Shark Going Inland Is My Chief by Kirch Patrick Vinton

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

When David Stannard published his provocative book Before the Horror, in 1989, it caught the attention of scholars working on Hawaiian history and archaeology. One of those was Tom Dye, then employed by the state of Hawai'i's Historic Preservation Division, where he reviewed the reports of contract archaeologists. Dye, assisted by Eric Komori, who was in charge of the division's site database, began to compile all of the radiocarbon dates obtained from these projects.

Dye and Komori's approach to ancient demography—paleodemography, as it is sometimes called—was a bit different from the one I had used earlier. They did not try to count house sites in a “census-taking” approach. Rather, they reasoned that the overall production of “anthropogenic” (human-produced) charcoal, from hearths, earth ovens, clearing agricultural fields, and so forth, should be roughly proportional to the size of the human population, given a consistent technology. More people, more fires, more charcoal. If archaeologists sampled that charcoal in a more or less random fashion, plucking samples from a hearth here, an oven there, an agricultural terrace somewhere else, then the cumulative distribution of radiocarbon dates should mirror, at least to a first approximation, the population growth curve. A plot of cumulative radiocarbon dates would not tell one the number of people at any particular time, but it should—if their assumptions were correct—provide a proxy measure of the growth rate of that population.

In 1992 Dye and Komori published the distribution curve derived from a database of 598 radiocarbon dates throughout the archipelago. The curve had a long tail extending back into the first millennium A.D. This start date was probably due to just a few samples of “old wood” and didn't necessarily mean that the islands had been populated so early. The first sign of a significant increase in the numbers of dates—and, by inference, the population—came around A.D. 1100. After that, the curve shot up exponentially. Then, about 1440, the curve peaked and began to fall off. The period from 1440 until European contact was marked by several “squiggles” in the curve, explained by technical problems in the calibration of radiocarbon dates from the last few centuries. The important take-home lesson was that Hawaiian population was marked by dramatic exponential growth between about 1100 and the mid fifteenth century, when it suddenly stabilized or declined. These results largely matched Hommon's and my earlier findings. However, they suggested that the exponential phase might have been even more marked, and that the transition to a stable or low-growth period was even more sudden.

In recent years, I have returned to tackling the problems of Hawaiian paleodemography. I decided to look first at the evidence for population growth in one of the areas that was not settled by Hawaiians until the phase of inland expansion commenced. This is the Kahikinui district along the southeastern, leeward side of Haleakalā on Maui. Kahikinui lies in the rain shadow created by that great volcanic mountain. Its annual rainfall comes mostly in the winter months from southerly, or kona, storms. Although

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