Micronesia is a very large area of ocean with a very small area of land in it, and its religious life reflects that proportion.
Older Micronesian religion centred on ancestors, on spirits of place and sea, and on the ritual authority of particular lineages, with clan and chiefly rank determining who could conduct which observance. Glenn Petersen's comparative study of the region's societies emphasises how much religious authority was bound up with the political organisation of matrilineal clans, and how much variation existed between island groups whose material culture looked similar to outsiders.
Navigational knowledge is the element that most clearly counts as religious property. The systems that allowed voyaging over hundreds of miles of open water, using star paths, swell patterns, bird behaviour and a technique of holding the canoe stationary and moving the islands in the mind, were taught in schools with initiations, restricted to particular lineages, and accompanied by ritual. On the Central Caroline islands the knowledge survived through the colonial period and has since been taught onward to other Pacific societies whose own traditions had lapsed.
Nan Madol, on Pohnpei, is the region's greatest built monument: nearly a hundred artificial islets of stacked basalt columns in a lagoon, built for the Saudeleur rulers and containing tombs and ritual enclosures. Local tradition holds parts of it dangerous to enter, and access is governed by the community rather than by the archaeology.