The Isle of Pines, 80 km south of Noumea, New Caledonia, is famous for its mysterious earth mounds, whose anthropic nature and construction dates have been the source of heated scientific debate since the late 19th century. A large number of them are located on the island’s ferrallitic plateau, an environment in which the acidic soil would not allow any kind of perennial human settlement and horticultural practices. Amateur digs have had poor results so far, these inconclusive findings have led to sometimes far‑fetched interpretations. However, their interpretation has played a key role in the New Caledonian archaeological discourse and the historical paradigm that was locally issued from it since the 1960s: reviving diffusionist theories put forward in the early 20th century, some local amateur historians had suggested that these structures were the remnants of a megalithic age, when “fair‑skin” predecessors of the Kanaks settled the archipelago (Avias, 1949, Brou, 1977) in an attempt to deny the latter of their legitimacy to land claims that became more and more numerous in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1988, pioneering Oceanic archaeologist Roger C. Green, who perfectly understood their importance, put forward a non‑anthropic hypothesis for their origin, suggesting that large flightless megapod birds (now extinct) were actually the builders of these structures (Green, 1988). This hypothesis then allowed the debate to settle down.Almost 30 years have passed, during which further archaeological fieldwork on Isle of Pines has been undertaken. Daniel Frimigacci’s pioneering (although unfortunately overlooked) work on the earth mounds that are located on the calcareous plain of the island had already allowed the discovery of human remains within the structures, dating to the first centuries AD (Frimigacci, 1986). Therefore, these calcareous mounds, of identical proportions (and in similar numbers) to the ferrallitic ones found on the plateau, hold a probable interpretation key to the earth mounds’ mystery. New results from global surveys, new radiocarbon dating obtained from human bone samples in other earth mounds give additional weight to these findings, as the recent samples date to the first centuries BC. It is, therefore, necessary to reconsider what has been written on these enigmatic structures. After thorough re‑evaluation of the earth mounds’ diverse interpretations over time, there is now a strong possibility that they are of anthropic origin and that at least some of them were used as funerary mounds for primary burials, within an indigenous, localised and specific tradition, roughly 2,000 years ago.