Archaeological research on traditional Hawaiian agriculture has generally focused on two primary strategies: irrigated pondfield and intensive dryland cultivation. However, other cultivation strategies, such as colluvial slope agriculture, were practiced but have been less intensively studied and remain poorly understood. To begin to remedy this paucity of information, a joint education and research project between International Archaeological Research Institute, Inc., the University of Hawai'iat Manoa (UHM) Department of Anthropology, and Kamehameha Schools (KS) was conducted in Punalu'u Ahupua'a to examine an integrated slope agricultural, religious, and residential complex. Subsurface investigations and radiometric dating indicate that initial vegetation clearing of the area may have occurred as early as the late thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries AD. As early as the fifteenth century, some stands of economic trees were growing, which may have coincided with initial placement of boundary walls along some portions of the slopes. Major expansion of the surface agricultural infrastructure along the landscape occurred through the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries AD. Religious structures and associated features were built as early as the seventeenth century and later. These results situate colluvial slope agriculture within the broader context of traditional Hawaiian agronomic strategies and political and social processes across the Hawaiian archipelago.

Exchange systems are constituted by multiple materials moving in different patterns. Factions in societies negotiate access to these materials based on their social and practical utility, as well as whether and how society honors property rights claims to a resource. In Hawai'i, there has been a primary focus on the movement of staples and wealth that fueled political economies with less attention placed on materials largely outside those political economies. Volcanic glass is one item that is hypothesized to have moved in a decentralized manner as a common pool resource, though these interpretations are based on data largely from a single island and source. Here, we build on this research by evaluating and interpreting evidence of volcanic glass exchange on the island of O'ahu. We show that the composition of assemblages can be best predicted by the distance from archaeological locations (destinations) to multiple sources (origins). Furthermore, the density of sources proximal to archaeo-logical locations influences assemblage composition. For O'ahu, we find no evidence that leaders claimed property rights in volcanic glass at the scale of our analysis.

The Samoan Islands are a key archipelago for understanding the broader settlement chronology of the Remote Oceanic region. Using an integrated set of spatial and Bayesian models, this chapter evaluates the utility of the ideal-free distribution framework for understanding habitat use and settlement pattern on the high Pacific Island of Tutuila, American Samoa. The results not only demonstrate the utility of simple human behavioral ecology models for explaining the archaeological record, but also point out how the process of model development and refinement can result in the generation of new and unexpected hypotheses.

Across the Pacific, agricultural systems have used two main complementary cultivation regimes: irrigated farming of wet environments and rain-fed cropping of drylands. These strategies have different productive potential and labour needs, which has structured their temporal and spatial distributions. Although these approaches have been studied a great deal at a general level, there has been less work on the local use and significance of these strategies. Here, the authors evaluate ideal distribution models of agricultural activities in the Punalu‘u valley on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, to assess how habitat suitability changed as a result of infrastructural investment and dynamic environmental, social and demographic change. The results are of relevance for contemporary initiatives to revive Indigenous agricultural systems in Hawai‘i and beyond.

The timing of human colonization of East Polynesia, a vast area lying between Hawai'i, Rapa Nui, and New Zealand, is much debated and the underlying causes of this great migration have been enigmatic. Our study generates evidence for human dispersal into eastern Polynesia from islands to the west from around AD 900 and contemporaneous paleoclimate data from the likely source region. Lake cores from Atiu, Southern Cook Islands (SCIs) register evidence of pig and/or human occupation on a virgin landscape at this time, followed by changes in lake carbon around AD 1000 and significant anthropogenic disturbance from c. AD 1100. The broader paleoclimate context of these early voyages of exploration are derived from the Atiu lake core and complemented by additional lake cores from Samoa (directly west) and Vanuatu (southwest) and published hydroclimate proxies from the Society Islands (northeast) and Kiribati (north). Algal lipid and leaf wax biomarkers allow for comparisons of changing hydroclimate conditions across the region before, during, and after human arrival in the SCIs. The evidence indicates a prolonged drought in the likely western source region for these colonists, lasting c. 200 to 400 y, contemporaneous with the phasing of human dispersal into the Pacific. We propose that drying climate, coupled with documented social pressures and societal developments, instigated initial eastward exploration, resulting in SCI landfall(s) and return voyaging, with colonization a century or two later. This incremental settlement process likely involved the accumulation of critical maritime knowledge over several generations.

Explaining the processes underlying the emergence of monument construction is a major theme in contemporary anthropological archaeology, and recent studies have employed spatially-explicit modeling to explain these patterns. Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile) is famous for its elaborate ritual architecture, particularly numerous monumental platforms (ahu) and statuary (moai). To date, however, we lack explicit modeling to explain spatial and temporal aspects of monument construction. Here, we use spatially-explicit point-process modeling to explore the potential relations between ahu construction locations and subsistence resources, namely, rock mulch agricultural gardens, marine resources, and freshwater sources-the three most critical resources on Rapa Nui. Through these analyses, we demonstrate the central importance of coastal freshwater seeps for precontact populations. Our results suggest that ahu locations are most parsimoniously explained by distance from freshwater sources, in particular coastal seeps, with important implications for community formation and inter-community competition in precontact times.

The diverse island societies of East Polynesia are well-suited as models for comparative evolutionary analysis. Settled ca. 750 BP by a common ancestral population, colonists of the remote corners of the Pacific shared a pool of cultural traits that included commensal species, language, technology, and other cultural practices. Following colonization however, island populations diverged in language, subsistence practices, degree of territoriality, settlement patterns, investment and forms of monumental architecture, and social organization. Driven by historical circumstances and varied environmental conditions, this divergence presents evolutionary case studies of alternative paths of cultural change. One explanatory approach to this evolutionary divergence involves isolating the critical ecological parameters that likely constrained and shaped the diverse history of island populations. Here, we offer a comparative evolutionary analysis that explores the divergent histories of two marginal East Polynesian islands: Rapa Nui and Rapa Iti.

The timing and choice of initial settlement location are examined on the small island of Tavua in Fiji's Mamanuca Group. The mid- to late-Holocene sea-level retreat influenced the island's coastal landforms through the acceleration of coastal progradation and the production of habitable land. Archaeological, sedimentological, and chronological data are integrated to better understand the island's settlement and geomorphological history. These datasets are then compared with regional and modeled sea-level curves for Fiji in order to constrain the time period for the onset of coastal regression. The results indicate that Tavua was initially settled around 3000 years ago, within a few centuries of the formation of the coastal plain. Integrating archaeological, sedimentological, and sea-level datasets helps produce a more precise understanding of the relationship between sea-level change and the timing of settlement on small islands in Oceania.

The Hawaiian Islands, like many other high volcanic islands, are characterized by a diversity of ecozones, which had ramifications for the types of subsistence strategies that developed within each. Although traditional cultivation practices were highly variable, agricultural systems can be roughly split into windward and leeward forms. Leeward agriculture is differentiated from windward agriculture based on the almost complete dependence on rainfall. Dependence on rainfall, an often-unpredictable resource, creates a high level of risk and uncertainty in agricultural yields. Dryland field-systems were highly susceptible to droughts, potentially resulting in food shortages that would have had various societal consequences, such as increased intergroup conflict, community cooperation, or social inequality. The concepts of risk and uncertainty, derived from human behavioral ecology, are useful for exploring how fluctuations in the availability of resources from droughts influenced agriculturalists in the Hawaiian Islands. Using the Rainfall Atlas of Hawai‘i, a newly published rainfall archive, we investigate spatiotemporal rainfall patterns in the Leeward Kohala Field System (LKFS) on Hawai‘i Island. We employ geostatistical modeling techniques, time-series analysis, and a simulation model to quantify the intensity, frequency, and periodicity of droughts in the LKFS. Our results support previous studies and suggest a high degree of agricultural risk, particularly from ca. AD 1450–1600, with implications for Hawaiian agriculture and emerging sociocultural patterns.

Agent-based modelling (ABM) is an emerging archaeological tool that offers insights into processes which are archaeologically invisible or difficult to detect. Here we illustrate the potential of ABM for archaeomalacology, posing two research questions and comparing ABM results with Pacific archaeological sequences. The first analysis considers how molluscan energetic return rates (ERR) and age of reproductive maturity (ARM), singularly or in combination, influence prey population resilience. The second analysis assesses how prey spatial structure affects foraging efficiency and prey susceptibility to resource depression. Consistent with expectations from evolutionary ecology and life history theory, the ABM results demonstrate that both ERR and ARM influence prey population resilience (or vulnerability). However, the analysis also demonstrates that ARM is the more important variable and taxa with high ERR (i.e., large-bodied) are disproportionately affected by human harvesting. Not only are efficient foragers more likely to target high ERR taxa, but these prey often have delayed ARM and un-foraged individuals are more likely to be smaller and immature, with disadvantages for population stability and recovery. In short, early-maturing taxa are highly resilient, while late-maturing organisms are more vulnerable; these outcomes also are observed archaeologically. The ABM analyses also demonstrate the effects of prey spatial structure on molluscan susceptibility to resource depression. High prey aggregation initially allows for high foraging efficiency, but prey abundance and encounter rates often rapidly decline. In contrast, when prey are dispersed, search time is greater, leading to lower encounter rates and reduced foraging efficiency, but greater prey population stability. Our ABM and archaeological examples further illustrate that while general principles can be derived, the resilience and spatial structure of specific prey populations, as well as foraging outcomes, are context dependent and continuously evolving. Finally, we note that model departures from theoretical expectations serve to stimulate further research, including use of additional parameters, consideration of novel contextual evidence, and/or investigation of social, technological or environmental hypotheses.

The diverse islands of Oceania are ideal locations for the study of human ecology. Here, we argue that human behavioural ecology (HBE) provides a useful theoretical framework to approach a range of topics in Pacific prehistory, including, but not limited to, subsistence, territoriality, and monumentality. We further stress that the strength of this approach lies in the use of models as heuristic devices, and that HBE is not mutually exclusive from other explanatory frameworks, but complements larger research agendas in Pacific archaeology.

ABSTRACT Marine foraging is an under‐studied aspect of Sāmoan archaeology, although it clearly played a primary role in subsistence, with implications for settlement and demography. A pair of previous ichthyoarchaeological studies identified general stability in fish exploitation during ∼1500–2000 year sequences. We present a foraging‐theory‐based analysis of fish remains from Tula Village, Tutuila Island. Our results identify a decrease in foraging efficiency, but there is no unequivocal evidence for resource depression. To frame this issue at a broader level, we re‐analyse published data for Fatu‐ma‐Futi, Tutuila Island, and To‘aga, Ofu Island. Our results are consistent with previous analyses in suggesting little change in the prevalence of particular fish families and the contribution of large‐bodied prey at these two sites. However, a degree of localised variability in dominant fish taxa is evident. Our analysis has implications for studies of resilience in nearshore marine environments, as well as methodological issues for data generated to examine foraging efficiency and resource depression.

The discovery of the fully developed Formative sites of Cotocallao (ca. 3750-2350 cal. B.P.) in the Quito Basin and La Chimba (ca. 2650-1700 cal. B.P.) in the northern highlands of Ecuador has raised questions about their cultural antecedents, which have not been resolved despite decades of archaeological work in the region. Paleoenvironmental coring investigations were conducted at Lake San Pablo in northern highland Ecuador to determine the date for the onset of prehistoric maize farming in the temperate highland valleys of this region. The investigations included analysis of lake sediments for pollen, phytoliths, diatoms, and tephra: Maize pollen was identified as early as 4900 cal. B.P., while maize phytoliths dated even earlier, to 6200 or 6600 cal. B.P. These results demonstrate a long history of maize farming in valleys around Lake San Pablo, but in the context of a punctuated record of major and minor volcanic eruptions. It is concluded that early horticultural sites predating Cotocallao and La Chimba must exist, but to find such sites, archaeologists will have to locate and study deeply buried A-horizon soils.

Between 3050 and 2700 years ago, humans first colonized the islands of south-west Remote Oceania, a region stretching from Vanuatu to Sāmoa. These colonists created a dense archaeological record of Lapita pottery and other artefacts on island coastlines across the region. There is one striking exception to this pattern: Sāmoa, with only a single Lapita pottery colonization site dating to approximately 2800 years ago. There are two competing explanations for the unique Sāmoan colonization record. First, there was a dense Lapita colonization record, now displaced through sedimentation and coastal subsidence. Second, there were few coastal plains suitable for settlement 2800 years ago resulting in the lack of colonization sites. This article describes the first archaeological and geological research designed to systematically test these explanations. The research focuses on the south-eastern coastal plain of ‘Upolu Island, an area where previous geological research and mid-Holocene sea-level indicators predict the least relative subsidence over the last 3000 years. Auger cores and controlled excavation units sampled the geological sequence and archaeological deposits across 700 m of coast. Sedimentary and dating analyses indicate coastal plain formation beginning 1200 years ago with the earliest archaeological deposits, including plain pottery, lithics, shellfish and vertebrate fauna, dating possibly 700 years later. Microfossil analyses identify burning and forest clearance coincident with the earliest archaeological remains. Compared with other Sāmoan archaeological deposits, the cultural materials and ecofacts represent very low-intensity occupation. These results support the proposal that there were few coastal plains suitable for Lapita pottery–bearing colonists approximately 2800 years ago.

Rapa Nui Journal Vol. 30 (2) October 2016 point in the island’s history, marked by the introduction of new organisms and micro-organisms and new cultural perspectives. It describes the devastating effects of the Peruvian slave raids and the introduction of smallpox that resulted in a dramatic depopulation and loss of knowledge about Rapanui culture. This marked the true collapse that happened due to foreign influence on the island. In Chapter 8, Boersema describes the Christianization of the islanders and the effect of the first foreign residents on the island. He gives an account of the different researchers who came to study the Rapanui culture – or what was left of it – and eventually “[...] propelled Easter Island to iconic status in the field of environmental science.” The last chapter deals with Rapa Nui’s role as a model in environmental sciences and comes to the somewhat psychological question of why the “collapse theory” remained so popular despite all the evidence against it. The author gives examples for impoverishments of ecosystems that did not end in collapse, but in a reorganization. It is “[...] the quality of ecosystems [that] is at stake, not their sustainability.” He lists all the misconceptions that the “collapse theory” is based upon and comes to the conclusion that it misrepresents Easter Island’s past and can therefore not be used as a lesson for the world’s future. Instead the Rapanui found “[...] a new balance of culture and nature [...]” He ends with a portrayal of Rapa Nui today and a number of suggestions for the cultural and environmental sustainability of the island. Throughout the book, Boersema lays out how the misconceptions about the pre-contact Rapanui culture could have been avoided – if objectiveness had ever been the objective – by reading the available historical accounts and by taking the results of scientific research into account. The story of Easter Island before contact is not one of failure but one of success. This book can convincingly prove that the population was able to adjust culturally and materially – albeit on an impoverished level – to an environment which had developed at least partly through factors over which the islanders had no control. The psychological aspect that the author includes in the book as to why the idea of Easter Island as a model of worldwide disaster became so popular and was so uncritically repeated by many scholars is most interesting and adds a new perspective to the collapse controversy. There are two minor points of criticism. Firstly, the term “coconut palm tree” as it is used throughout the book is misleading: While there is still so much uncertainty as to the taxonomic classification of the extinct Easter Island palm, it would be more judicious to refrain from using the term “coconut palm”. The author seems to have had an actual coconut palm (Cocos nucifera) in mind, because he refers to the endocarps as possible containers for storing water (p. 52). The shells of the palm nuts found in excavations on the island don’t hold more than 1oz of liquid and could hardly have been used for that purpose. And secondly, in such a meticulously referenced book, it would be desirable to also give references for some of the dates (e.g., for the beginning and end of the statue production) to have a better idea of what his chronological framework is based upon. In summary, Jan Boersema is to be commended for presenting such a conclusive body of evidence that may be seen as the final blow to the simplistic and once iconic “collapse theory” which, in fact, “[...] turned out to be “a textbook example of collective error” [...]” The book The Survival of Easter Island – Dwindling Resources and Cultural Resilience is a rehabilitation of the ancient Rapanui who have been characterized as being responsible for the demise of their island despite being the victims of foreign influences.

ABSTRACTGeologist Bill Dickinson argued that prior to late Holocene sea level fall, in many Pacific island settings low‐lying islands were awash, shallow nearshore environments were restricted and human settlement was constrained or sometimes impossible. Stable coastlines and islets of modern configuration only developed after the “cross‐over date”, when declining high‐tide levels fell below mid‐Holocene low‐tide levels, a regionally variable process. We evaluate evidence from the almost‐atoll of Aitutaki, Cook Islands against this model, providing: (1) a local late Holocene sea level reconstruction including nine U/Th‐dated microatolls; (2) 22 new AMS dates on human activities, many from small, low‐lying offshore islets; and (3) elevation data for 14C‐dated cultural deposits on three islets. Our results include an early first millennium sea level position 0.74–0.97 m (± 0.126) above modern height‐of‐living‐corals, an eighth to eleventh century AD minimum relative to the long‐term trend, and a sea level rise peaking in the mid‐fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. This reconstruction, combined with twelfth century AD Cocos nucifera charcoal, informs on the timing and distribution of human activities across Aitutaki's evolving land and seascapes and sea level impacts. While our findings do not contradict Dickinson's model of sea level constrained island settlement, other explanations cannot be excluded.