Hawaiian Archaeology: A Post-Colonial History

Abstract

My first and earliest encounter with Hawai'i was as a child, age unremembered, listening to the old Sears Roebuck radio spilling forth, in a cold, wintry, New England, "Webley Edwards' Hawai'i Calls." Instead of buying only the platters ofElvis, a teenager PBG bought Hawaiian records-one still owned. l Ah, Hawai'i called, and like so many ancestral New Englanders (Father Bond of Hallowell, Maine and Kohala was an ancestral neighbor), I too answered the call. Arriving in August, 1969, with the 69th Ph.D. degree in Anthropology awarded by the University of Arizona, I must have been an outrageous malihini, and along with Dave Tuggle a year later, part of the new archaeologists come "like invading hippies" who "stormed and raided ... our [Bishop Museum] storehouse and ... such knowledge as is lodged in the brains of our staff" as argued by that venerable doyen of kamaaina, Keneti, in a 1971 memo.2 No flowered aloha shirt, but flowered bellbottom pants-what can one expect?