Radiocarbon Dating Land Snails and Polynesian Land Use on the Island of Kaua'i, Hawai'i

Abstract

The exact chronology of the first settlement of Hawai'i was a topic of much speculation (Irwin 1993; Dye 1989) generations before the introduction of radiocarbon dating to Pacific archaeology by Emory (Libby 1951). Traditional Hawaiian genealogies were first used to calculate initial settlement in the 5th century A. D. (Fomander 1969) while archaeological models postulated an arrival date of about A.D. 750 (Sinoto 1970; 1983; Bellwood 1978; Jennings 1979), based in part on seriations of diagnostic attributes in fishhooks (Sinoto 1962) and other artifacts (Kirch 1974; Cordy 1974; Sinoto 1967). Kirch (1985) later suggested that initial colonization occurred circa A.D. 300, if not before (Kirch 1986). More recently, debate has become focused in two camps, one cautiously favoring the beginning of the first millenium (Hunt and Holsen 1991) and the other favoring dates no earlier than A.D. 600-950 (Spriggs and Anderson 1993).