The Secret of the 8th Hole

For more than a decade archaeologist William Meacham has had a project on his mind: to rescue a set of rock carvings that have been lost under the ground. The problem? He believes they are located at the golf course of the Grand Coloane Resort, deep beneath the 8th hole.

 

 

The year is 1985. The inspector of the Judiciary Police Manuel Araújo, an archaeology enthusiast, appears bare-chested, camera in hand, leaning over a drawing engraved on a rock. This image is evidence of the discovery, three years earlier, of a set of rock carvings that have now been missing for decades.

 

The mystery of the Ka Ho rock carvings has long been talked about among lovers of Macau’s history and archaeology: the rock carvings were found in 1982 and recorded by Hong Kong experts in 1985, and the discovery was the subject of a report published by the Hong Kong Archaeological Society. But today no one seems to know where they are. 

 

No one except William Meacham, one of the Hong Kong-based archaeologists who came to Macau in 1985 to document the rock carvings. It was years later, with a book in the pipeline about Hong Kong, including a chapter dedicated to Macau, that the idea came to him.

 

“I began to think about that set of rock carvings in Macau and what might have happened to them when they built the golf course. It occurred to me that during the construction of the golf course, they probably wouldn’t have moved those two giant boulders that featured the carvings. They were in a very narrow, steep sided valley. So they probably just pushed the soil off the top of those hills, down into the valley and covered them up. Looking at the golf course design, sure enough that area has now been raised by about seven meters. So, I’m pretty sure that the rock carvings are still there, under the golf course,” Meacham proposes.

 

 

But let’s take a step back first. In 1985, guided by Araújo, the Hong Kong team of archaeologists found three types of rock carvings: small pits, ‘gameboards’, and a unique “complex” carving whose meaning is still unclear.

 

According to Meacham’s book, cup-like depressions like this have not been found in Hong Kong, but exist elsewhere in China and Europe, and also in Hawaii, where they are associated with rituals linked to childbirth.

 

The ‘gameboards’, Meacham explains, have been at the centre of controversy in Hong Kong: some think they were made by “campers, or hikers, or villagers playing games on the rock”, while others consider them ancient and valuable. 

 

“I was convinced they were significant and ancient,” says Meacham, who has lived in Hong Kong since the 1970s. The archaeologist believes the carvings are from the Iron Age, meaning they are approximately 2,000 years old. Their function is yet to be understood, but a similar board was used, for example, by Han Dynasty geomancers, for Feng Shui readings in the landscape.

 

Similar patterns have been found in various parts of the world: Egypt, Sri Lanka, England. And because they are difficult to date, they have always been shrouded in controversy.  But it is the “complex” rock carving that really puts Macau on the map. 

 

“I can only explain what it is not,” notes Meacham. “It doesn’t appear to have any similarities with the Bronze Age rock art that we have here [in Hong Kong] or that they have in Zhuhai (…) Those have very distinct styles: it’s either abstract, geometric or zoomorphic (…) But the one in Macau doesn’t really fit any of those categories very well. You could say it’s kind of abstract, but it’s much more linear, and it doesn’t have the swirls that the abstract ones had. I would classify that one as different from Bronze Age art,” adds Meacham, who has conducted 22 excavations in Hong Kong, and some in Macau as well.

 

It’s hard for untrained eyes to tell the patterns apart. Lines and dots do form some sort of image, but it’s not clear what it is. Some publications on Chinese rock art have come up with a theory: it’s a representation of  Western-style ships, with sails and masts, sailing at sea. But Meacham disagrees: “I don’t think it is. It could be, but I can’t see it. I can see a row of dots that goes across. Some people thought ‘well, maybe that’s the sea’. But some of the structures are below it. This becomes art interpretation, which I’m not very good at. But in the Bronze Age and Iron Age, they wouldn’t have ships that big, those look like sailing ships.”

 

For the archaeologist, the boat theory defies logic: these drawings could only have been made by aborigines, as there is no record of Cantonese villagers making rock carvings; and if they do indeed represent European ships, this could only have happened after the year 1500, by which time the existence of aborigines would be “quite remarkable, but not impossible”, Meacham explains.

 

“I think it’s more like something symbolic, the representation of something. If you look at Bronze Age art, you see that symbolism was very prominent”, says the author of several books and articles about Hong Kong and South China archaeology. 

 

 

The importance of the Macau rock carvings is partly due to the fact that they were found together, which may ultimately help to understand what era they are from.

 

“I can’t be sure, but my gut feeling is that they were probably made within a few decades of each other,” says the American archaeologist.

For Meacham, this represents a strong indication that the ‘gameboards’ are indeed ancient and valuable, and not the result of modern campers’ games. It also indicates – although without certainty – who the author might be, and that could help understand which peoples inhabited Coloane in the past.

 

“The fact that those carvings in Macau, those square ones, were found with the complex one, singe the argument that these were not Cantonese villagers that were doing it. That they’re earlier than that. They could go back to the Yueh people, which is the old term for the aboriginals here (…) The rock carvings in Hong Kong, Macao and Zhuhai are the only ones in the whole of Guangdong province. They represent possibly an ethnic group, or at least a cultural group, on the coast of this area, right on each side of the Pearl River estuary (…) It’s significant that they [Yueh] were on Coloane”, Meacham explains.

 

“This rock art is probably at the end of that tradition of rock carving. Which makes me think that it comes from the Bronze Age and survived into the early Iron Age, which would make it the aboriginal people, not really yet ‘sinicized’ people, so not really Cantonese yet (…) As a symbol of what we theorise might have been the population of Coloane at the time, they are a very significant material evidence. It’s worth preserving them for sure”, says the archaeologist.

 

 

“It’s unfortunate though, very unfortunate, that there wasn’t an archaeological impact study done of that area before they built the golf course”, Meacham laments.

 

The Macau Golf and Country Club opened in 1993, more than a decade after the Ka Ho rock carvings were discovered. Meacham admits that there may have been “a failure on our part at the time” as they did not officially report the discovery to the Macau government. “But Araújo probably [reported it]. I’m sure it was in the newspapers”, he says.

 

It was only in 2010, after the publication of Rock Carvings in Hong Kong, in which he argues that the petroglyphs of Macau currently lie under the golf course, that the archaeologist approached the Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC). A proposal was made to retrieve the carvings. There was interest, there were even talks of feasibility costs and the government provided high resolution satellite images that allowed the identification of the site, but ultimately the idea did not go ahead, with the Executive claiming to have too many projects on hand at the time.

 

With no government backing and the notion that the project might “disturb the play of the golf course a little”, Meacham decided to appeal to someone “with money and influence”.

 

“I got a contact to set up a meeting with one of these big tycoons, that I shouldn’t mention by name, to try to interest him in the project. I showed him photos, and I showed him the map and said ‘I’m 90% sure, 95% sure, that they’re still there and can be recovered. You can put them in your casino’”, he recalls.

 

Again, there was interest, but it didn’t go any further. “I tried to follow up and nothing much happened, and then I got involved in other things”, he says.

 

But this was an idea that never left his mind: “I’ve sort of put it off. But I literally thought in 2019 ‘Ok, I’m going to raise this project in Macau’. It was literally on my list for 2020. I have to do it, as soon as the pandemic allows it”.

 

 

For William Meacham this is a workable project. But first he needs a precise location.

 

“You need a stereoscopic viewer with two aerial photographs taken slightly apart, a few seconds apart, from an airplane. You put those together and you get a three-dimensional view of the landscape – hills, valleys. And by doing that you can get a precise location of these boulders on the map. And then you put that map against the current map and you know exactly where they are,” he explains.

 

This is something that should be done by a specialist, but Meacham has done it roughly himself and established a possible location: the rock carvings, he says, are under the fairway of the 8th hole.

 

The impact, he guarantees, would be minimal: the golf course can remain open, in operation. There is only need for a fence around the area to be excavated. Once the rock carvings, which would be cut out of the rock, are removed, the hole would be refilled with earth and the golf course could return to normal. “A week, ten days,” he estimates. 

 

Almost 40 years after their discovery, Meacham maintains hope that these rock carvings, testimony to human inhabitants in Macau over 2000 years ago, can be retrieved from under the ground: “We can do it. I’m going to do it. I’m going to take that proposal back to see if I can get funding for it. And then we’ll need a permit too. But if I get the funding, I think the permit will follow.”