Patrick Vinton Kirch

Providing a synthesis of archaeological and historical anthropological knowledge of the indigenous cultures of the Pacific islands, this text focuses on human ecology and island adaptations.

An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact

On the Road of the Winds

The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth’s surface and encompasses many thousands of islands that are home to numerous human societies and cultures. Among these indigenous Oceanic cultures are the intrepid Polynesian double-hulled canoe navigators, the atoll dwellers of Micronesia, the statue carvers of remote Easter Island, and the famed traders of Melanesia. Decades of archaeological excavations—combined with allied research in historical linguistics, biological anthropology, and comparative ethnography—have revealed much new information about the long-term history of these societies and cultures. On the Road of the Winds synthesizes the grand sweep of human history in the Pacific Islands, beginning with the movement of early people out from Asia more than 40,000 years ago and tracing the development of myriad indigenous cultures up to the time of European contact in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This updated edition, enhanced with many new illustrations and an extensive bibliography, synthesizes the latest archaeological, linguistic, and biological discoveries that reveal the vastness of ancient history in the Pacific Islands.

An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact, Revised and Expanded Edition

Perhaps no scholar has done more to reveal the ancient history of Polynesia than noted archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch. For close to fifty years he explored the Pacific, as his work took him to more than two dozen islands spread across the ocean, from Mussau to Hawai'i to Easter Island. In this lively memoir, rich with personal—and often amusing—anecdotes, Kirch relates his many adventures while doing fieldwork on remote islands. At the age of thirteen, Kirch was accepted as a summer intern by the eccentric Bishop Museum zoologist Yoshio Kondo and was soon participating in archaeological digs on the islands of Hawai'i and Maui. He continued to apprentice with Kondo during his high school years at Punahou, and after obtaining his anthropology degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Kirch joined a Bishop Museum expedition to Anuta Island, where a traditional Polynesian culture still flourished. His appetite whetted by these adventures, Kirch went on to obtain his doctorate at Yale University with a study of the traditional irrigation-based chiefdoms of Futuna Island. Further expeditions have taken him to isolated Tikopia, where his excavations exposed stratified sites extending back three thousand years; to Niuatoputapu, a former outpost of the Tongan maritime empire; to Mangaia, with its fortified refuge caves; and to Mo'orea, where chiefs vied to construct impressive temples to the war god 'Oro. In Hawai'i, Kirch traced the islands' history in the Anahulu valley and across the ancient district of Kahikinui, Maui. His joint research with ecologists, soil scientists, and paleontologists elucidated how Polynesians adapted to their island ecosystems. Looking back over the past half-century of Polynesian archaeology, Kirch reflects on how the questions we ask about the past have changed over the decades, how archaeological methods have advanced, and how our knowledge of the Polynesian past has greatly expanded.

Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist

Unearthing the Polynesian Past

This text aims to combine all the evidence for Hawaiian prehistory into a coherent pattern. It presents a balanced cultural history of the Hawaiian group of islands, from the first Polynesian settlement to the time of European contact and is grounded in the archaeological evidence.

An Introduction to Hawaiian Archaeology and Prehistory

Feathered Gods and Fishhooks

D. E. Yen

The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier

Tikopia

Marshall Sahlins

From the late 1700s, Hawaiian society began to change rapidly as it responded to the growing world system of capital whose trade routes and markets crisscrossed the islands. Reflecting many years of collaboration between Marshall Sahlins, a prominent social anthropologist, and Patrick V. Kirch, a leading archaeologist of Oceania, Anahulu seeks out the traces of this transformation in a typical local center of the kingdom founded by Kamehameha: the Anahulu river valley of northwestern Oahu. Volume I shows the surprising effects of the encounter with the imperial forces of commerce and Christianity—the distinctive ways the Hawaiian people culturally organized the experience, from the structure of the kingdom to the daily life of ordinary people. Volume II examines the material record of changes in local social organization, economy and production, population, and domestic settlement arrangements.

The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Volume 1: Historical Ethnography

Anahulu

Roger C. Green

An anthropological approach to long-term history through detailed reconstruction of the Ancestral Polynesian culture, Hawaiki.

An Essay in Historical Anthropology

Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia

In early Hawai‘i, kua‘āina were the hinterlands inhabited by nā kua‘āina, or country folk. Often these were dry, less desirable areas where much skill and hard work were required to wrest a living from the lava landscapes. The ancient district of Kahikinui in southeast Maui is such a kua‘āina and remains one of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the islands. Named after Tahiti Nui in the Polynesian homeland, its thousands of pristine acres house a treasure trove of archaeological ruins—witnesses to the generations of Hawaiians who made this land their home before it was abandoned in the late nineteenth century. Kua‘āina Kahiko follows kama‘āina archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch on a seventeen-year-long research odyssey to rediscover the ancient patterns of life and land in Kahikinui. Through painstaking archaeological survey and detailed excavations, Kirch and his students uncovered thousands of previously undocumented ruins of houses, trails, agricultural fields, shrines, and temples. Kirch describes how, beginning in the early fifteenth century, Native Hawaiians began to permanently inhabit the rocky lands along the vast southern slope of Haleakalā. Eventually these planters transformed Kahikinui into what has been called the greatest continuous zone of dryland planting in the Hawaiian Islands. He relates other fascinating aspects of life in ancient Kahikinui, such as the capture and use of winter rains to create small wet-farming zones, and decodes the complex system of heiau, showing how the orientations of different temple sites provide clues to the gods to whom they were dedicated. Kirch examines the sweeping changes that transformed Kahikinui after European contact, including how some maka'āinana families fell victim to unscrupulous land agents. But also woven throughout the book is the saga of Ka ‘Ohana o Kahikinui, a grass-roots group of Native Hawaiians who successfully struggled to regain access to these Hawaiian lands. Rich with ancedotes of Kirch’s personal experiences over years of field research, Kua'āina Kahiko takes the reader into the little-known world of the ancient kua‘āina.

Life and Land in Ancient Kahikinui, Maui

Kua‘āina Kahiko

From the late 1700s, Hawaiian society began to change rapidly as it responded to the growing world system of capital whose trade routes and markets crisscrossed the islands. Reflecting many years of collaboration between Marshall Sahlins, a prominent social anthropologist, and Patrick V. Kirch, a leading archaeologist of Oceania, Anahulu seeks out the traces of this transformation in a typical local center of the kingdom founded by Kamehameha: the Anahulu river valley of northwestern Oahu. Volume 2, by Patrick V. Kirch, examines the material record of changes in local social organization, economy and production, population, and domestic settlement arrangements.

The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Volume 2: The Archaeology of History

The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth's surface and encompasses many thousands of islands, which are home to numerous human societies and cultures. Among these indigenous Oceanic cultures are the intrepid Polynesian double-hulled canoe navigators, the atoll dwellers of Micronesia, the statue carvers of remote Easter Island, and the famed traders of Melanesia. Decades of archaeological excavations, combined with allied research in historical linguistics, biological anthropology, and comparative ethnography, have revealed much new information about the long-term history of these Pacific Island societies and cultures. On the Road of the Winds synthesizes the grand sweep of human history in the Pacific Islands, beginning with the movement of early people out from Asia more than 40,000 years ago, and tracing the development of myriad indigenous cultures up to the time of European contact in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. This updated edition, enhanced with many new illustrations and an extensive bibliography, synthesizes the latest archaeological, linguistic, and biological discoveries that reveal the vastness of ancient history in the Pacific Islands.

An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands Before European Contact, Revised and Expanded Edition

"Some 1,500 years ago, Polynesian seafarers discovered and settled the Hawaiian Islands, spawning a culture that flourished in isolation until Europeans arrived in the late eighteenth century. Pre-contact Hawaiian civilization is represented by a rich legacy of archaeological sites, many of which have been preserved and are accessible to the public. This volume provides for the first time an authoritative handbook to the most important of those archaeological treasures." "The fifty sites covered in this book are distributed over all of the main islands and include heiau (temples), habitation sites, irrigated and dryland agricultural complexes, fishponds, petroglyphs, and several post-contact (early nineteenth-century) sites. Site locations are shown on individual island maps, and detailed plans are provided for several sites."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

An Illustrated Guide to Hawaiian Archaeological Sites

Legacy of the Landscape

Jean-Louis Rallu

Were there major population collapses on Pacific Islands following first contact with the West? If so, what were the actual population numbers for islands such as Hawai‘i, Tahiti, or New Caledonia? Is it possible to develop new methods for tracking the long-term histories of island populations? These and related questions are at the heart of this new book, which draws together cutting-edge research by archaeologists, ethnographers, and demographers. In their accounts of exploration, early European voyagers in the Pacific frequently described the teeming populations they encountered on island after island. Yet missionary censuses and later nineteenth-century records often indicate much smaller populations on Pacific Islands, leading many scholars to debunk the explorers’ figures as romantic exaggerations. Recently, the debate over the indigenous populations of the Pacific has intensified, and this book addresses the problem from new perspectives. Rather than rehash old data and arguments about the validity of explorers’ or missionaries’ accounts, the contributors to this volume offer a series of case studies grounded in new empirical data derived from original archaeological fieldwork and from archival historical research. Case studies are presented for the Hawaiian Islands, Mo‘orea, the Marquesas, Tonga, Samoa, the Tokelau Islands, New Caledonia, Aneityum (Vanuatu), and Kosrae.

Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives

The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies

Tracing the origins of the Hawaiians and other Polynesians back to the shores of the South China Sea, archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch follows their voyages of discovery across the Pacific in this fascinating history of Hawaiian culture from about one thousand years ago. Combining more than four decades of his own research with Native Hawaiian oral traditions and the evidence of archaeology, Kirch puts a human face on the gradual rise to power of the Hawaiian god-kings, who by the late eighteenth century were locked in a series of wars for ultimate control of the entire archipelago. This lively, accessible chronicle works back from Captain James Cook’s encounter with the pristine kingdom in 1778, when the British explorers encountered an island civilization governed by rulers who could not be gazed upon by common people. Interweaving anecdotes from his own widespread travel and extensive archaeological investigations into the broader historical narrative, Kirch shows how the early Polynesian settlers of Hawai'i adapted to this new island landscape and created highly productive agricultural systems.

The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai'i

A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief

In How Chiefs Became Kings, Patrick Vinton Kirch addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology: the emergence of "archaic states" whose distinctive feature was divine kingship. Kirch takes as his focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from his own four decades of research, Kirch argues that Hawaiian polities had become states before the time of Captain Cook’s voyage (1778-1779). The status of most archaic states is inferred from the archaeological record. But Kirch shows that because Hawai`i’s kingdoms were established relatively recently, they could be observed and recorded by Cook and other European voyagers. Substantive and provocative, this book makes a major contribution to the literature of precontact Hawai`i and illuminates Hawai`i’s importance in the global theory and literature about divine kingship, archaic states, and sociopolitical evolution.

Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai'i

How Chiefs Became Kings

Terry L. Hunt

A Critical Review

Archaeology of the Lapita Cultural Complex

Three Millennia of Polynesian Occupation in the Manu'a Islands, American Samoa

The To'aga Site

Clive Ruggles

Heiau, ‘Āina, Lani is a collaborative study of 78 temple sites in the ancient moku of Kahikinui and Kaupō in southeastern Maui, undertaken using a novel approach that combines archaeology and archaeoastronomy. Although temple sites (heiau) were the primary focus of Hawaiian archaeologists in the earlier part of the twentieth century, they were later neglected as attention turned to the excavation of artifact-rich habitation sites and theoretical and methodological approaches focused more upon entire cultural landscapes. This book restores heiau to center stage. Its title, meaning “Temples, Land, and Sky,” reflects the integrated approach taken by Patrick Vinton Kirch and Clive Ruggles, based upon detailed mapping of the structures, precise determination of their orientations, and accurate dating. Heiau, ‘Āina, Lani is the outcome of a joint fieldwork project by the two authors, spanning more than fifteen years, in a remarkably well-preserved archaeological landscape containing precontact house sites, walls, and terraces for dryland cultivation, and including scores of heiau ranging from simple upright stones dedicated to Kāne, to massive platforms where the priests performed rites of human sacrifice to the war god Kū. Many of these heiau are newly discovered and reported for the first time in the book. The authors offer a fresh narrative based upon some provocative interpretations of the complex relationships between the Hawaiian temple system, the landscape, and the heavens (the “skyscape”). They demonstrate that renewed attention to heiau in the context of contemporary methodological and theoretical perspectives offers important new insights into ancient Hawaiian cosmology, ritual practices, ethnogeography, political organization, and the habitus of everyday life. Clearly, Heiau, ‘Āina, Lani repositions the study of heiau at the forefront of Hawaiian archaeology.

Patrick Vinton Kirch

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