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Micronesia's Coral Pyramids Are Surprisingly Old, Experts Say

New evidence reveals that Micronesia's coral pyramid tombs could be up to 700 years old — much older than experts had previously thought.
Zoe Richards, a researcher from the Western Australian Museum, inspects one of the corals used to build the sacred twin tomb known as Bat.
Zoe Richards, a researcher from the Western Australian Museum, inspects one of the corals used to build the sacred twin tomb known as Bat.Jean-Paul Hobbs
/ Source: Live Science

On a remote Pacific island not much bigger than Manhattan, there are ancient pyramids built out of living coral. New evidence reveals that these tombs could be up to 700 years old — much older than experts had previously thought.

The royal tombs are tucked away in an artificially built ancient city called Leluh just off the mainland of Kosrae, a Micronesian island. Leluh was home to Kosraean high chiefs (as well as some lower chiefs and commoners, too) from about 1250 until the mid-1800s, when foreign whalers, traders and missionaries started to arrive on the island.

With impressive canals and walled compounds built from basalt, Leluh is often considered a companion city to the more famous Micronesian settlement of Nan Madol, on the nearby island of Pohnpei. While the tiny islets of Nan Madol were built on top of a coral reef, at Leluh, coral was actually incorporated into the construction material of many buildings, including the royal tombs. [8 of the World's Most Endangered Places]

Zoe Richards, a researcher from the Western Australian Museum, inspects one of the corals used to build the sacred twin tomb known as Bat.
Zoe Richards, a researcher from the Western Australian Museum, inspects one of the corals used to build the sacred twin tomb known as Bat.Jean-Paul Hobbs

"Today, the ancient tombs of the royal burial complexes are one of the few parts of the ancient Leluh site that remain intact," said Zoe Richards, a coral expert at the Western Australian Museum and lead author of a new study detailing the findings.

These tombs, also known as saru, stand about 6.5 feet (2 meters) tall, and they're shaped like frustums (pyramids with their pointy tops lobbed off). When a Kosraean king died, he would be rubbed with coconut oil and wrapped in mats and cords to be buried in the saru for up to three months. The king's bones would then be exhumed, cleaned and reburied in a hole on the nearby reef, Richards and her colleagues say.

Because these burials were not permanent, not much was left behind in the tombs to help archaeologists today determine the age of these structures. Richards and her colleagues turned to the building material itself. They collected 47 chunks of coral from three saru and subjected these samples to uranium-thorium dating, a technique used to determine the age of calcium-carbonate materials like coral.

The researchers determined that all three tombs could have been built as early as the 1300s.

"The results of this study lend support to oral histories and other archaeological work on Kosrae suggesting an earlier construction, occupation and use of Leluh," Richards told LiveScience in an email. "It also better supports Leluh's place in the region, not only as a rival to Nan Madol on Pohnpei, but also as a hub of political and economic activity throughout this part of the Pacific."

The findings were published March 13 in the journal Science Advances.

— Megan Gannon, LiveScience

This is a condensed version of a report from LiveScience. Read the full report. Follow Megan Gannon on Twitter. Follow us @livescience, Facebook & Google+.