Ancestral Oceanic Society and the Origins of the Hawaiians

Abstract

In Evolution ofthe Polynesian Chiefdoms, Patrick Kirch (1984) discussed Ancestral Polynesian Society, reconstructed from linguistics, archaeology, and comparative ethnography. This is seen as the baseline from which the Hawaiian and other contemporary Polynesian societies originated and from which they have been transformed over time (Kirch and Green 1987). Ancestral Polynesian Society did not of course appear out of nothing, its own origins were in the Lapita Culture which can be traced back to the Bismarck Archipelago to the immediate east of the Island of New Guinea. l The question of ultimate Lapita origins is a more controversial one and will not be pursued in detail in this paper (but see Allen and White 1989, Gosden et al. 1989; Spriggs 1989). Instead, the nature of early Lapita culture in the Bismarcks will be examined as the culture directly ancestral to Ancestral Polynesian Society. This examination seems worth attempting for several reasons