The Monastery Beneath the Sand.
Buried on a Kaafu Atoll island, a 1,880 m² Buddhist complex whose stonework Thor Heyerdahl ranked with the walls of Cuzco.
On Kaashidhoo island, a 1996 dig led by Norwegian archaeologist Egil Mikkelsen uncovers a 1,880 m² Buddhist monastery — 64 coral-stone structures including a 16-sided stepped platform so geometrically precise that Thor Heyerdahl compared Maldivian stonemasonry to the Inca walls of Cuzco.
Unearthed at Kuruhinna.
Between 1996 and 1998, a Norwegian team led by archaeologist Egil Mikkelsen — with the Maldivian National Centre for Linguistic and Historical Research — excavated a site on Kaashidhoo known as Kuruhinna Tharaagandu. Beneath the sand lay a Buddhist monastery covering 1,880 square metres.
Sixteen perfect sides.
Sixty-four coral-stone structures emerged. The most striking, Ruin XXXIII, was a sixteen-sided platform six metres across and five tiers high, each side subtly concave. The geometry is so exact, and the coral blocks so tightly fitted, that the masons appear to have worked at the level of the finest pre-modern stoneworkers anywhere.
As fine as the Inca.
On Kudahuvadhoo, Thor Heyerdahl surveyed the coral masonry in the 1980s and called it 'among the finest I have ever seen', comparing it directly to the monumental Inca walls of Cuzco. The comparison is extravagant — but the photographs bear it out.
The long arc.
- 7th–8th c.
Built in coral
A Buddhist monastery rises on Kaashidhoo, part of fourteen centuries of island Buddhism.
- 1153
Conversion
The Maldives adopt Islam; the monasteries are abandoned and, in time, buried by the sand.
- 1980s
Heyerdahl looks
Thor Heyerdahl surveys Maldivian coral masonry and compares it to the walls of Cuzco.
- 1996–98
Unearthed
Egil Mikkelsen's team excavates the 1,880 m² complex at Kuruhinna Tharaagandu.
Continue the timeline.
- Mikkelsen, Egil. The Maldives: Archaeological Excavations on Kaashidhoo (Oslo, 2000)
- Heyerdahl, Thor. The Maldive Mystery (Allen & Unwin, 1986)
Two thousand years of history — one extraordinary place to experience it.
The atolls in this story are the islands you can stay on today: private-island resorts and overwater villas, planned by a team that works from inside the Maldives.