Hawaii - Aspects of History

Some of the broad goals of archaeology include and the understanding of change in prehistory. Hawaiian archaeology is, in part, concerned with the problems of how the people who settled a group of islands in the North Pacific came to the "Hawaiian" - that is, certainly Polynesian, but nonetheless unique. The answer involves determining the origin and culture of the first settlers. It involves exploring the way in which these settlers and their descendants met the possibilities and limitations of an island environment over a period of some 1,500 years. And it involves understanding the consequences of isolation from the rest of the Polynesian world. The theme of Hawaiian prehistory thus becomes the human use of an isolated and bounded environment, which resulted in the culture encountered by Europeans in 1778.

The Hawaiian archipelago lies over 4,000 km north of the Society Islands and nearly 5,000 km due west of the Jalisco coast of Mexico. The islands stretch across the Tropic of Cancer, with the main groups toward the southeast and a string of island remnants toward the northwest. These sub-tropical islands, volcanic in origin, have great diversity in landform, rainfall, and vegetation. If an island is visualized as once a cone (or several cones), its topography may be understood as a consequence of the amount of erosion of the cone's surface. To windward (north-east), the direction of the prevailing wind and rain, erosion has formed deep valleys, usually with permanent streams, on the older cones. to leeward, the cone sides are poorly dissected or are cut by valleys usually shallower than those to windward. Coastal plains have formed in some areas, with trough-like valleys behind them. The coastlines include wave-cut cliffs, rocky slopes, and beaches of cobbles or sand.

In 1778 this landscape of Hawaii was a human landscape. The Hawaiians were farmers. They cleared vegetation by cutting and burning, controlled streams through the construction of dams, canals, and terraces; cultivated the soil of slop9es and valley bottoms, and constructed field lines of stone to restrict erosion. 'The Hawaiians were builders. Under a complex social system, massive temples of piled stone were constructed and are still visible in imposing locations around the islands. As far north along the chain as Necker Island and as high as the upper slopes of the volcano called Mauna Kea, the Hawaiians left their imprint on the land.

The effective world of the Hawaiians in 1776 was eight major islands, with a total land area of 16,558 km, spread along an arc some 500 km long. According to Hawaiian tradition, there had been no contact with other areas of Polynesia for some twenty generations prior to European contact. Two small islands, Nihoa and Necker, to the northwest of the main group, have archaeological remains but were not occupied at contact. Hawaiians travelled between islands by paddling or sailing canoes; however, several wide and often dangerous channels, up to 115 km across, limited communication. The wider channels created four interaction areas, areas with stronger ties internally than externally: Kauai and Niihau; Oahu, Maui, Molokai, Lanai, and Kahoolawe; and Hawaii. Under the best of conditions communication between Kauai and Hawaii may have taken five or six days with the use of special runners and canoe crews.

The largest island, Hawaii, is composed of five volcanoes, the highest of which is 4,205 m above se level. The island has 10,415 km of land and 425 km of coastline. Kahoolawe, the smallest of the major islands, was formed by a single volcano and is 450 m high, with 116 km of land and 46 km of coastline. Transportation across islands before contact was on foot because there are only a few kilometers of navigable streams and there were no pack animals at the time. An extensive system of trails had been developed which, combined with coastal travel by canoe, allowed relatively rapid communication on each island.

The remains of such trails provide the clearest record of Hawaiian movement and are found extending inland and along the coast. Trails were marked in a variety of ways. Waterworn stones were placed across rough lava fields, and small cairns were placed as markers particularly atop knolls. Many sections of trail are corridors through field structures. Often a trail may be identified by a shallow trough-like depression and a scattering of discarded sea shells. Caves or small sheltering walls of piled stone were used as resting places where trails ran for long distances through uninhabited territory.

Petroglyphs (rock carvings) are frequently found in association with trails, particularly in areas of smooth lava. Although petroglyphs served many purposes, those associated with trails probably were mementos left by travellers - perhaps to record events of importance, perhaps for luck. The petroglyphic depictions include canoes, travellers, and carrying poles, and so provide evidence for several forms of transportation used by the islanders.

For the Hawaiians as farmers, the major resources of the land were fertile soil and water. Flowing water was used to irrigate the alluvial bottoms of valleys and sections of coastal plains. Canals, led from streams or springs and brought to irrigated fields, were constructed of earth and stone embankments. In many areas the beds of small streams were terraced and converted to pond fields. There is a general relation between landform and the development of irrigation: the steeper the land, the less likely it was to have been irrigated; and with land that was irrigated, the steeper the slope, the smaller the lot size. Thus while the extent of irrigation was considerable, construction labour was kept to a minimum.

The staple grown in the irrigated fields was taro (Colocasia esculenta), a plant with many varieties that were cultivated also under non-irrigated conditions. The other major food plant, the sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas), was exclusively a dry-land crop. It was grown in fields that had 60 to 200 cm of rain per year with adequate sunlight. The dry taro could be grown primarily where rainfall exceeded 120 cm per year.

Other cultigens included coconut (Cocos nucifera), banana (Musa paradisica), and breadfruit (Artocarpus incisus). Where possible these and other plants were grown in concert with sweet potatoes and taro, even though the largest percentage of land was devoted to the latter two. The agriculture was multi-crop, and agricultural techniques were mixed. Irrigated and non-irrigated fields were often adjacent, and the dry cultivation techniques ranged from swidden to permanent field. Taro grown in irrigated wet valleys and sweet potatoes grown on dry slopes represent the extremes of the system. Irrigation fields on Kauai were described in this way in the late 1700s.

Only some 10 to 15 percent of the island of Hawaii was under cultivation at contact because agriculture was constrained in great inland stretches by low rainfall, recent lava flows, or high altitude. A much greater percentage of each of the other large islands was under cultivation. The total agricultural complex included pig (Sus scrofa), dog (Canis familiaris), fowl (Callus gallus), and several species of fish. All of these were dependent to some extent upon agricultural production or the agricultural environment. Fishponds were often incorporated into the lower areas of the large irrigation complexes. The primary tools used in agriculture were adzes for vegetation clearance (used in conjunction with fire), a simple wooden digging stick for tilling, and cutting implements (perhaps bamboo and basaltic-glass - a variety of obsidian) for plant trimming.

Other resources of the land came from the upland forests. Items collected included some food plants, fibers, wood for house and canoe construction, and a few animals - particularly birds, which were hunted for food and as a source of feathers for cloaks and headdresses. Some cultigens, especially taro and banana, were planted in the forests and allowed to go wild to serve as potential food supply in case of crop failure. Streams were also a source of food where fish (particularly of the family Gobiidae) and prawns could be collected.

The ocean was the primary source of protein for the Hawaiians. They obtained fish, shellfish, squid, crusaceans, and, on occasion, marine mammals. The most diversified tool assemblage of the Hawaiians was for ocean resource exploitation and included fishhooks, nets with sinkers, traps and octopus lures, as well as manufacturing tools (such as abraders made of sea-urchin spines or coral) and canoes for transport.

An environment not only provides resources, it poses hazards. In Hawaii, tsunamis (tidal waves), mud and rock slides, and volcanic eruptions (on Maui and Hawaii) were all hazards to life and property, but the greatest threat came from drought and flood, the hazards to agriculture. Dry-land farming was subject to periodic failure, particularly in areas of marginal rainfall. Flash floods even now are quite common in the islands and can easily destroy fields and settlements. Floods and drought-produced famines are recorded in the traditional literature and in early historic records.

The archaeological remains of Hawaiian resource use are extensive, although many have been destroyed by the same hazards the early Hawaiians faced, especially tsunamis and floods. Yet many Hawaiian structures were well engineered. A number of fishponds continue to survive the pounding of the ocean and are still in use today. Remants of irrigation fields can be found in the upper portions of the valleys on Oahu, while whole irrigation complexes, some also still in use, exist in the valleys of other islands. The terrace facings of stacked stone are still in evidence, some as high as 2 and 3 m, stone-lined canals can be traced; and, on occasion, a terrace soil is still naturally irrigated, long after abandonment, and wild taro continues to grow. In dry valleys and on slopes, dry agricultural features of stone alignments, terraces, low walls, and mounds have been identified. These features are seldom imposing, but in some areas they are dramatic because of their extent. Excavations into agricultural fields have shown that pond-fields commonly developed fine clay above a hardpan as well as a zone of heavy iron staining, while dry fields show the disturbance of cultivation and frequently a heavy scatter of charcoal fragments.

Portable artifacts are found primarily in areas of manufacture, storage, or discard, rather than in places of use. Adzes are found in the largest numbers at the quarry sites where they were roughed out, or they are located in association with structures where they were being finished or sharpened. The adzes produced at about the time of contact varied widely in size, but tended to be quadrangular in cross section and tanged or flat. They were often finely ground and polished on at least two sides.

The greatest percentage of fishhooks are located in sites that were the temporary shelters of fishermen. Fishhooks made of wood, bone, and shell were manufactured in a variety of sizes and shapes, but at contact three forms predominated: a single-piece hook with either a jabbing or rotating point; a two-piece hook; and a trolling hook. The line attachment for single-piece hooks was generally knob shaped.

The resources used by the Hawaiians fall into concentric zones on each island: the ocean, occasional reef, and shoreline; agricultural oands of the valleys and slopes; and upland forest. In general, resources were exploited by means of the basic Hawaiian land unit, the ahupua'a, which extended from the coast inland, thereby cutting across the resource zones. Each island was divided radially by numerous ahupua'a, the boundaries of which tended to follow natural topography. Ahupua'a varied in size, but few were more than 2 km wide at the coast. They extended from 5 to 20 km inland.

The nature of ahupua'a social and economic organization has long been a problem in Hawaiian anthropology. Recent work suggests that the people who lived within an ahu0pua'a tended to form an economically self-sufficient unit. Not every scholar agrees with this on material distribution is needed. Although some form of distribution of items from localized resources, high-quality adzes for example, probably took place, the mechanisms for such distributions are unknown.

Ahupua'a boundaries were of major importance because they defined the territories of use. They were marked with cairns or identified by natural landmarks such as rock outcrops or valley rims. The word ahupua'a itself is composed of two words meaning pig altar or pig cairn, thought by some to refer to a structure, sometimes called an altar, located at the border of an ahupua'a for the placement of tribute (symbolized by the pig). No such tribute cairn has been identified archaeologically, but markers that follow historically recorded ahupua'a boundaries have been noticed in a number of areas. Inland trails may also have served as boundaries.

Hawaiian society was divided into two major classes, so-called commoners and chiefs, the latter subdivided into at least two ranks, with an additional segment forming a special category of priests. Local populations were organized into family units, although among all social ranks males ate separately from females in a special men's house, which also housed a local shrine and was used for a number of activities, such as adz manufacture. The common people of an ahupua'a maintained a certain amount of social distance from members of other ahup0ua'a by local endogamy. In contrast, the chiefs developed geographically extensive marriage networks.

The ahupua'a were organized into large political units, each of which was under the control of a ruling chief, usually a male, who "owned" the land and its produce. He or his representative allocateed the use of the land to the commoners, who supported themselves and the chiefs from its production. An overseer, usually a low-ranking chief, represented the interests of the ruling chief within each ahupua'a. The commoners generally remained on the land through succeeding generations, as the land was reassigned to them as the chiefs' administrations changed.

The ideological support for the hereditary ranking system lay in the belief that chiefs were chiefs because they were genealogically closer to the gods than were commoners. This relationship was ratified through the actions of the priests, who carried out ceremonies of propitiation and dedication on behalf of the chiefs. The gods were also considered to be the power behind natural forces that brought rain and good fortune on the one hand and drought and misfortune on the other. Thus the actions of the priests as representatives of the chiefs provided ideological security for the commoners.

Among the chiefs intense competition for power for themselves and their lines expressed itself through diplomacy, marriage, and warfare. At the time of contact, there were four independent chiefdoms, each with a ruling chief. The four territories centered on Kauai, Oahu, Maui, and Hawaii. Each island was subdivided into political districts, which according to the traditions from time to time of contact had acquired his domain by first taking control of two districts of the island, then conquering the ruling chief of the remaining four districts.

Hawaii had one of the most complex Polynesian societies, as defined by the sharply bounded endogamous classes, the number of chiefly ranks, and the power held by the ruling chiefs. The development of this complexity is a problem of much concern in Hawaiian anthropology and an important issue in the archaeology of the islands. The material reflections of social relations are often inadequate, but there is some evidence for Hawaiian class separation and social units. As suggested by recent detailed analysis of residence patterns, a commoner's family ordinarily occupied one or two structures, a sleeping house and perhaps a cooking or utility house. These took the archaeological form of pavings, low platforms, or enclosures, averaging about 35 m in area, which served as the foundation for pole-and-thatch houses. Small hearths are found in sleeping houses in some instances, while cooking houses may have an earth-oven and perhaps an additional hearth. A number of structures have been archaeologically identified as men's houses. They are platforms or enclosures, averaging over 100 sq m in size, and may include several stepped terraces. Unworked pieces of coral and a platform, perhaps shrine features, are also indicative of a men's house.

The household of a chief resided in a cluster of several structures, including one or more of the following: a sleeping house, a men's house, a female eating house, a storehouse, and perhaps a canoe shed and house temple. The rank of the chief can be related to the number of structures or to the overall labour expenditure in housing construction relative to that of other clusters.

Habitation complexes of chiefs and commoners have been located on bare lava fields, in areas with some soil buildings around the structures, or buried in alluvial deposits or sand dunes. Excavations have evidenced multiple construction on rebuilding of structures and usually have produced scatterings of shell, flakes of basalt or basaltic glass, and fragments of adzes, fish-hooks, and abrading tools. The most common features are earthen ovens or hearths of various forms.

Two other kinds of structures, slides and temples, were primarily associated with the activities of the chiefs. The slides are long ramps of stone used for a toboggan-like sport. The temples (heiau) have been described in great detail ethnographically but have not been studies recently as a structural class. A good many of the major temples in one of contact have survived. They are stone structures, as much as 4,000 m in area. some are stone-filled platforms, many with aides several metres high. Others are constructed as a series of large, stepped platforms or have great walled enclosures. These originally served as the foundation or enclosure for a number of structures of pole and thatch, where ceremonies were carried out. The major temples are usually conspicuously located on hilltops above bays, on high sand dunes, or at the upper edge of ridges on valley sides.

Burial pattern has been argued to be reflection of differences between chiefs and commoners, but the contact practices are not well-known. In some areas burial platforms were constructed, and it has been suggested that platform size was related to the rank of the buried chief, however, there is some uncertainty about the dating of these structures. The data may also be skewed by6 the reported practice at hiding bones to prevent their use of magical practices. By the time of contact, in some areas, the bones of ruling chiefs were placed in mausoleums - places of great sanctity - one of which is still preserved at Honaunau, Hawaii, as National Historic Park. the house of the chiefs' bones is there associated with two temples and a huge wall that isolates the sacred area on a spit of lava at the ocean edge.

The archaeological remains of warfare between competing chiefs are primarily sanctuaries, either ridge forts or refuge caves, defensible areas in which small groups of people could hide during conflict. Ridgetop refuges are found on most of the islands: these are located on knife-edge ridges with trenches 3 to 4 m deep cut across the ridges to leave a central area of isolation. Stones could then be dropped on attackers as they crossed the trenches. Many caves were used for hiding, and a number of fortified caves have been found on the island of Hawaii. Located in lave fields, they are entered through the collapsed roof of a lava tube or bubble. Their openings are walled to allow passage for only one person in a stooped position and give those inside the best defensive advantage.

The first census records from the early 1800s indicate a great range of population size per ahupua'a. In a deteiled study in one area of Kauai it was found that the size of ahupua'a populations, which ranged from 85 to 522 in an 1832 census, correlated strongly with the amount of agricultural land within the unit. Ahupua'a that contained irrigation complexes such as those on Kauai were generally defined by the limits of the drainage area. Thus the larger the irrigation resource base (drainage basin), the larger the population of the ahupua'a. However, in areas with non-irrigated agriculture populations were of approximately equal size per ahupua'a, with each ahupua'a having an approximately equal production base. In other words, the richer the resources, the smaller the ahupua'a; and the poorer the resources, the larger the ahupua'a, a situation that resulted in more or less equal population distribution per unit in each case, people were concentrated were food was concentrated.

A contact, population distribution was positively correlated with the first three categories. Land subdivision was also correlated with these resource areas, as the smaller ahupua'a and the greatest populations were the maximum to secondary resource areas. A third correlation was 3ith district boundaries. Districts centred on maximum resource areas, and boundaries between districts fell in secondary to minimum resource areas or along natural boundaries dividing such areas.

The majority of people maintained their permanent residence along the coast with temporary use shelters inland for specialized work, particularly in the agricultural fields. There were two exceptions to this. Scattered permanent residences appear to have existed inland in association with extensive irrigation fields, and small-scale permanent settlements may have been located in at least some of the inland specialized agricultural areas, such as Waimea, Hawaii. permanent inland settlement in dry agricultural fields has been suggested but not clearly demonstrated.

The chiefs of a district resided predominantly in the largest centres of population, that is, in the maximum resource areas. The many chiefs and their retainers required a large amount of food, including a preponderance of fishpond production and a great share of the pigs and dogs. Goods from outlying areas were collected for the chiefs, who also moved about the district, particularly to good surfing ort fishing areas, helping to distribute the burden of their support.

Many temporary-use sites are also found archaeologically. These include caves and stacked, stone-wall windbreaks. The cave sites at the coast served as fisherman's shelters and those inland as rest areas or temporary shelters for exploitation of specialized resources, such as adz stone quarries. The low-walled shelters are frequently found in non-irrigated inland agricultural areas. Excavations in these sites have produced evidence of sporadic occupation, such as superimposed hearths and lenses of debris. Coastal caves commonly have relatively deep midden deposits (over 30 or 40 cm) and numbers of fish-hook fragments.

This was the first recording of what would become a major source of information about early historic Hawaii, the observations of explorers, travellers, and traders. As Hawaii became westernized in the nineteenth century, voluminous descriptions of Hawaiian life and events became part of the archival material: records of missionaries and planters; tax, marriage, and census records, land claims, court cases; and newspapers. The "memory" culture of Hawaii was also recorded during this period by island residents, Hawaiian and European. Some Hawaiian writers called on their own experiences in recording material about the Hawaiian past. The Europeans and many of the Hawaiians also collected great quantities of information from Hawaiian informants about traditional customs, myths, legends, and histories.

As in the history of all contact, however, the people making the observations were also involved in events that changed what they were observing. Venereal disease was immediately introduced. Iron nails were converted to fishhooks before the eyes of the first Europeans to reach Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii. From the first encounter, the observations and records were of increasingly "acculturated" Hawaii. those collections of traditional cultural data are subject to the problems of misunderstanding, omission, and leveling of original and social differences. Archaeology, despite its many limitations, provides an independent reference to the past. It is a source of information about the period before contact, the culture at contact, and the events following contact. To understand how sites can be used, it is first necessary to explore their history per se, that is, how they became sites and whether those that remain after years of destruction are representative of the range of past occupation.

When Cook arrived, there was little that could be called archaeological, there were few abandoned areas, no major ruins of earlier or different peoples (although legends referred to such people), no lost cities; mysterious mounds, or decaying monuments. The "sites" were alive and well, lived in and lived upon. European contact changed this. Areas of Hawaiian occupation would become Hawaiian ruins.

Beginning in the early 1800s some areas began to lose population, the use of the land began to change, and old ways of life were transformed. The infant death rate increased and the birth rate declined as the population was reduced by some 50 percent in the first 60 years of contact. Political and economic changes brought redistribution of the population. The islands were consolidated into a single Hawaiian monarchy, and European trade became a major factor in the economy. Areas favourable for the anchorage of European vessels saw the growth of new centers of population and trade. Introduction of new plants and animals altered agricultural practices.

While many of these changes occurred gradually or without sharp boundaries, a major socio-religious change occurred in 1819 with the deliberate abandonment of the old "state" religion and the practices associated with it, particularly the separation of male and female activities. This led to the abandonment or destruction of temples and men's houses, and changed relationships within the family unit.

As some structures were being abandoned, many more were modified where Hawaiians remained on the land but altered the ways in which they lived. European artifacts of metal and glass were added to or replaced the traditional assemblage. Homesteads and settlements were reorganized or rebuilt. The nineteenth century became the century of the stone wall. Houses, yards, fields, and roads were enclosed or lined with stacked stone walls, in response to the great members of animals to be controlled, to new concepts of property, and to the make-work needs for prisoners. Toward the end of the nineteenth century many Hawaiian settlements were abandoned as economic independence was lost, as commercial demands lured people into towns or plantations, as transportation of produce became too costly, or as property was lot through indebtedness.

There are areas in Hawaii today where these nineteenth-century abandoned settlements, and the occupations that existed before them, may be found as archeological sites. But large-scale eradication of sites began with nineteenth-century plantation agriculture and has continued to the present with urban and resort expansion. No one has assessed how much this distorts knowledge of Hawaiian archaeology, but for some islands - certainly Oahu - the remains of much of the past have perished.

The origin of archaeology in Hawaii is firmly linked with the founding in 1889 of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum for Polynesian Ethnology and Natural History. Although there was an interest in antiquities prior to this time, the museum brought organization to the study of Hawaiian material culture and sites, particularly temples, fishponds, and petroglyphs. Archaeological field surveys were begun around the turn of the century, and the first controlled excavation in Hawaii was the digging of a shelter deposit on Kahoolawe in 1913. Only very limited excavation were carried out over the next 37 years, a period characterized by broad-scale surveys aimed at the location and categorization of major surface features on each island and the collection of local information about their history.

This archaeological work produced no "prehistory." There are several ways to explain this, one of which is by examination of the relation between data and problems. A conference held in Honolulu in 1920 emphasized the difficulties with Polynesian origins and suggested a program of ethnographic and archaeological survey in Polynesia for the collection of comparative data. Stratigraphic excavation was suggested, and culture area and age area were the theoretical frameworks for explanation. In Hawaii Emory began a problem-oriented survey, but no substantial excavations were carried out. The archaeological material in Hawaii proved hard to control typologically and chronologically. Artifacts such as adzes and temples did not lend themselves to easy comparison, because they lacked the stylistic variability of pottery or projectile points, which was leading to success in mainland American archaeology in the creation of archaeological "cultures" and diffusion patterns. The sites in Hawaii were generally thought to be shallow and unsuitable for excavation (despite the results on Kahoolawe), surface structures were hard to categorize, and portable artifacts were generally few in number and limited in variety. The research carried out stimulated no controversy; there was nothing like the Moa-hunter material of New Zealand. McAllister (1933), who conducted surveys on Kahoolawe and Oahu, noted that the material from Stoke's 1913 excavation yielded some artifacts adequate in number for comparison, but with no variation throughout the site. In other words, there was no evidence for significant change in the archaeological record, and without change, what was to be explained? there was nothing to cast doubt on the Polynesian origins of the Hawaiians, but neither was there much evidence to aid in determining the specific Hawaiian homeland.

Oral traditions and linguistics (in other words, non-archaeological data) proved more valuable in dealing with problems of prehistory than did archaeology. The Hawaiian traditions furnished detailed accounts of voyaging, wars, famines, and other major events, with an accompanying time-scale of genealogies that could be converted to years. Furthermore, comparative ethnology and linguistics were used to postulate migration and contact histories.

In the 1950s archaeological data and archaeological questions began to match. The beginnings of radiocarbon dating meant specific sites could be dated, so that some sort of "absolute" time scale for early Hawaii could be determined. Stimulus came also from a field school excavation of a rock shelter that produced a variety of artifacts. The possibility of prehistoric change was revived (Emory 1968). A program to develop a framework for Hawaiian archaeology was devised, which focused on a search for early components in relatively deep stratified sites. Cave and sand dune deposits provided the models for this kind of site and led to excavations at South Point, Hawaii. this research produced evidence of relatively early Hawaiian occupation and a clear demonstration of artifact change through time, primarily morphology (Emory et al. 1968). This change was used to develop a seriation, with a stratigraphic base, that could be used for temporal references - the first use of archaeological data to solve an archaeological problem in Hawaii. Specific ideas about Hawaiian culture history also came from this work.

In the 1960s work on settlement pattern, subsistence, and social organization was begun and emphasized the study of local regions. This orientation, primarily inspired by Green's concept of settlement archaeology (1967), aligned Hawaiian archaeological problems with the kind of data of greatest abundance and variety in Hawaii: agricultural and residential structures. Current problems thus include not only Hawaiian origins, but patterns of resource use, agricultural change, trade patterns, stone technology, and the development of complex ranking.

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