at Iosepa? At its height, it was 228 individuals, at its peak. That was over several years building up. I think the original population that settled there in 1889 was about 75 people. So it grew over the years as families grew and as other immigrants came. Good question. [INAUDIBLE] Mahalo. I'm Richard Poulson. I'm one of the board members of the Iosepa Historical Association. If you come Memorial weekend, if you come Monday, thank you for coming Monday, because that's when we clean up the place and you'll miss out on the celebration. Richard may not be happy with me inviting all of you out. I'm the chief cook and bottle washer out there. But everybody's welcome. We have always a great time. If you do come, I call them daytrippers, come on Saturday. We have activities throughout the day, and then we have a luau at the end of the day, and entertainment during the day. I see a few of our ex-board members still here nodding their heads. When we first started this, we would go out to clean the graveyard. This is when this new society started about 30 years ago. And we would go potluck, and clean the graveyard, and play music. And now it's established into a three-day affair. We welcome everybody. Donations are welcome. When you go out there-- you saw slides of the pavilion, all this is by donation. If you give us money, when you come the next time, there might be something else built out there. It might pass the laws. A couple places are being condemned. But they say they're OK. Polynesians, sometimes we skip the process of getting a building permit. So we just build it, and then they go, hey, you can't do that. It's condemned. And then they inspect it and say it's OK. So there's lots of great stories about the ancestors. My wife, her great grandmother's buried out there. And that's how I got involved. I'm a New Zealander, but then I found out that one of my ancestors, the [INAUDIBLE] and [INAUDIBLE] tribe was out at Iosepa. But he's buried in the Salt Lake Cemetery. So there's a lot of connection. We welcome anybody. We just have a great time. But when you do come-- this last Memorial weekend was nice. You could come in a nice short-sleeved shirt. But there's some times when you need full winter gear. But we're always out there. We've been out there for the last 30 years trying to remember our ancestors and preserving the lot. Thank you. Thank you, Richard. [APPLAUSE]

I'm curious, just by show of hands here, we'll take another question or two, but how many of you had ever heard of Iosepa before tonight? Quite a few. That is good. I am constantly surprised at how many, including Pacific Islanders, don't know about this place. And it is so meaningful to them if they can learn the story. Yes. Hi, my name is Leilani Fuller Grange, and in reference to Uncle Richard and his bringing in the cemetery, how deep did you dig? And was there any prospects of looking around the cemetery? Did you run into any skeletal remains? Is that a project for the future? Is that even in your line? Of course, we're interested in the [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH],, the bones, the spirit of the people. I see. So I learned early on, also, that it's quite controversial to actually dig into the earth in Hawaiian culture, because like I explained, the ancestors return to the earth and literally become one with the earth. And so we actually had to negotiate that, Richard, and Mike, and others. I remember one morning, we got up early and we went out to the cemetery. And we had what was called an [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] ceremony, or a prayer ceremony, where prayers were offered to the ancestors, asking for their permission to allow us to do this work and this study. We never did excavate near the cemetery, and we have no plans to do that. We do not want to disturb the graves of the dead. Like I showed you in the slides, in most areas, we only excavated between one and two feet before we hit those cobblestones. In that one pit, it went down six feet. But that was a hole that the Mahoe family had dug themselves. So that is the answer to the question here. And the active field work is no longer going. As soon as I took a job with the Church History Department, I had to stop that project because they've given me many others now. But that's a good question. The cemetery is a wonderful place, even if you go out there on your own. In fact, sometimes it's even more sacred if you're the only one out there. And you can just sit there, and think, and ponder, and meditate about these people that are buried out there. Are there any other questions? How do you get there? [INAUDIBLE] So the question is, how do you get there. You go I-80 West, and you take Exit 13. There actually is a good, green highway sign that says Iosepa. 77. 37? 77. OK, forgive me. I don't know where I got 13. Oh, it's 13 miles from there down to Iosepa. Exit 77, it's signed. And you just head south down through the Skull Valley. And you will see some signs on the left-hand side, the east side of the road. And there is a nice, new access road that the landowner has built that takes you up over the foothills, and drops you right down on top of the cemetery there. And there's parking. And it's a wonderful place to visit. A good day trip. I would highly recommend it. And be respectful when you go, please. Other questions?

Well, thank you very much for coming. I am so glad that you chose to use your time tonight this way. Thank you, again. [APPLAUSE]

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