THE MANY SIDES OF POLYNESIAN ARCHAEOLOGY IN REFERENCE TO THE COLONIZATION PROCESS IN SOUTHEAST POLYNESIA

Polynesian archaeology is undergoing a renaissance with spirited debates on a number of fundamental issues such as dating human colonization of islands and archipelagos, determining the causes of landscape change (whether human-induced, climate affected, or some manner of both), defining the temporal and geographical limits of long-distance interaction spheres, the causes and consequences of sociopolitical change, and the nature of Ancestral Polynesian Culture. None of these topics engender a discipline-wide consensus, least of which is the date for the colonization of any Polynesian archipelago.