Late Prehistoric Fishing Adaptations at Kawakiu Nui, West Moloka'i

Abstract

Fishhooks are one of the more common items of material culture found in Polynesian archaeological sites, and sizeable hook assemblages were accumulating in museum and private collections from as early as the 18th century from early explorers such as Bligh and Cook who amassed large ethnological collections from New Zealand and tropical Oceania (Kaeppler 1978). On the basis of the collections available by the early decades of the 20th century, ethnologists became aware that variation in hook form showed strong spatial patterning. Skinner (1924), for example, defined a number of prehistoric culture areas in New Zealand on the basis of hook form and discussed these in terms of alternative migration models. Buck (1927) also saw the potential for using fishhook distributions as a means of tracing, Polynesian migration routes and interpreted Polynesian colonization history on the basis of one-piece hook distributions. Additionally, the distribution of onepiece hooks, Ruvettus hooks, and bonito hooks (trolling, lures), were used by Burrows (1938) to differentiate western, central, and marginal Polynesian culture areas.