Taputapuatea works differently from most sacred sites, because its significance is relational rather than local. It was not simply the most important marae on Raiatea. It was the marae from which other marae derived.
A marae is a walled open-air court with a raised stone platform, the ahu, at one end, a place for ritual rather than a roofed building, and the characteristic religious structure across eastern Polynesia. Taputapuatea's is built of massive coral slabs set on edge beside Te Ava Mo'a, the sacred pass through the reef, so that a canoe could come in from open ocean directly to the ceremonial ground.
It was dedicated to 'Oro, and it functioned internationally. Chiefs, priests and navigators came to it from across the region, and the founding of a new marae elsewhere involved carrying away a stone from this one. That practice made ritual authority physically transmissible and traceable: a marae in the Cook Islands or in New Zealand could hold a stone from Taputapuatea and, with it, a demonstrable line of descent back to the source. What radiated outward was a network with a documented centre.
This is why the site sits where it does in Polynesian accounts of themselves. Raiatea's older name is Havai'i, one of the family of names (Hawaiki, Savai'i, Hawai'i), that traditions across the triangle give to the homeland from which people set out. The island is central to the accounts of settlement that the voyaging revival has drawn on since the 1970s, when crews began rebuilding double-hulled canoes and navigating them by star, swell and bird without instruments, demonstrating that the settlement of the Pacific was deliberate seamanship rather than accident.
The sense in which the marae is in use today should be stated precisely. The cult of 'Oro ended in the nineteenth century under mission pressure, and there is no continuous priesthood. What is living is the voyaging revival, whose crews have made ceremonial landfall through the sacred pass, and which treats the site as the acknowledged centre of a return rather than a reconstruction. That distinction, between a revived practice that says so and a claimed unbroken descent, is one the participants themselves are careful about.
Taputapuatea was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2017, the first site in French Polynesia to be listed.