Hawaii’s Past in a World of Pacific Islands

By James M. Bayman and Thomas S. Dye

Given its relatively late encounter with the West, Hawaii offers an exciting opportunity to study a society whose traditional lifeways and technologies were recorded in native oral traditions and written documents before they were changed by contact with non-Polynesian cultures. This book in the SAA Press Current Perspectives Series chronicles the role of archaeology in constructing a narrative of Hawaii’s cultural past, focusing on material evidence dating from the Polynesians’ first arrival on Hawaii’s shores about a millennium ago to the early decades of settlement by Americans and Europeans in the nineteenth century. A final chapter discusses new directions taken by native Hawaiians toward changing the practice of archaeology in the islands today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Mar 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781646425136

Book preview

The Society for American Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 20005

Copyright © 2013 by the Society for American Archaeology

All rights reserved. Published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bayman, James.

Hawaii's past in a world of Pacific Islands / James M. Bayman, Thomas S. Dye with maps by Eric K. Komori.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-932839-54-1 (alk. paper)

1. Hawaii--Civilization. 2. Hawaii--Antiquities. 3. Hawaii--History. 4. Ethnology--Hawaii. 5. Hawaiians--Social life and customs. I. Title.

DU624.5.B38 2013

996.9'02--dc23

2013001183

Printed on acid-free bytes

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 Approaches to Hawaii’s Past

2 Seascapes and Landscapes

3 Settlement and Chronology

4 Food Production Economy

5 Technology and Craft Economy

6 Ideology and Political Economy

7 Western Contact and Colonialism

8 Reconciling Archaeology and History

Hawaiian Terms

References

Acknowledgments

We offer our thanks to Ken Ames (SAA Press Editor) and Paul Minnis (former SAA Press Editor) for their encouragement as we developed this book; it was our pleasure to engage in this writing project with their support. Guidance with the production of the manuscript was kindly pro- vided by John Neikirk, Publications Manager for the Society for American Archaeology (SAA).

We are particularly grateful for our friends and colleagues in Hawai‘i and elsewhere who have, for many years, shared their perspectives on the archae- ology and history of the archipelago. We owe a special debt to Pat Kirch, John Peterson, and one anonymous reviewer for their careful and useful comments on the first draft of this book. The time and effort that they devoted to providing us their input is much appreciated. Rob Hommon, Dave Tuggle, Tim Rieth, Thegn Ladefoged, and Mark McCoy contributed greatly to the lines of thought developed in Chapters 3 and 4, without nec- essarily agreeing with all or any of it. Many of the ideas in Chapter 8 were initially developed with Maria Ka‘imi Orr and Lynette Cruz. We thank them for stimulating discussions and hope that they see their influence on what we have written. Errors of fact or interpretation are ours alone.

We appreciate the editorial assistance of Krickette Murabayashi, research assistant at T. S. Dye & Colleagues, Archaeologists, for editing the book with her usual fine attention to detail and converting the LaTeX document to Word for submittal to The SAA Press.

Infrastructural support for writing this book was provided by the Anthro- pology Department of the University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa and by T. S. Dye & Colleagues, Archaeologists.

We thank the following colleagues and institutions for permission to repro- duce figures and photographs: Thegn Ladefoged for Figure 4.4; Yosihiko Sinoto for Figure 5.5; Bishop Museum Press for Figure 6.1; and Bishop Museum for Figures 5.1, 7.1, and 7.2.

The authors have donated their royalties from sales of the book to the SAA scholarship program for Native Americans, Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians, and Indigeneous Pacific Islanders.

1

Approaches to Hawaii’s Past

Hawaii’s first archaeologist, John F. G. Stokes, arrived in the islands from Australia in 1899, a year after Hawai‘i was annexed by the United States of America and six years after the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893 by a small band of insurgents supported by the American minister and United States troops (Sai 2011). This was an era when the decline and extinction of the Hawaiian race was widely predicted. From the start, the work of the archaeologists took place in abandoned cultural landscapes, places where traditional houses and temples had been reduced to their foundations, and the verdant agricultural fields described with admiration by Captain Cook and his crew a century earlier were overgrown with weeds. Since that time, archaeologists have joined the effort to construct a narrative of Hawaii’s history along Western lines, a project that, unwittingly or not, has often served the interests of a newly dominant social and political order. This work of rewriting history has been taken up not just by archaeologists, but by a broad range of both native and Western scholars drawn from the ranks of historians, folklorists, politicians, clergy, and businessmen. It has considered several sources of evidence ranging widely over oral tradition, comparative linguistics and ethnology, memory culture, and the material remains that are properly the study of archaeology. This book chronicles archaeology’s role in rewriting Hawaii’s history. Its concern is the archaeological record of old Hawai‘i–the material remnants of labor carried out from the time the islands were discovered by Polynesians late in the first millennium A.D. through the early decades of settlement by Americans and Europeans in the nineteenth century—and how this record has been used, and in some cases misused, to rewrite Hawaiian history. The book is not an argument for privileging archaeological data or interpretations, both of which we regard as important but inherently problematic. Rather, it traces how archaeology and its concepts have developed in the unique cultural and social milieu of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Hawai‘i.

Perspectives on Ancient Hawai‘i

Humanity’s adventure in the most remote archipelago on earth began when the first canoe of Polynesians stepped on Hawaii’s shores about a millennium ago. To sustain themselves, the Polynesians brought a suite of resources from the South Pacific, including chickens, dogs, and pigs, and various tropical plants such as taro, banana, coconut, and sugarcane. As the first people to settle the islands, Hawaii’s earliest Polynesians were free to experiment with constructing a new society, unhindered by a pre-existing human population. Such opportunities were exceedingly rare in the Late Holocene world, except in the pristine islands that dotted the Pacific Ocean, a vast body of water covering some two-thirds of the globe. The Hawaiian Islands were among the last places on earth to witness human colonization and eventual contact with the West (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1

Figure 1.1: Location of Hawai‘i in the Pacific Ocean.

From an Americanist perspective, the timing of this event is remarkable. Hawaii’s first recorded contact with Europeans ensued almost three centuries after natives in the Americas encountered agents of the Spanish Empire, and only two years after the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America was signed in 1776 C.E. in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Moreover, unlike Hawai‘i, many native societies in North America experienced the consequences of Western contact several decades prior to any face-to-face encounter. Some native communities in North America, for example, experienced the ravages of introduced diseases and precipitous declines in their population decades prior to the arrival of Europeans in their immediate territories. Consequently, documentary accounts of those encounters describe the remnants of demographically and politically diminished societies (Upham 1982).

The Hawaiian Islands, in contrast, offer archaeology an exceptional opportunity to study the development of a society that was recorded in both native oral traditions and written documents before it was changed by non-Polynesian cultures and world capitalism. Since the moment of Hawaii’s discovery, people from all walks of life have spun a tapestry of interpretations of its past. Today’s Hawaiians recall traditions about their ancestral genealogies; these origin stories are transmitted across successive generations, from elders to their children. These traditions embody a legacy of gods, earthly creation, and human agency that enlivens the Hawaiian present with the past.

When Hawai‘i encountered the West in 1778 C.E., the famed British naval captain James Cook and his crew penned the earliest accounts of her people’s lifeways. At the time, Cook and his crew were sailing north to the Arctic Sea on the ships Discovery and Resolution in their search for a northwest passage from England to the Pacific Ocean. Their descriptions of Hawai‘i and its people captivated the imagination of Western thinkers and artists who pondered the origin and meaning of Hawai‘i and her people’s membership in James Cook’s idea of a Polynesian Nation (Beaglehole 1967:354). More than two centuries later, people around the world maintain a fascination with the magnificence of Hawaii’s islands and her storied past.

Hawaiian oral traditions offer a uniquely native view of Hawaii’s cultural past (Hommon 1976; Kirch 2010a). These traditions celebrate and commemorate Hawaii’s primal creation, the feats of a pantheon of deities, and the genealogies of chiefly luminaries. Such traditions were recorded by indigenous Hawaiians who were schooled and influenced by Protestant Christian missionaries who first came to the islands in 1821. Native writers in the mid-nineteenth century such as David Malo (1951), Samuel Kamakau (1961, 1964, 1976), John Papa ‘Ī‘ī (1963), and Kepelino (Beckwith 2007) set down traditions that had been passed on to them along with their own firsthand accounts of life in old Hawai‘i. Other accounts were gathered and synthesized critically by Abraham Fornander (Fornander 1916–1919, 1969), who quizzed elderly Hawaiians about their daily lives with a particular focus on customs that prevailed before contact with Europeans. Because Hawaiian culture, traditions, and technologies changed rapidly in the decades following Cook’s early visits, much of what these writers documented comprised memory culture. Archaeologists who use the direct historic approach to interpret Hawaii’s past view such writings as canonical sources (Nogelmeier 2010); such sources have long been a mainstay of studies of the precontact horizon in the islands. Structuralist analyses of these materials have yielded deep insights into traditional Hawaiian politics and religion (Valeri 1985a, 1985b, 1990, 1991).

The promise of archaeology in Hawai‘i was initially constrained by an assumption that was widely shared by scholars: human occupation of the Pacific islands was relatively recent and so study of their peoples should be the purview of ethnographers. The relative shallowness of archaeological deposits in Hawai‘i and elsewhere in the Pacific, compared to other regions of the world, seemingly corroborated this belief. If Hawaii’s past was relatively brief, it was implied, ethnographic studies of its native peoples were more vital than archaeological studies for documenting traditional lifeways and technologies. Early ethnographic studies benefited from the rich collections held by Bishop Museum, established in 1890 as a treasure house of the Kamehameha dynasty (Rose 1980), and later augmented by important, well-preserved collections of Hawaiian material culture (Summers 1999). Bishop Museum collections at the turn of the twentieth century included a rich array of material culture such as wood canoes, plant-fiber fishnets, gourd containers, wood and stone bowls, wood spears and shark-tooth knives, stone adzes, and stone poi pounders. Other materials included barkcloth; plaited mats; feather capes, cloaks, helmets; and ritual standards, sacred images made of stone, wood, and feathers (Brigham 1899, 1902; Buck 1957; Rose et al. 1993).

Emergence of Archaeology

The first systematic records of Hawaiian archaeological field remains were made by an antiquarian and publisher, Thomas G. Thrum, who compiled descriptions of temples and their associated legends for publication in an almanac (Thrum 1906–1907a, 1906–1907b, 1915, 1916). Hawaii’s first major archaeological field project was initiated in 1906 when Bishop Museum sent Stokes to map ancient temples on Hawai‘i Island (Dye 1989:4–5; Stokes 1991). Stokes was charged with the task of producing plans of known temple foundations and compiling accounts of their history from elderly Hawaiians (Dye 1989:5–6). Although traditional gods were no longer openly worshipped at these temples following the overthrow of the traditional religion in 1819, it was thought that plans of heiau foundations could be integrated with Hawaiian genealogies to track the arrival of Pa‘ao, a legendary priest from an island in the South Pacific. In traditional accounts, Pa‘ao introduced a religious ideology that sustained a pantheon of gods, legitimized class stratification, and compelled offerings and human sacrifice at large war temples. After he returned from Hawai‘i Island, Stokes completed the first rescue archaeology project in the islands, recording the walled fish traps of Pearl Harbor in advance of its eventual development as the world’s largest naval base (Stokes 1909b). He also published notes on Hawaiian petroglyphs (Stokes 1909a).

A conscious attempt to build a more scientific archaeology at Bishop Museum developed in the 1920s and 1930s under the directorship of the Yale University geologist Herbert Gregory. Gregory brought graduate student archaeologists to Hawai‘i to complete island surveys of a broad range of sites. In addition to the temples, fish traps, and petroglyphs recorded by Stokes, the graduate students identified and recorded a wide variety of feature types, including house sites and villages, shelter caves, fishing shrines, fishponds, battle sites, trails, hōlua slides, burial grounds, and agricultural terraces, among others (Bennett 1931; Emory 1924, 1928; McAllister 1933a, 1933b; Sterling 1998; Summers 1971). They looked for evidence of superposition of architectural elements with the goal of weaning archaeology from its dependence on tradition for chronology, but failed to find any examples.

It was not until the University of Hawai‘i offered a field school course in 1950 that the potential time-depth of Hawaii’s past was fully realized. The archaeological field training program was directed by Kenneth P. Emory, a Bishop Museum archaeologist, shortly before it was announced that ¹⁴C dating had been developed by the University of Chicago physicist Willard F. Libby. The application of ¹⁴C dating to a charcoal sample from the field school excavations at a rockshelter indicated that it was apparently occupied about a millennium ago. The recovery of datable charcoal from the lowest level of a stratified rockshelter electrified the archaeologists who wrote that it opened up undreamed of possibilities for reconstructing the prehistory of the area (Emory in Emory et al. 1968:ix).

Like other Americanist archaeologists, fieldworkers in the Hawaiian Islands quickly sought to construct a culture-historical chronology of the past. Unlike their colleagues who excavated in the eastern or southwestern United States, Hawaii’s archaeologists did not recover ceramics or projectile points, two mainstays of culture-historical chronologies across the Americas. Instead, archaeologists in Hawai‘i undertook detailed analyses of fishhooks from stratified deposits to construct time-sensitive sequences of technological change in the islands (e.g., Emory et al.1968; Sinoto 1968; Emory and Sinoto 1969).

Subsequent attempts to construct culture-historical chronologies focused on Hawaiian stone adzes within the larger geographic framework of East Polynesia (Duff 1959; Emory 1968). The prevailing theoretical perspective held that similarities in the forms of adzes from different island groups were due to historical connections among the people of the island groups, rather than to technological and functional constraints in the production and use of these stone woodworking tools. The typical quadrangular-sectioned, tanged Hawaiian adze has close parallels in Eastern Polynesia, but is distinct from the adzes typical of Western Polynesia, and this was interpreted as evidence for close culture-historical relationships in Eastern Polynesia. Although preliminary suggestions of chronological significance for adze form were offered (Kirch 1972, 1985), subsequent investigations indicated that their morphological variability is due to differences in function and use life rather than age (Cleghorn 1992). Archaeologists became increasingly reluctant to rely on variation in stone adze morphology to construct a culture-historical chronology for Hawaii’s past, and have focused instead on technological explanations for the forms of Hawaiian stone adzes (Cleghorn 1982, 1984).

Growth of Archaeology

In certain respects,