On the Road of the Winds by Kirch Patrick Vinton

Author:Kirch, Patrick Vinton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520292819
Publisher: University of California Press

THE “TRADITIONAL” ATOLL SOCIETIES

Although most of the best-known Polynesian societies are situated on high, volcanic islands, there are also nearly one hundred atolls dispersed over a wide sector of the tropical core of the Polynesian Triangle. The largest cluster of atolls, about eighty in all, constitute the Tuamotu Islands of French Polynesia, forming a 1,600-kilometer-long arc from just east of Tahiti extending southeast as far as Mangareva (map 12). Several other atolls comprise the Northern Cook Islands (including Manihiki, Tongareva, Pukapuka, and Rakahanga), while a third cluster located just north and south of the equator (Fanning, Malden, Christmas, and others) is known as the Line or Equatorial Islands. Both the Tuamotu and the Northern Cook islands have flourishing Polynesian cultures. The Line Islands have archaeological vestiges of former Polynesian habitation (Emory 1934a) but were all abandoned by the time of European contact. All of the ethnographically documented atoll societies were classified by Goldman (1970) as falling within his “Traditional” category. With limited land area, these societies never exceeded about two thousand people within a single polity, and the degree of social stratification and hierarchy was minimal.

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