Suggested Best Practices for the Application of Radiocarbon Dating to Hawaiian Archaeology

Abstract

Ongoing studies (Duarte 2012; Rieth et al. 2011; Rieth personal communication) show that fully 90 percent of 2,334 radiocarbon determinations reported from archaeological contexts on Hawai'i Island, Maui, and portions of O'ahu have been from samples of wood charcoal of unspecified taxa or plant parts. Some unidentifiable portion of these dates are unrelated to, and older by as much as a century than, archaeological events of interest because, among other factors, they derive from the heartwood of one or more long-lived trees of unknown in-built age (Dye 2000). The fact that, in the absence of the samples' botanical sources, accurate dating results cannot be distinguished from inaccurate ones renders such unidentified samples poorly suited to the task of supplying the level of reliable chronometric accuracy required to understand processes in the brief and recent span of the Hawaiian archaeological record at any scale, from individual hearth use to multi-island agricultural expansion. The remaining ten percent of examples reviewed in the above-mentioned study are those reported by researchers who have avoided the problem of in-built age by dating only samples from individual, identified short-lived plants or plant parts such as seeds or twigs, an approach rooted in Murakami'