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Wet and Dry

The Polynesian Period, 1000–1778

The moment that the first Polynesian canoes touched Hawaiian beaches, around AD 1000, marked one of the culminating achievements of the greatest seaborne colonizing society in the premodern world.¹ Over a two-thousand-year period, Polynesians perfected techniques of long-range ocean voyaging and permanent agricultural settlement that allowed them to claim small islands and thrive in an archipelagic realm covering a quarter of the globe. Contrary to earlier theories that held that these mariners must have been descendants of migrants into the region from as far away as Asia or India, archaeologists now believe that “becoming Polynesian took place in Polynesia,” in the words of Patrick Kirch, the preeminent Pacific archaeologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley. According to this view, ancestral Polynesian culture evolved in situ first, from Melanesian and “Austronesian” Southeast Asian antecedents, up to thirty-five hundred years ago in what is called the Lapita cultural cradle area in eastern Melanesia. From there, these peoples reached Fiji and then Tonga and Samoa by perhaps 880 BC, where, over the next millennium, the fully formed Polynesian cultural complex incubated. It was a lifestyle based on crops—the Melanesian suite of vegetatively propagated roots such as aroids (taro, or kalo in Hawaiian) and yams—supplemented with orchard crops, such as coconuts and breadfruit, and fish and other products of the surrounding sea. In maintaining links between these neighbor islands, Polynesians effectively created a “voyaging nursery”: the small, outrigger canoes of Melanesia and Southeast Asia became large oceangoing vessels equipped with double hulls and lateen sails, sailed by large crews and guided by a supple science of navigation by stars, winds, currents, swells deflected between islands, and the signs of birds and other creatures.² In the face of the near-constant easterly trade winds at this latitude, Polynesians perfected the art of sailing upwind to remote landfalls and then returning to their islands of origin. When, after one thousand years, the cultural conditions coalesced in favor of purposefully searching for new lands to colonize, the skills and technologies required were in place, allowing Polynesians to reach nearly every (not yet populated) inhabitable island in the Pacific Ocean and establish themselves on them.

The first waves of settlement out from the Fiji-Tonga-Samoa-Futuna core reached the Society group and the Marquesas; later migrations traced northward up the Line Islands to Hawai‘i; eastward to Easter (Rapa Nui); and southward to Mangareva, the Southern Cooks, and finally, New Zealand (Aotearoa) by AD 1200–1300—making it “one of the last places on earth to be settled by preindustrialized humans,” in Kirch’s words.³ The addition of the South American sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) to the crop repertoire of the last-settled islands also indicates Polynesian contact with that continent.⁴ Polynesians went—and stayed—everywhere, occupying even rocky, inhospitable Pitcairn and Henderson in the Eastern Pacific, and remote islets like Necker and Nihoa in the Hawaiian chain northwest of Kaua‘i, for as long as six hundred years.⁵ Linguistic and material evidence shows that they maintained links between islands across formidable distances for centuries, before isolation returned for unknown reasons.⁶

When Europeans ventured into Polynesia in numbers in the eighteenth century, they immediately recognized that the widely dispersed people they encountered, from Tahiti to Easter Island to New Zealand to Hawai‘i, belonged to a single group closely related by race, language, religion, technology, and cultural patterns and organization from agriculture to architecture.

This expansion was not just a question of boats and navigation: the islands of the Pacific east of the Solomons had few edible plant or animals species, especially on atolls.⁷ Prospective settlers had to bring almost everything with them, providing a textbook example of what the anthropologist Edgar Anderson called “transported landscapes” and the historian Alfred Crosby called a “portmanteau biota”: all the biological resources necessary to long-term survival, without which the technological and cultural skills of the voyagers would have proven useless.⁸ Settlers in Hawai‘i would eventually import dogs, pigs, chickens, rats, and the Hawaiian horticultural complex (differing only in emphasis from that of elsewhere in Polynesia): taro (kalo), sweet potato (‘uala), yam (uhi), banana (mai‘a), sugarcane (kō), breadfruit (‘ulu), coconut (niu), paper mulberry (wauke), kava (‘awa), gourd (ipu), ti (ki), arrowroot (pia), turmeric (‘olena), and bamboo (‘ohe).⁹

All across Polynesia, the colonizers adapted to fit the diverse environmental circumstances they found. In a general sense, these can be divided into the three principal kinds of islands in the Pacific: atolls, makatea islands, and high islands. Their origins can be either from “arc” islands or “hot spot” islands. All Pacific islands are volcanic or tectonic in origin; most on its western margin are arc islands, accretive products of plate margin subduction, wherein pieces of crust sitting atop the diving plate are scraped off onto the overriding plate. Arc islands, such as New Zealand, Fiji, and New Caledonia, are often large and mountainous. In the mid-ocean, including most of Polynesia, islands are products of midplate hot spots—plumes of molten magma rising from the earth’s mantle that pierce the crust to form volcanic shields; as the plates move over the stationary plume, islands string out like beads on a necklace, leaving lines, arcs, or clusters of islands diminishing in size as they recede in distance and time from their point of origin and erode back into the sea. High islands, such as Tahiti, Rarotonga, and the main Hawaiian islands, are examples of relatively recently formed hot-spot islands. Built of volcanic basalts and lavas, younger islands often lack surface water because of extreme rock porosity and lack fringing reefs because of steep slopes into the surrounding depths. Older high islands, removed by plate motion from the building process of the hot spot, gradually erode, developing deeply incised stream valleys, broad coastal flats, and fringing or barrier reefs. Atolls are formerly high islands that have been lowered, through a combination of erosion and subsidence under their own weight, to near or below sea level, leaving fringing reefs surrounding a volcanic core that eventually disappears, leaving no dry rock, just a barrier reef surrounding a lagoon. Makatea islands are older atolls or subsided high islands where previously submerged portions have been partially raised above water, either by falling sea levels or by tectonic forces. Typically, the uptilt is caused by the weight of a nearby, related volcanic shield formation. Makatea means “white stone,” after the exposed limestone of former reefs elevated to become limestone ramparts and plateaus. These are often marginal environments for cultivation because rainfall disappears into their porous limestone karsts and thin soils. Mangaia and Henderson, both islands with histories of socioenvironmental stress, are examples.¹⁰

Within environmental limits, most Polynesian societies thrived—and evolved. The ability of Polynesian societies to adapt their main crop, taro (Colocasia spp.), to highly varying circumstances is the most significant “event” in Polynesian prehistory, second only to success at voyaging. All of these adaptations involved the control of water. On atolls, which are typically dry zones because of high soil porosity and low rainfall, taro was grown by pit cultivation: digging down through the sand or coral to the thin freshwater lens overlying the seawater. On high islands and makatea islands with swampy coastal valleys, it was by raised-bed cultivation: digging drainage canals through the swampy flats and heaping the spoils up into mounds where taro, yams, sugarcane, and other crops were planted. On high islands with well-developed stream valleys, irrigated pondfields were constructed, with streams diverted through barrages and ditches to a series of linked, walled paddies, in which flooding and drainage were controlled by means of headgates.

Several writers have pointed to a seeming paradox of Polynesians’ existence: though accomplished at seafaring and fishing, the majority of them derived their subsistence from the land. The dominance of the land over the sea would have profound effects on the history of Hawai‘i, as we will see later; here I will list just a few examples. E. S. and Elizabeth Handy, with Mary Kawena Pukui, in their classic study Native Planters in Old Hawaii, cite much evidence that most common Hawaiians were farmers, not fishers.¹¹ Suggestively, the word for an island or a division of land, moku, is also that for a ship or a boat. The sea as highway is a frequent metaphor in legend and oral tradition, and it is even reported that some Polynesian navigators talked about the moving sea passing by the stationary canoe.¹² In an agricultural society with a severely limited land base that practiced a form of primogeniture, younger sons would be pushed to sea in search of tillable land: as it was for many of the Scandinavian Vikings who sailed off in search of new lands, oceanic expansion was a farmer’s imperative.¹³

NATURAL HISTORY OF THE PACIFIC ISLANDS

The discoverers of Hawai‘i found the largest piece of unclaimed island real estate in the Pacific, excluding New Zealand: an area of 16,692 square kilometers (6,424 square miles) 30 percent larger than Connecticut.¹⁴ It was also the most remote: 2,557 miles from Los Angeles, 5,541 miles from Hong Kong, 3,847 miles from Japan, and 5,070 miles from Sydney.¹⁵ The insularity of the Hawaiian Islands, together with their geologic history, accounts for much of their physical—and in certain ways, their social—destiny. From its origin over a stationary, midplate hot spot now under the island of Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian chain extends 2,449 miles westward toward Kure Atoll, where the eroding volcanoes submerge, then carries on northward as the Emperor Seamounts, ending at Meiji Seamount, beyond which the Pacific Plate subducts into the Kuril Trench off Kamchatka. The oldest seamounts date to seventy-five million to eighty million years; the islands’ life span above water varies from eight million to fifteen million years.¹⁶ Active volcanism is limited to the zone directly over the hot spot: three volcanoes on the island of Hawai‘i—Mauna Loa, Hualalai, and Kilauea—and Haleakala volcano on Maui, have erupted historically (since 1778). Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984, while vents on Kilauea have erupted continuously since that year. The island-making process continues: Loihi, a new, actively building, submerged volcano southeast of the Big Island, is expected to surface in roughly one hundred thousand years.

On these islands, age is fundamental to form. The Big Island of Hawai‘i, so new that its surface rocks are no more than a million years old, has no significant stream valleys with developed soils, except on its northernmost and oldest coasts, Kohala and Hamakua. Offshore, its slopes drop precipitously into deep water, and consequently, the island has no fringing coral reefs. By the same token, as islands increase in age, erosion gradually changes their character: at the other end of the main group, five-million-year-old Kaua‘i is typified by deep canyons, broad and swampy coastal valleys, and more generous fringing reefs than on the other islands.

As age equals geomorphology in a general sense, topography is fundamental to climate at the local level, and variation is tremendous. Ten percent of the main island area is above 7,000 feet, with relatively cold temperatures; Mauna Kea volcano on Hawai‘i reaches 13,796 feet and boasts ancient glaciers and a seasonal snowcap. Precipitation varies abruptly and radically depending on local topography, with the main dynamic being orographic rain produced over windward mountains by the prevailing trade winds from the northeast and compensatory rain shadows in their lees: Mount Waialeale on Kaua‘i receives up to 486 inches of rain, more than forty feet, the highest total in the world; not far away, in its rain shadow, is a desert. The northeasterly trades are so predictable—blowing at or above twelve miles per hour 50 percent of the time in summer and 40 percent of the time in winter—that the windward/leeward (ko‘olau/kona) distinction orders climate, vegetation, and land use a priori in Hawai‘i.¹⁷ With the exception of areas too low to create orographic clouds (below about one thousand feet) and that are therefore largely arid—such as West Molokai and much or all of Lana‘i, Kaho‘olawe, and Ni‘ihau—windward areas are wet, and leeward ones are dry, irrespective of elevation. Windward coasts (with the previous exceptions) are well watered yet see some sunshine most days. With increasing elevation, windward ranges are wetter and more often cloud shrouded, clothed in deep forest dominated by ohi‘a lehua (Metrosideros collina), until the alpine zone, above eight to ten thousand feet. At higher elevations, the flanks and lees of mountains are covered in mixed mesic, or medium rainfall, forest dominated by koa (Acacia koa). Low leeward areas once grew a distinctive, variegated dry forest, though this has been very nearly wiped out since human colonization and replaced with grasslands. Precipitation gradients are commonly extreme, as much as 118 inches in a mile, though more typically 25 inches per mile.¹⁸ Nearly every main island has rain forests just around the corner, so to speak, from semiarid zones or near-deserts that see fewer than 20 inches per year. In between can be found a representative of every climate zone on Earth from subtropical to alpine, save true tropical humidity and polar cold. Mark Twain wrote in 1866 that if a person were to stand at the top of Mauna Loa, “he could see all the climes of the world at a single glance of the eye, and that glance would only pass over a distance of eight or ten miles as the bird flies.”¹⁹ Indeed, on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, one can deliberately select one’s preferred weather conditions by simply driving for five to twenty minutes.

Even so, fully half the islands’ area is below two thousand feet, with a stable year-round temperature ideal for cultivating the oceanic crop suite: temperatures average 77 degrees Fahrenheit at sea level and vary seasonally about 5 degrees Fahrenheit at Hilo and 6.5 degrees at Honolulu. Below five thousand feet elevation, the seasonal variation does not exceed 9 degrees, and this is almost exclusively where the precontact Hawaiians lived and worked.²⁰

Insularity and isolation, more than any other factors, have shaped Hawai‘i’s natural history. Because of the “volcanic conveyor belt,” habitats have continuously evolved, fragmented, and disappeared as new islands have arisen, and old ones have eroded and disappeared.²¹ As specks of land in the mid-Pacific ocean, any animals or plants that reached Hawai‘i had to do so over vast expanses of water—limiting potential immigrants to those that could fly or ride exceptionally well. There were no reptiles, amphibians, or land mammals, save one species of bat, in Hawai‘i prior to human settlement. This lack of representation of groups common on more varied continental areas is called disharmony and extended even to types of insects and birds that presumably had better chances of colonization, so great was the difficulty of successfully establishing a population. Hawaiian flora and fauna is disproportionately made up of members of a handful of families. In fact, the prehuman Hawaiian flora of eleven hundred species can be accounted for by just 275 successful immigrants over 27.5 million years, a rate of one introduction every 100,000 years.²² A corollary of disharmony is impoverishment of diversity—that is, a biota made up of less than the full complement of species that made up the ecosystem in which the immigrant organism evolved: competitors, congeners, predators, and parasites. Successful immigrants into a depauperate environment are then free to move into and adapt to open habitat niches, a process called radiation, often rapidly speciating into a variety of new forms unprecedented in their ancestry. As an archipelago of continuously transforming high islands with radical climatic gradients over short distances, Hawai‘i presented successful colonists with a dizzying array of different habitat types, resulting in stunning biodiversity and a level of endemism unknown elsewhere in the world. Among plants, insects, spiders, moths, birds, freshwater fish, shrimp, and snails adapted to trees, land, and freshwater, evolution produced not only new species but entire genera unique to Hawai‘i. Among the forest birds is the most spectacular example, the Drepanidae, or Hawaiian honeycreepers, with forty-two historically known species exhibiting an extraordinary diversity of color, form, and lifestyle, all descended from a single ancestor.²³ Had Darwin landed in Hawai‘i before the Galápagos, he might have had the evidence he needed to come out with his theories decades earlier.

Yet in the process, it is typical of colonizing organisms to lose the extraordinary powers of dispersal that got them to the islands and shed defensive characters that no longer serve any purpose. With no herbivorous animals, Hawaiian plants generally have no thorns or toxic compounds: mints have lost their oils and raspberries, their spines. This loss of defenses would come back to have devastating consequences when Hawai‘i was suddenly “reconnected” with continental flora and fauna with the advent of Polynesians and later, Europeans and Asians.²⁴

Molokai had its share of unique species, including, in the historic period, the endemic birds kākāwahie, or Molokai creeper (Paroreomyza flammea); ō‘ō, or Molokai or Bishop’s ō‘ō (Moho bishopi); mamo, or black mamo (Drepanis funerea); and numerous plant species, including the lo‘ulu palms Pritchardia forbesiana and P. lowreyana and the tree hibiscus Kokia cookei.

SETTLEMENT OF MOLOKAI

Molokai, the fifth largest of the eight main islands, is 38 miles long and 10 miles wide at its widest point, with an area of 260 square miles and a coastline of 100 miles. It lies 25 miles southeast of O‘ahu, 8.5 miles northwest of Maui, and 9 miles north of Lana‘i—a position in the center of the archipelago and thus at the locus of four of the archipelago’s most important channels and essential sea travel routes. This location may have been memorialized in its name, as molo means “to interweave and interlace,” and kai means “sea” or “seawater.” Or the name is of unknown, ancient origin and cannot be translated—though this seems unlikely given the wealth of layered linguistic tradition around names in Hawai‘i and Polynesia, generally. (The use of the glottal stop, Moloka‘i, is likely a modern mistake, possibly the invention of singers in Honolulu in the 1930s who tailored syllables to rhyme in their verses.)²⁵ The island is an amalgamation of two originally separate volcanoes; topographically and climatically, they retain their differences. The eastern half of the island is dominated by steep mountains; the tallest is the 4,970-foot Kamakou peak. Its north shore, the Ko‘olau district, consists of precipitous sea cliffs, at 3,000 feet the highest in the world, plunging into deep water. At its center is a large collapsed caldera, drained by three deep, steep-sided valleys open to the sea: Waikolu, Pelekunu, and Wailau. All are heavily forested and virtually inaccessible except by sea—and even then sometimes only in the summer months, when the giant northerly swells and the high trade winds that make landings impossible much of the rest of the year subside. At the eastern tip of the island is a narrow bay opening into another long valley, Hālawa, which can be reached overland from the south. East Molokai’s south slope, the Kona district, known locally as mana‘e side to the east of Kamalō (from mana‘e, east, versus malalo, or west of Kamalō), is deeply dissected by roughly fifty sets of alternating narrow valleys and ridges, some nearly vertical in the upper reaches, where they are known collectively as the canyon country. The higher elevations are forested, while, moving downward and southward, rain shadow progressively dries the landscape. Some perennial streams exist here and, at the immediate coast, abundant groundwater surfaces near shore or just offshore in shallow sea water. The south side, sheltered from trade swells by mountains and from southerly winter kona storms by Lana‘i, has some of the most developed fringing reefs in the islands. The middle portion of Molokai is a gradually sloped shield formed by lava from the eastern volcano and the alluvial outwash plains from both ancient volcanoes, becoming progressively more arid toward the west. The West End is dominated by the remnants of Mauna Loa, now reduced to 1,381 feet. Its landscape is arid or semiarid except for the peak itself. There are sandy beaches facing fringing reefs on the south side but only isolated beaches, without developed reefs, on the west and north sides. As on the East End, the West End’s north coast consists mainly of sea cliffs exposed to the rough waters of the open ocean. Midway along, extending seaward at the base of the cliffs, is Kalaupapa Peninsula, a more recent volcanic product shaped liked a low lava table, or, as its name indicates, a stone leaf lying on the sea.

Probably the earliest Hawaiian settlement site known for Molokai was found in the backshore dunes at the seaward entrance to Hālawa Valley, likely settled by AD 1200–1400.²⁶ While the first archaeologically recorded Hawaiian sites, such as the Bellows dune site on windward O‘ahu, came earlier, perhaps as early as AD 800, the initial settlement at Hālawa was presumably typical of Hawaiian subsistence patterns in the colonization period.²⁷ Excavation of this stratified site revealed the long-term occupation of a small, nucleated fishing camp consisting of several dwellings and hearths, loosely grouped and probably inhabited by a small group of people. Artifacts recovered indicate direct affinities with the material culture of the Marquesas, according with the broad archaeological consensus that the initial colonization of Hawai‘i originated in that island group.²⁸

Hālawa has many advantages that would have made it ideal for early Hawaiians, and judging from the archaeological record, it is exemplary of how early Polynesian settlers fit their economy and culture into Hawai‘i’s physical environment and how that environment in turn shaped the development of Hawaiian culture. Three kilometers long, the valley is nearly one kilometer wide at the coast, narrowing to less than half a kilometer inland. Unlike the other large valleys on the north coast, where plunging sea cliffs and exposure to winter surf make access difficult, Hālawa is somewhat sheltered in a bay, with a headland to the north and a cape to the southeast blocking swells and a navigable river mouth and estuary easily accessible to canoes. The bay and shoreline have abundant invertebrates and fish. Fossil remains from the earliest period show a preponderance of mollusks and inshore fish in the diet—though no tuna or other deepwater species—as well as pigs, dogs, and rats.²⁹

Hālawa’s name means both “curve,” perhaps in reference to the bay, and plenty (lawa) of stems (ha), either of kalo, sugarcane, coconut, or banana—indicating its potential for Polynesian agriculture.³⁰ Everywhere in Polynesia, where conditions allowed, well-watered but sunny windward valleys, ideal for kalo cultivation, were the first locations settled. These have been called the “salubrious cores” that sustained settlers until they could multiply and expand out into less favorable environments. The Hālawa Stream is reliably perennial, draining a large watershed in the high mountains of East Molokai through four tributaries. Rainfall high in the watershed is above one hundred inches and above sixty inches at the head of the valley but just twelve inches at the beach, making for mostly sunny conditions in the low-lying fields.³¹

In the colonization period, kalo would have been grown in the low, swampy flats around the mouth and the estuary, where clay soils that can hold water are well developed. The degree of water control required in the earliest stages is uncertain; cultivation may have been ad hoc, in semipermanent, unlined fields. Shifting or “swidden” cultivation of kalo in cleared patches of forest farther up the valley where slopes are steeper and soils less developed is attested to by much evidence of charcoal flecking in the strata, indicating periodic burning for clearing.³²

According to models proposed by Kirch and others, after colonization of Hawai‘i by one or more small canoe loads of settlers, population numbers would have increased slowly for the first four hundred to five hundred years of occupation.³³ Evidence from what is called the development period in Hālawa Valley, from first settlement to about AD 1400, points to just such a gradual population expansion. The fossil sequence shows a similarly gradual change in subsistence as fish, important early on, decreases as a percentage of diet relative to pigs and dogs. (The record of dental caries in these animals also shows that they were fed a mostly vegetarian diet.)³⁴ There was a gradual increase in clearing the low Acacia koa-dominated forest inland for traditional swidden cultivation, as evidenced by an increase of charcoal in the first few hundred years of occupation and the presence of fossils of land-snail species specific to that forest.³⁵ The forest clearance set in motion a feedback process: as the forested slopes of the watershed were burned off and tilled, erosion increased, including the collapse of the steeper valley-side slopes, shown by accumulations of layered tallus, higher up in the watershed. In turn, Hawaiians retained more of these slopes with stone terracing, at narrower contours as the slopes become steeper. In this period, the interior of Hālawa was likely not settled but was extensively exploited.³⁶

This pattern of increasing exploitation of the valley took two forms: an expansion of the land area under cultivation and an increase of yield per unit area of land already under cultivation by shortening crop and fallow cycles—a process referred to as agricultural intensification. Intensification can proceed by two routes: one, greater inputs of labor, mostly in the form of mulching and fertilizer; and two, large investments in permanent built infrastructure such as stone walls, stone-lined ditches, and drainage structures, called by archaeologists landesque capital intensification. In Hālawa, the archaeological record shows a predominance of the latter. The historical landscape, reconstructed in the excavation series, shows a gradual progress toward greater complexity, increasingly in scale and speed during the “expansion period” from AD 1400 to 1650. In the valley floors, wet kalo pondfields were constructed with stone facing and pounded clay floors and irrigated by means of ditches and headgates linked together in elaborate, reticulate systems much like the rice terraces of Bali. Hawaiian terraces differ from the Indonesian, though, in that they are squarish in plan and do not follow slope contours so closely—instead being organized into a hierarchical sequence of ditches and drops that mirrored the social hierarchy, with the most powerful people holding rights to the head of the diversion and the least powerful people the tail.³⁷

Archibald Menzies, the Scottish surgeon and naturalist who accompanied Captain George Vancouver’s British expedition to the Pacific in 1792, described an especially fine example of Hawaiian hydraulic engineering at Waimea on the north shore of O‘ahu:

The aqueduct which waters the whole plantation is brought with much art and labor along the bottom of the rocks from this north-west branch, for here we saw it supported in its course through a narrow pass by a piece of masonry raised from the side of the river, upwards of 20 feet and facing its bank in so neat and artful a manner as would do no discredit to more scientific builders. Indeed the whole plantation is laid out with great neatness and is intersected by small elevated banks conveying little streams from the above aqueduct to flood the distant fields on each side at pleasure, by which their esculent roots are brought to such perfection, that they are the best of every kind I ever saw.³⁸

Farther up the valley on steeper, narrower streamside slopes, partially and intermittently irrigated and dryland, or rain-fed, terraces were built for growing varieties of kalo requiring less water. On the highest and driest terraces, sweet potato, ‘uala, would have been grown in preference to kalo. Dryland terraces averaged three meters wide, following the slope contours, unlike house terraces and wet pondfields, which were squarish in plan. In addition, numerous stone-walled pens attached to the habitation structures of fields show the growing importance of animal husbandry.³⁹ Beyond these terraces was a third agricultural form known as colluvial slope cultivation, where a mix of crops of roots, tubers, leaves, and tree fruits and nuts were tended in eroded sediments that accumulated at the base of valley slopes. These included ‘uala; yams; bananas; pia (arrowroot); breadfruit in limited locales; nonsubsistence crops such as kukui nuts (Aleurites mollucana) for lighting, medicine, and flavoring; olonā (Touchardia latifolia) for cordage; wauke (paper mulberry) for kapa cloth; and kava (Piper mythysticum) for ritual consumption. Robert Hommon described the Hawaiians’ extensive alterations in areas receiving between five hundred and one thousand millimeters of annual rainfall—barely enough for ‘uala cultivation—as a form of surface runoff management or floodwater irrigation: “Planters subtly transformed entire local landscapes with stone structures including walls, mounds, check dams, and terraces, as well as sprawling forms defying simple description, that perhaps served as combinations of dam, lithic mulch, and barage wall.”⁴⁰ But the key parameter was geochemical: success in growing Polynesian crop species in Hawai‘i’s volcanic soils is limited by the presence of necessary nutrients; new and young lava substrates are insufficiently broken down by weathering, while mid- and old-age upland soils have their minerals leached away by rainfall. Pondfield irrigation is only possible on older terrains with incised valleys and clay streambed deposits. Yet in the upper reaches of those valleys, slope erosion exposes new rock, and accumulated sediments on lower slopes and toes have a higher “base saturation” of necessary minerals such as phosphorus and nitrogen than older leached slopes.⁴¹ Though purposeful landscape alteration was part of colluvial slope cultivation, it was an extensive practice, rather than an intensive one, with much lower labor inputs required than intensive pondfield cultivation, and it was inserted into the natural community instead of replacing it—an example of what is called an agroecosystem. Such landscapes have been archaeologically described in Mākaha Valley, O‘ahu, South Kohala, and Hawai‘i and in Hālawa Valley, Kawela, and Kaulaupapa Peninsula on Molokai.⁴² A study by Natalie Kurashima and Patrick Kirch using GIS modeling has suggested that colluvial cultivation had the potential of doubling the amount of cultivable land on Molokai over that achieved with pondfields and dry terracing.⁴³

In the expansion period, the growing Hawaiian population moved out of the “salubrious cores” of Hālawa and other valleys into progressively more marginal areas. Taking the extensively documented Hālawa case, by 1400 the valley’s residents had expanded out from the nucleated village of the coastal dune site (from about 100 to 350 persons over this period) and established permanent homes up the valley and in several tributaries. Their dwellings were dispersed among their terraces, in loose groupings on low ridges embedded in the cultivated landscape. From 1400 to 1500, inland sites at Hālawa proliferated, meshing well with a raft of evidence from all over Hawai‘i of a demographic explosion from 1200 to 1650. Hālawa’s population was probably between 350 and 600 persons at the end of this period. The model of exponential population growth from the first canoe loads until 1450 is borne out by the archaeological record of settlement patterns showing a clear interlinking of population growth and agricultural intensification, with neither one preceding or driving the other but each sustaining the other in a kind of symbiosis.⁴⁴

The kinds of changes seen in the archaeological record in Hālawa are also seen elsewhere on Molokai—including Wailau Valley and Kalaupapa Peninsula, where sites have been excavated, and all over the Hawaiian archipelago as settlement expanded and radiated into lowland areas outside the primary windward valleys. In the expansion period, Hawaiians came to be everywhere, even inhabiting the remote islets Nihoa and Necker northwest of Kaua‘i, for several hundred years. Kirch has written: “There is scarcely an area in the lowlands (if it receives greater than 500 mm rainfall and is not a steep cliff) that upon archaeological reconnaissance does not yield evidence of indigenous Polynesian agricultural use.”⁴⁵

On Molokai, Hawaiians inhabited, or at least utilized, nearly everywhere below twenty-five hundred feet elevation. Adzes from Mauna Loa quarries on the West End appear at Hālawa from the earliest period. Kalo cultivators moved into the south shore valleys, building conventionally stream-irrigated pondfields in those larger valleys where water was sufficient, such as Waialua, Puko‘o, Mapulehu, Ualapu‘e, and Kamalō. In others, terraces were carved out of the swampy coastal lowlands, kept brackish by the spring flow of water percolating down through the lava from the mountain forests and surfacing at the shore where the island’s freshwater lens meets the saltwater. These farmers developed a technique unique in Hawai‘i of “mound” culture in inundated paddy fields, where soil was heaped up into a mound and planted with kalo at its base, with kō (sugarcane), ‘uala, and other crops on top. In the upper valleys, dryland kalo and ‘uala were grown on terraces, along with extensive colluvial slope cultivation. Dryland crops were also grown in the Kala‘e kula (upland) area in the midsection of the island, including at Kualapu‘u, “sweet potato hill,” just downslope from it. Where there was not enough water for agriculture, Hawaiians established fishing camps, some seasonal, some permanent, even on the arid West End shoreline, which is thick with archaeological remains.⁴⁶

The reliable spring flows on the mostly arid south shore also favored aquaculture in the form of offshore (loko kuapa) ocean fishponds—a form developed in Hawai‘i that reached its greatest extent on Molokai, in good part due to the protection from waves afforded by the long fringing reef. Rock walls up to a mile in length built out onto the shallow nearshore flats enclosed ponds ranging from 1 to 523 acres.⁴⁷ Kurashima and Kirch state that there were “at least 73” ponds.⁴⁸ The main fish species cultivated were mullet, or ‘ama‘ama (Mugil cephalis) and milkfish, or awa (Chanos chanos), both inshore species. Tides, let in through makaha, or gates blocked with wooden grates designed to let water and fish fry in but keep larger fish in, flushed the ponds while freshwater spring flow maintained a semibrackish condition that encouraged the growth of young fish. The fishpond necklace and the diversified agriculture in the valleys and uplands helped make the southeast kona shore of Molokai one of the richest food-producing regions in the Hawaiian Islands, outpacing the windward valleys in productivity and population (see figure 1).⁴⁹

FIGURE 1. Fishpond in East Molokai. Photo by Kristina D. C. Hoeppner.

WATER, LAND, AND SOCIETY

In Hawai‘i, water is not only the critical variable in shaping the physical landscape, it is the basis of the social as well, structuring everything: production, reproduction, mythology, religion, and political economy. Its relationships and vocabulary extend into every facet of Hawaiian life. In the muddy water of the kalo field is the ‘oha (kalo sprout), which begets the ‘ohana (productive extended family). The ‘ohana members till the ka ‘āina (land, “that which feeds,” from the proto-Polynesian kaainga, an extended household group and its associated estate or productive landscape), making them ma ka‘āina na (living on the landers, na = substantive plural) and kama‘āina (children of the land).⁵⁰ In this relationship is the origin of the world: in the stone-lined, irrigated lo‘i (kalo paddy), the ‘oha grows from the makua (parent corm). This haloa (long kalo sprout, or “long stem”) was both the firstborn son of the creator, Wakea, who died and turned into a kalo plant, and his younger son, also named Haloa, the progenitor of people. People too, call their parents makua. The lo‘i is watered by wai (freshwater), carried from the stream in ‘auwai (ditches) and hawai (wooden flumes), often of bamboo stems (ha). Wai as the giver of life is associated with Kāne, the first god and giver of water: kāne ka wai ola. In prayers and mythic tales, it is the significant basis of the spiritual and of fertility. As an element, it is the basis of waiwai (wealth)—literally, much water.

Wai provides the founding structure of the human community, physical and legal: Hawaiian law, called kānāwai, “of the water,” describes first the management of water, which is itself a literal map of the division and tenure of land, and from this, the rigid system of ranking and class that overlays the productive landscape—each level called papa (stone strata), the same as the walls and terraces that divide and guide and submit the stream waters to orderly production. The lo’i and its associated irrigation works, barrages, ‘auwai, headgates, and so on are constructed by laulima (community labor, “many, many hands”). Under the rule of the luna wai (water boss), each planter receives a share of water in proportion to the amount of labor contributed, both in construction and in maintenance, to keeping the ditches clean and clear. Each ‘ohana tends an ‘ili (a collection of productive spaces made up of lo‘i ponds), kuauna (the banks of ponds and ditches where banana, coconut, sugarcane, and other crops are planted), mo‘o (strips of kalo or ‘uala land), and pauku (yet smaller strips, “land cut off”). An ‘ili could be pa‘a (complete) or an ‘ili lele (jumping ‘ili), made up of various noncontiguous pieces and strips. It could be an ‘ili ‘āina, subject to the konohiki (chief’s man) who controls the environs, or an ‘ili kupono, paying tribute directly to the ruling chief. Within it were koele (plots) cultivated for the ali‘i, who were designated by what kuakua (portion) of the land they eat: the ali‘i ‘ai ‘ili, ali‘i ‘ai ahupua‘a, “the chief who eats the subdistrict,” and the ali‘i ‘ai moku, “the chief who eats the major district or island.” Koele were also called po-a-lima (fifth-day patches), as they were worked for the chiefs on Fridays. Next were haku (lord or overseer) one, plots for konohiki; mahina ‘ai, usually dry-farmed plots for the people; and kihapai, plots for the tenants.

Together, all the ‘ili belong to an ahupua‘a, the basic political division in Hawai‘i.⁵¹ At the top of the ahupua‘a, generally organized as a single watershed demarcated by ridgelines, are the mountains and the uninhabited forested uplands, wao (wild, unpeopled), where wild foods and birds are gathered; next are the kula lands, where ‘uala and other dry crops are grown, where pili grass is gathered for thatching houses and where groves of kukui trees are harvested for their nuts for candles and food, and wauke (paper mulberry) trees are tended for their bark, which is pounded into kapa cloth. Then, the stream (kahawai) flows through the cultivated landscape (au) or the reticulate, irrigated pondfields to the beach (kahakai) and finally, to the sea (kai). Under the right conditions, rock-walled fishponds are built, either just inshore (loko wai) or offshore (loko kuapa), turning the space where the freshwater (wai), meets and mingles with the saltwater (kai), into fat fish, another kind of waiwai. Fishponds effectively encircled the sea, attaching it and assimilating it to the controlled relations of production of the land; they complete the linkage between the top of the watershed and the sea in both physical-environmental terms and political terms. Hawaiian space, bounded by the relation between water and land, is a fundamentally islanded space: the productive landscape is segmented and divided into ever-smaller pieces, each an island with its own water supply, isolated yet linked with others in a larger archipelago, which is itself surrounded by trackless, unproductive, uncontrolled wastes: the lo‘i and mo‘o within the ‘ili, the groves and patches within the kula, the stream surrounded by the wao of the forests; the ahupua‘a by the moku, the island surrounded by other islands, and they by the endless sea, where no chiefs claim rights. As physical space, land, and water is structured by environmental constraints, so too is it structured by the social hierarchy with its myriad subtle gradations, divisions, and constraints. And, vice versa, Hawaiian social space is fundamentally structured by the environment. The two are intimately grafted onto one another and are illegible as independent ideas (see map 2).

MAP 2. Map from 1901 showing locations of ahupua‘a land divisions and fishponds.

ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF SETTLEMENT

The landscape was extensively transformed by people, both to fit their needs and inadvertently. Forests covering much of the lowlands were cleared, especially the leeward dry forests. When Europeans arrived, many remarked on the treeless character of the Hawaiian coastal uplands, which seem to have been mainly grasslands with interspersed fields and stands of trees extending as much as four or five miles inland in some areas.⁵² Archaeology indicates, through pollen cores and land-snail fossils present, for example, at the base of Diamond Head, O‘ahu, that dry forests grew down to the sea when Polynesians arrived. There had been few or no original grasslands.⁵³ Prior to humans, there had been little or no fire away from active volcanic zones, and anthropogenic fire would have quickly transformed the dry and mesic lowlands, leaving isolated pockets of dry forest remnants and vast areas of more fire-adapted species such as pili grass, favored for thatching. More recent evidence from stratigraphy on the ‘Ewa Plain of O‘ahu suggests that, even prior to Hawaiian burning, the introduced Polynesian rat may have decimated forest plant species by eating seeds and fruits unadapted to herbivores. One study argues: “The main source of destruction of the native forests was the introduced Polynesian rat, Rattus exulans, not Hawaiian agricultural clearing and burning.”⁵⁴ In his memoir, Patrich Kirch reflected: “It is a sobering thought that the delicate and vulnerable Hawaiian lowland forests may have been subject to a tidal wave of exploding rat populations, hundreds of thousands of little jaws munching away at the defenseless vegetation.”⁵⁵ Rat predation on native birds, an unusually high proportion of which were ground nesting, especially in the lowlands, was also likely devastating.⁵⁶

Whether or not the Polynesian rat preceded them in destruction, the human colonists clearly did their part: the expansion of ‘uala culture by forest clearance was particularly widespread and devastating, as the ubiquity of “burn layers” in the archaeological record attests.⁵⁷ Evidence of the former forests on the now dry and nearly treeless West End is plentiful both in the presence of the vestigial pockets of trees that can still be seen in the deepest gulches of Mauna Loa and in Hawaiian tradition: the peak area was celebrated for a type of mythic poison trees, kalaipahoa, and for its marvelous o‘hia lehua groves, where every traveler was urged to make a lei of lehua blossoms.⁵⁸

By 1600, at minimum 80 percent of Hawaiian lands below fifteen hundred feet were extensively altered; Kirch believes the figure to be closer to 100 percent.⁵⁹ Studies of windward O‘ahu provide an intriguing indication of former lowland forest composition: Pritchardia, or lo‘ulu palms, once apparently a dominant species, went quickly in steep decline, limited thereafter to refugia such as Nihoa and the several tiny sea stacks off Molokai that even today remain covered by palm forests. One researcher, Stephen Athens, wrote: “Pollen diagram after pollen diagram from the coastal lowlands of O‘ahu show the same thing. The native forests of the lowlands disappeared in a matter of centuries. By AD 1400 to 1500 there was essentially nothing left.”⁶⁰

With deforestation came erosion. Erosion sequences from O‘ahu have been carefully documented: over a comparatively brief time, a number of centuries, the coastline was totally transformed with the creation of square miles of new land, as bays infilled into new valley floors, and advancing sand barriers pushing out from stream deltas created marshy flatlands behind them. For the first time in these islands, enough marsh habitat existed for several species of duck, rail, and gallinule to tarry on their great Pacific migratory routes and establish breeding populations. Some are now recognized as unique subspecies—a case of evolution responding to anthropogenic environmental change in a very brief time frame.⁶¹ Most of the currently observable alluvial fans in the state are of recent vintage, products of man-made hillslope erosion.⁶² Based on these and similar geomorpholical changes seen on O‘ahu and elsewhere from prehistory and documented on Molokai in the historic period (detailed in chapter 3), it is reasonable to assume that the same processes were at work on Molokai prior to European contact in 1778, especially on the kona shore, with its shallow reef flats stretched out below the steep, dry, easily eroded southern slopes of the ancient volcanoes.

Polynesian expansion brought equally massive impacts to the biota. The fossil record shows wholesale extinctions of land snails and birds (these are far more easily preserved than insects and other invertebrates, about which little is known). Recent, startling discoveries in dunes at Mo‘omomi, Molokai, and in limestone sinkholes near Barber’s Point, O‘ahu, have revealed that the Hawaiians’ hunting and habitat destruction pushed at least one-half of the known land bird species, at minimum thirty-eight previously unknown birds, and between one-third and one-half of the land mollusks into extinction.⁶³

With the depletion of easily obtainable wild foods came a greater reliance on agriculture, setting in motion a cycle of cropland expansion, agricultural intensification, and population growth, which in turn had their feedback regime in deforestation, followed by erosion, which affected nearshore reefs and bays, decreasing the productivity of the marine environment and in turn forcing an ever-greater reliance on agriculture.⁶⁴ For Hawaiians, it was a mixed bag: there was less wild food but more farmed from pondfields, terraces, and fishponds—more reliable and less vulnerable to drought, weather, and pests. A fragile environment had been transformed into a rich agricultural landscape. However, this change came at a price—one perhaps higher in social terms than in environmental losses.

PATTERNS FROM PACIFIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Events in Hawai‘i were part of a broad pattern across Polynesia of anthropogenic environmental change, almost always following a version of the same script: early exploitation of wild foods, leading to extinctions, especially of birds; deforestation for swidden agriculture aided by fire and introduced animals, leading to erosion and dessication; and agricultural intensification in response to slope erosion, population growth, and decreasing productivity of the nearshore marine environment. The transformation of once-forested landscapes on Pacific islands following Polynesian settlement into treeless grasslands or fernlands dominated by pyrophytic plants has been extensively documented. It was especially emphatic in New Zealand, Mangaia, Easter Island, and the Marquesas, as well as Hawai‘i.⁶⁵

Across the Pacific, archaeologists have found evidence of colonization: charcoal and fossilized bones, shells, nuts, and pollen well preceding the first dated habitation sites.⁶⁶ This is an indication of both the odds against the preservation of early coastal sites on unstable, flood-prone sand dunes and the odds against successfully locating and excavating them. But in significant part, this is because the environmental degradation set in motion by the arrival of humans was devastatingly rapid. This fact is due to Polynesian practices, as we have seen, but also, significantly, to the structure of island biogeography that gives island biotas “their extreme vulnerability, or susceptibility, to disturbance,” in the words of botanist Raymond Fosberg.⁶⁷ In remote Polynesia—and nowhere there more so than Hawai‘i—island biogeography reaches its apogee. Just as the forests had evolved without fire, rooting pigs, or dessication, birds—whether seabirds nesting on the exposed ground by the millions or geese that had actually lost their ability to fly—had never been hunted, by humans or rats, and quickly succumbed to both. The Polynesians in their march encountered flightlessness on nearly every major island they settled; the record of extinctions in Hawai‘i is matched generally by all major Pacific island groups so far adequately studied. In New Zealand, for example, the thirteen species of moa (in Maori, as in Hawaiian, meaning chicken or chicken-like running birds) were virtually all eliminated by Polynesian settlers. A poignant detail is provided by the fact that Polynesian sailors knew that unusual concentrations of seabirds over the open ocean indicated the proximity of uninhabited islands. “It is no exaggeration,” Kirch writes, “to say that among the Remote Oceanic islands, the ‘biodiversity crisis’ began not recently but 3,500 years ago with the Lapita expansion.”⁶⁸

These outcomes are not cases of environmental determinism in history but the complex and dynamic interaction between Polynesian social structures, economies, introduced organisms, and a series of similar yet unique island environments—outcomes predictable, to some extent, based on the variables involved yet different on every island. Patrick Kirch invoked Charles Tilly’s concept of “historically grounded huge comparisons of big structures and large processes” to “help establish what must be explained” and to shine light back on the human, contingent, and social causes.⁶⁹ Historical environmental change visible to the techniques of anthropology is one such large process, played out at the level of the island: “An ecological process with enormous consequences for island landscapes and for island cultures . . . In these large environmental ‘structures’ one seeks clues to certain big processes of political economy.”⁷⁰

One such locus is how population growth interacts with the environment. Archaeological evidence sketches a series of similar progressions across most of the Pacific that accord with mathematical models of demographic increase. Most every place in Remote Oceania, on the eve of European contact, had reached a near-maximum population density.⁷¹ Remote Oceania (Polynesia, Micronesia, and extreme eastern Melanesia) had much higher growth rates than Near Oceania (most of Melanesia and insular Southeast Asia) for several conditions and reasons. The first was a better disease environment, with no mosquitoes capable of carrying malaria east of the Solomons, due to the same dispersal difficulties encountered by other immigrants to remote islands. Next in importance were plentiful marine and terrestrial foods, at least initially; the lack of competing human inhabitants on arrival; and the cultural reasons for high fertility and voyaging already discussed.⁷²

In every case, there is a familiar relationship between population increase, agricultural expansion and intensification, and environmental degradation. Equally strong is a corollary relationship between environmental stress and increasing social hierarchy. Kirch in On the Road of the Winds uses as his textbook case that of the island of Mangaia, in the southern Cook Islands, because of its extreme geological features and history of environmental and social disaster. It is an ovoid island, fifty-two square kilometers, with an eroded volcanic core surrounded by makatea ramparts as much as two kilometers wide. This is a limestone karst landscape riddled with caves and sinkholes and deeply cut by small streams that nearly disappear into the ground before ponding against the ramparts near the coast and dropping their sediment load. At these edges are swampy basins ideal for irrigated kalo culture but that account for just 2 percent of the total land area, with no more than another 18 percent available for dryland agriculture. Pollen coring and stratigraphy indicate that the island possessed extensive forests and marine and terrestrial resources, including a rich bird fauna, prior to human colonization about twenty-five hundred years ago. These resources were heavily exploited and crashed, resulting in faunal extinctions and the replacement of the forest with a pyrophytic landscape of scrub ironwood and ferns. The human population, divided into six districts with each ruled by a hereditary chief, eventually reached 150 persons per acre—very high even in Polynesian terms. Over time, competition for land became so severe that the political economy devolved into a permanent state of intertribal raiding and war, with victors seizing irrigated bottomlands and defeated groups taking refuge in cave systems on the upland makatea. There is plentiful evidence of human sacrifice and potentially outright cannibalism. In Kirch’s words, “Late precontact Mangaian society became . . . a society based on terror.”⁷³ Similar trajectories are visible in the Marquesas; parts of New Zealand; Mangareva, which has some of the worst land degradation in Polynesia; and, most famously, Rapa Nui (Easter), where total deforestation led to spectacular social collapse, descent into warfare, cannibalism, and population crash.

In each case of environmental degradation, there was a parallel political evolution from a social hierarchy based on rigid hereditary chiefships to a more fluid one based on earned status, typically in the military sphere. In Mangaia and elsewhere, this transition proceeds in lockstep with the progress of environmental degradation. Kirch has described the process as “competitive involution” (borrowing and enlarging a concept from Clifford Geertz) where rapid population growth in areas of marginal, especially dry environments led to land degradation and fierce competition over resources “between inherently contradictory hereditary and achieved status positions.⁷⁴ The result was an involuted cycle of prestige rivalry and competition that led as often to the destruction of the very means of production which were the objects of competition.”⁷⁵

Easter Island is only the radical nightmare scenario of population “overshoot” of scarce resources leading to social collapse; to lesser degrees this process was ongoing in much of Polynesia by the eighteenth century. Fortunately, in only a handful of them had conditions worsened to such a grim point. These few, extreme examples naturally come from islands with marginal environments, whether due to makatea geology, remoteness, and/or small size—as with Henderson, Pitcairn, or the ten other small islands that Polynesians once inhabited but had abandoned by the time of European contact.⁷⁶ This can help explain the rapidity of their transit through the phases Kirch catalogs—which we might better call socioenvironmental involution. Other places in Polynesia, with fewer obvious environmental limitations, appeared to be pushing against the door of involution in late prehistory: Tonga, the Societies, and other islands in the Cooks among them. While not every case of environmental vulnerability produced competitive involution, much less crash, the record promises some ability to predict these trajectories based on geography; after all, as Braudel formulized, “living standards are always a question of the number of people and the total resources at their disposal.”⁷⁷ A bigger question is: What can the record of how they choose to dispose of their resources teach us?

EXPANSION INTO THE DRYLANDS

A new agricultural form appeared in Hawai‘i around AD 1400: intensive cultivation of ‘uala and other crops in unirrigated field systems constructed on broad slopes, mostly in leeward areas. Like the other Hawaiian farming types, this intensive rain-fed, or dryland, cultivation was unevenly distributed across the islands, being possible only where the right conditions existed: rocks old enough to form soils but not so old as to be leached and nutrient-poor, combined with enough rainfall to grow crops of mainly ‘uala, supplemented with dryland taro and kō but not so much as to leach away necessary nutrients. This “sweet spot” for sweet potatoes can be found only on the eastern islands—Kaua‘i and O‘ahu are too old geologically—and principally on the broad, unincised leeward slopes of Hawai‘i and East Maui running in horizontal bands between the dry coastline makai (below) and the wet forest mauka (above).⁷⁸ On Maui, the Kahikinui and Kaupo field systems wrapped around the southeastern, leeward slopes of Haleakala; on Hawai‘i, traces of extensive field systems have been found in Kohala, Waimea, Kona, and Ka‘u. The best-preserved and most extensively studied, the Lower Kohala field system, covered sixty square kilometers over parts of thirty ahupua‘a and large ‘ili ‘āina with a dense, reticulate grid of stone walls delineating terraced gardens, water catchments, planting mounds, and trails, which also formed field boundaries. Interspersed among the productive infrastructure were house platforms, burial platforms, temples, and middens.⁷⁹

The dryland fields were by nature less reliable food producers than irrigated pondfields, depending as they did on the vagaries of rainfall in a marginal environment where drought is a regular occurence. Kirch has suggested that farming families coped with the risks of variable climate by employing “bet-hedging agronomic strategies,” planting crops at several locations up and down the slope and thus, the rainfall gradient, to maximize their chances of a return.⁸⁰ They also required more labor for weeding and especially mulching, including for “lithic” mulch, stones used to slow wind- and water-driven erosion and evaporation of moisture.⁸¹ On Maui and Hawai‘i, the women joined the men in the fields—something unknown on the other islands.⁸² The native Hawaiian historian David Malo wrote: “On lands supplied with running water, agriculture was easy and could be carried on at all times . . . On the kula lands farming was a laborious occupation and called for great patience, being attended with many drawbacks.”⁸³ Areas of dryland culture, with unreliable water and thin, volcanic, chemically impoverished soils in place of the rich valley soils, were inherently marginal and more vulnerable to drought, fire, erosion, and soil exhaustion. Beyond these physical difficulties were social ones: Samuel Kamakau noted that “the women worked outside as hard as the men, often cooking, tilling the ground, and performing the duties in the house as well. This is why the chiefs of Hawai‘i imposed taxes on men and women alike and got the name of being oppressive to the people, while the chiefs of O‘ahu and Kaua‘i demanded taxes of the men alone.”⁸⁴ Nevertheless, the enormous size of the larger field systems supported large populations: the Lower Kohala system may have been capable of supporting 15,480 to 30,960 persons, while the Kona field system’s population has been estimated at between 47,300 and 94,600.⁸⁵ From its initial appearance, dryland cultivation on the eastern islands exploded, feeding populations that may have doubled in a single lifetime.⁸⁶ By the end of the precontact period, Maui depended on rain-fed crops for 70 percent of its food, while the percentage on Hawai‘i reached 94 percent.⁸⁷ On Molokai, soils on the leeward slopes with the correct rainfall were too old—most had formed from volcanic eruptions up to 1.4 million years earlier—and thus too mineral-poor for extensive field systems. But at Kalaupapa Peninsula, the “stone leaf” formed at the base of the windward sea cliffs by an eruption 330,000 years ago, ideal soil conditions combined with a rainfall band between nine hundred and thirteen hundred millimeters to allow a very productive ‘uala field system, begun about 1400 and encompassing at its zenith in the nineteenth century a grid of up to four thousand walls covering a combined 230 kilometers, according to partial surveys.⁸⁸

Studies of the dryland field systems indicate that they, like the irrigated valleys but in an accelerated amount of time, followed the path of intensification. Likely beginning as long fallow swidden areas carved out of the mesic forest to help support small numbers of people, they gradually became more permanent and more intensive, with labor needs and population growth rising reciprocally, leading to the rapid expansion of the area under cultivation but also to increased subdivisions within the fields.⁸⁹ Productivity also trended downward as nutrients were depleted, spurring farmers to shorten fallow periods and increase mulching.⁹⁰ Robert Hommon summarized the probable net effect on the dryland farmers: “Increased labor requirements, the addition of field work to women’s traditional tasks, diminished productivity, rapid population growth, reduced soil fertility resulting from shortened fallow, government levies, and finally infrastructure development that reached the limits of cultivable land—probably led to an increased frequency and degree of food stress among the commoners who were dependent on rain-fed systems.”⁹¹

Even so, the inherent instability of the dryland field systems slowed neither their expansion nor the increase in overall average production as well as population. This is in contrast to the situation in the older, western islands of Kaua‘i, O‘ahu, and probably Molokai, where the population, after expanding enormously from 1400 to 1650, reached a peak in 1650 and then went into a slow but steady decline.⁹² Yet on Maui and Hawai‘i, population continued to grow from 1650 to contact.⁹³ Had population in the western islands reached the limits of their environment’s carrying capacity, or were other processes at work?

Patrick Kirch outlined a theory of why population growth in Polynesia slowed, oscillated, or even reversed in many places at or about the same time: the “full land” scenario, where population pressure was felt first in a lack of access to land, not in constrained food supply, “which could often be offset through” intensification. Population densities of one hundred people per square kilometer or higher were not uncommon on many Polynesian islands, without causing famine. Instead, “cultural controls on population growth began to be implemented,” including “means of reducing fertility (celibacy, contraception, abortion), as well as of increasing mortality (infanticide, suicide voyaging, war, expulsion of certain groups, ritual sacrifice, and even cannibalism).⁹⁴ The most successful of these societies self-regulated to adapt to their resource base before their diminishing resource base did the regulating for them.

The fact that agricultural intensification is, if not entirely independent of demography, at least not deterministically produced by population pressure is one of the most interesting discoveries of Pacific anthropology. Instead, it is dependent on social variables. There is a primary relationship between production and power. In anthropological theory the salient feature of chiefdoms as distinct from other simpler modes of social organization (usually described as the domestic model of production and typically organized around many equivalent-status household units producing only enough for their subsistence) is that chiefdoms are ordered by rank and impose “social production” on the households that make it up. That is to say, a small, nonproducing class of chiefs extracts a surplus of food and goods from the majority of producers and then deploys it in the service of continuing and expanding the hierarchical relationship. In a sense, the surplus is a kind a capital accumulated and spent to sustain or increase itself, the extraction of surplus. Kirch, echoing his colleague and frequent collaborator University of Chicago anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, characterized the political economy of chiefdoms as “the ceaseless extraction of surplus from individual households that otherwise might be thought of as intrinsically antisurplus.”⁹⁵

In Hawai‘i, status was conferred not solely by genealogy but by wealth, which took the form of food and labor extracted from the people and of ritual, status, and durable goods, such as feather cloaks, produced by commoners and specialists for the ali‘i—goods that could in turn be deployed to obtain more status and power—a system of political economy referred to as staple finance.⁹⁶ Kurashima and Kirch wrote: “The political economy of precontact Hawai‘i was based fundamentally on food surpluses.”⁹⁷

There have been two classic analyses of Polynesian chiefdoms, both from the mid-twentieth century (predating the postwar expansion of field archaeology in the Pacific), attempting to explain both the broad similarities and diversity of types by dividing them into three classes. The first is Sahlins’s 1954 study, “Social Stratification in Polynesia.” In it, Sahlins identifies Type III societies as simple; small (not more than two thousand people); generally based on atolls like Tokelau; and ruled by hereditary chiefs, little removed in lifestyle from commoners, who are responsible for both religious and secular guidance. Type II societies are midsized both in terms of population and island size (like Mangaia), with at least two strata of chiefs. Type I societies are large (ten thousand or more people), with distinct and often complex social hierarchies (Tonga or Hawai‘i) counting as many as seven to eight distinct strata, with separate priestly and warrior classes. In this framework, environmental limits had a direct social manifestation: greater aggregate productivity of an island or system equaled greater social differentiation between producers and distributors—which is to say that social stratification is ecologically adaptive. Accordingly, the physical size of the island or island system, insofar as it equates with productive potential, correlates in Sahlins’s conception directly with social typology.⁹⁸ Big islands have big societies; small islands have small ones.

The second classic analysis is Irving Goldman’s 1970 Ancient Polynesian Society, in which his three categories are sorted by degrees of “status rivalry” between chiefs and are called traditional, open, and stratified. A traditional society is governed by the same hereditary chief as Sahlins’s Type III; it is “conservative” and close in structure to the ancestral Polynesian model described by Kirch of the ‘qariki (hereditary leader of a common descent group).⁹⁹ Open societies are typified by competition between politicomilitary claimants and are less rigid, and less religiously ordered, than the traditional type. They tend to be located on midsized islands, such as Mangaia, the Marquesas, and Easter. Stratified chiefdoms, including Hawai‘i, Tahiti, and Tonga, are rigidly divided by caste and rank and supported by elaborate religious structures yet retain some of the competitive, warlike qualities of open societies as a sort of alternate method of social advancement.

Clearly, there is overlap between the two analytical frameworks; both describe the dynamic social and productive evolution of Polynesian societies, though from different optics: one resources, the other status. These optics derive from and illustrate two fundamental outlooks in anthropology: Malthus’s focus on environment and Marx’s on political economy. Both share a basic correlation with size, though only Sahlins’s ecological approach interprets it explicitly. In Sahlins’s model, greater size equals greater productive potential and therefore greater potential or tendency toward sociopolitical stratification and, when conditions are right, toward greater intensification. Simple atoll environments sustain only simple, relatively stable social types, as the opportunities for agricultural intensification are radically limited. In midsized environments—which correspond with the list of environmentally marginal islands—progress toward stratification is derailed by the shortage of good land. When the “full land” state is reached in the valley cores, intensification extends onto more marginal lands, pushing them into the cycle of degradation—deforestation, erosion, and so on—at first increasing and then markedly decreasing the carrying capacity of the land and creating conditions of competition and strife too unstable and dynamic for the rigid, stratified structure to take hold. Instead of an intermediate stage on the evolutionary road from traditional to stratified, the open society is more like another pathway, “different, more fluid,” sometimes leading to a more dire, or dead, end. Large islands, with greater productive potential and therefore more capacity to absorb population shifts and environmental stress, could take the path of intensification and still successfully accommodate more layers of human structure.

WAI AND MALO‘O

In the dichotomy between the western and eastern Hawaiian islands can be seen the outline of one of the most fundamental oppositions not only in Hawai‘i but most everywhere in Polynesia; one that extends the full range from the environmental to the social and their conjuncture: the wet and the dry (wai and malo‘o)—at once the differing productive regimes and crops of well-watered, kalo-growing windward landscapes and dry, yam- and sweet potato–growing leeward ones and the correspondingly different social systems each produced.¹⁰⁰ As each island encompassed a wet/dry distinction based on trade winds and topography, so too did the archipelago: the western islands of Kaua‘i and O‘ahu predominantly wet and kalo growing and boasting the largest irrigation complexes in the Pacific; the eastern islands of Maui and Hawai‘i predominantly dry and yam- and ‘uala growing. Molokai sits in the middle, half wet and half dry and too small and segmented to rival its larger neighbors in either character. The Hawaiians acknowledged this fundamental distinction, as their creation stories of Pele and Hi‘iaka at opposite ends of the archipelago attest.¹⁰¹ They also understood, as well as do Kirch and other modern scientists, how “this environmental gradient played an important role in the political dynamics of the late prehistoric Hawaiian chiefdoms.”¹⁰²

The force of the dichotomy derives from the single fact that irrigated kalo is the most efficient form of Polynesian agriculture, yet land suitable for it is strictly limited and varies in direct relation to position within the archipelago. Wet kalo culture and dry ‘uala culture stand at opposite ends of a spectrum of efficiency. Pondfield kalo culture produces the highest yield from the smallest land area, with the lowest long-term labor input, requiring only a one-time investment in the capital improvements of pondfields and ditch systems, accomplished through a community labor pooling organized by konohiki appointed by the ruling chief.¹⁰³ On drylands, on the contrary, the path to intensification came through quickening the cropping cycle, decreasing fallow, and squeezing more yield from fertilization and mulching. All of this was labor intensive, rather than capital intensive. Dry land then, equaled constant risk and periodic stress: first agricultural and in direct consequence, social and political, shaping a sociopolitical structure different from that of the more stable windward valleys. Sahlins writes that “the great challenge [of the dryland economy] . . . lies in the intensification of labor: getting people to work more, or more people to work.”¹⁰⁴

The religious structure of the archipelago also attests to this geographic one. The authors of Native Planters in Old Hawaii assert evidence for different times of arrival of certain agricultural and cultural forms from elsewhere in Polynesia in Hawaiian tales of gods and their identification with different foods: “It seems likely that the four chief gods of Hawaii . . . represent distinct eras of colonization.” The first is Kāne, associated with kalo, sugarcane, bamboo, and windward valleys, who is central to the creation myths of Hawai‘i and therefore assumed to have arrived with the first settlers. The second is Kaneloa, associated with bananas, the ocean, and springs. The third is Kū, god of war, coconut, breadfruit, and fishing—and therefore assumed to be a latecomer because breadfruit orchards are poorly developed in Hawai‘i but fundamental to the Tahitian economy and because fishing is strictly regulated as an ali‘i prerogative, as opposed to farming, the occupation of peasants. Kū often appears in myth as Kū-the-land-snatcher, the invading, conquering chief whose war rituals are descended from ancient fishing rituals. The last is Lono, associated with sweet potatoes, gourds, and hogs, the primary foods of dry areas. The authors note that, in the makahiki festival of the new year celebrated on Hawai’i Island, the ruling chief who tours the island accepting his tribute of food and goods, the ali’i ai moku (chief who eats the land), takes the role of Lono, not Kāne, though Lono is the only god who takes human form and has no role in Hawaiian creation myths.

That new influences continued to arrive in Hawai‘i in the centuries after the first colonization is attested to by considerable evidence of a renewed “voyaging era” in the thirteenth century that saw frequent interisland travel in South Pacific Polynesia and interchange between Hawai‘i and a place called Hawaiki in the Hawaiian mo‘olelo oral histories, a generic name for ancestral lands to the south of Hawai‘i—most probably Tahiti and other islands in the Society group. The voyages brought new material techniques and new crops, especially ‘uala, which was not part of the original Polynesian crop suite but a later addition imported from South America. They also brought new social and religious ideas. A key figure was the Tahitian priest Pā‘ao, who is credited with major changes to the religious and ritual practices of the Big Island of Hawai‘i. He installed there a Tahitian chief he had brought with him, Pilika‘aiea, built major luakini heiau temples at Waha‘ula in Puna and Mo‘okini in Kohala, and introduced human sacrifice and the Kū war cult. Both of these would come to dominate ali‘i practices on Hawai‘i, as intensive dryland culture of ‘uala would radically expand their economic and territorial bases there.¹⁰⁵

The voyaging era was over by about 1400, and thereafter “the further evolution of Hawaiian society, economy, politics, and religion was a strictly endogenous affair,” yet the innovations the outsiders brought must have contributed to “a fundamental transformation in Hawaiian economic, social, and political structures” between the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century.¹⁰⁶ First, the expansion of dryland agriculture into previously marginal leeward landscapes and the new, more aggressive ali‘i culture that oversaw and parasitized it began to shift the balance of population and power from the older western islands to the younger eastern ones. This may also, in Hommon’s words, “explain the decoupling of the Hawaiian commoner and chiefly classes” that occurred during the period.¹⁰⁷ Unique in Polynesia, land tenure in Hawai‘i became completely alienated from the majority cultivators to a small class of ruling chiefs. Victorious war chiefs could displace the entire hierarchical structure of land tenure in areas they controlled at will; indeed this displacement was almost automatic in late prehistory. Also probably unique in Polynesia, commoners in Hawai‘i by the time of contact were not allowed to recite their ancestry beyond parents and grandparents—a radical impoverishment of identity in a society in which all claims to rank and power rested on recited genealogies.¹⁰⁸ This differentiation was reflected in new concepts: nā kanaka for the common people and nā li‘i for the chiefs—a shift of categories “from clan to class” that was highly unusual in what had hitherto been a kinship-based society and known elsewhere in Polynesia only from Tonga and Tahiti.¹⁰⁹ There was even a class of slaves or very low-class people (kauwa), described by Handy, Handy, and Pukui as “probably the descendants of aborigines found already settled in the Hawaiian Islands when the migrants from the south came and their chiefs established themselves as overlords.” These untouchables lived apart in reservations strictly kapu—taboo, in the anglicized Tahitian—to others and were “killed at will” for human sacrifice purposes, according to the Hawaiian chronicler Kepelino, born in 1830 and himself a descendent of the voyaging priest Pā‘ao.¹¹⁰

While today few scholars credit the idea that the Tahitians invaded the Hawaiian Islands in the thirteenth century, Hawaiian folk memory contains references, perhaps embroidered, to such a cataclysmic change. A particularly vivid version of these events comes to us in the oral history of the venerated Molokai kumu hula (hula and chant expert) Kaili‘ohe Kame‘ekua, recorded before her death in 1931:

To us, they were invaders. Pa‘ao had gone back to Tahiti and gathered thousands of people to come to Hawai‘i . . . The people on Lanai’i saw them approaching. Their red malo [loincloths] could be seen stretching from horizon to horizon. Soon the sea itself turned red with the blood of our people as thousands were slaughtered and enslaved. Those who could make their way to Kaua‘i were safe. Others hid in mountain caves. Those who were caught were used as fish bait and human sacrifices, and our people’s bones were used to decorate the tiki statues of their gods.

The ali‘i people ruled through a system of chiefs. Where we had lived in unity, they made separations and distinctions everywhere among people and things. War was accepted as a way of life. They thought everything could be taken by force.¹¹¹

Dryland religion, especially on Hawai‘i, was dominated by Lono and the war cult of Kū over Kāne, the god of kalo, streams, and irrigation.¹¹² The social structure was more aggressive, with more turmoil from young chiefs rebelling against old and more frequent cycles of warfare and territorial conquest. Kurashima and Kirch describe the dryland ali‘i as “hostile and expansionistic” because of the conjuncture between their own ambition and the instability and therefore vulnerability of their economic system.¹¹³ Consequently, more pressure was put on the productive base while at the same time it was being undermined by the same environmental dynamic already seen. In a short period of time, from their expansion around 1650 to a peak sometime in the early eighteenth century, the great dryland field systems of Hawai‘i and Maui reached limits and began to see declining yields relative to input, even as the population continued to increase, and field units were divided into smaller and smaller pieces.¹¹⁴

This is the pattern of competitive socioenvironental involution. Indeed, on Hawai‘i, for several hundred years before contact, warfare between the few long-established, windward kalo areas such as Waipi‘o Valley and the large, rapidly growing but unstable leeward areas increased. At the end of the period, there is evidence of caves adapted as places of refuge in the Kona district. Dry West Hawai‘i appears to have been primed to head down the Mangaian road, and had it been an isolated world, it might have found an end there. But it was part of a much larger system and could turn its stress-derived energies, what Sahlins calls its “historical dynamism,” to advantage by turning to conquer wetter, windward areas that had not reached the same limits.¹¹⁵

The wet/dry dichotomy correlates with duration of settlement and so with deeper, and thus better, genealogies in the western islands versus the eastern. In consequence, leeward chiefs coveted windward kalo lands for ritual legitimacy as well as for the productivity of their landscapes.¹¹⁶ The archetypal story comes from the sixteenth century, when the Hawai‘i chief Umi-a-Liloa, son of the chief Liloa by a low-ranked chieftess, is driven out by his half brother from his inheritance of Waipi‘o Valley, the only large kalo valley on the entire island. Exiled to the arid plateaus in the interior, Umi becomes a master farmer and pig herder, feeding the oppressed people there, who then help him to reconquer Waipi‘o, where he builds his war temple. Subsequent Hawaiian history is largely that of Maui and Hawai‘i chiefs who, when not attacking one another, were campaigning to seize the windward and western lands. Robert Hommon, noting the prevalence of marriages between Hawai‘i and Maui chiefs sealed with gifts of food and other forms of wealth and predicated on genealogical exchanges and the prevalence of wars between such clans, called them “cousin’s wars.”¹¹⁷ With his unification of Hawai‘i in the wake of Cook, Kamehameha the Great, Umi’s descendent, repeated the myth and fulfilled it; then, in unifying the archipelago under his rule, he replayed it on a grand scale: upstart dry West Hawai‘i finally subjugated the ancient salubrious cores.¹¹⁸ Kirch sums up the full, complex dynamic as a “set of linked feedback loops” between economic change, population pressure, and environmental limits and variability, causing food and “staple finance” insecurity, as well as drivers in the specific cultural context, including intensified status rivalry and competition and conquest warfare. On the eve of contact, he explains: “The aggressive, expansionist, Ku-cult centered polities of Maui and Hawai‘i were precisely those most dependent on intensified dryland field cultivation. In Hawai‘i and Maui, and especially in their leeward regions that constituted the ancestral seat of the most powerful and aggressive kings, the limits of increased productivity even with significant labor inputs (including the addition of female labor in field cultivation) had probably been reached by the end of the seventeenth century. And the increasingly frequent objects of their aggression became the western islands of Moloka‘i, O‘ahu, and Kaua‘i, rich in irrigated pondfields and fishponds.”¹¹⁹

EXCEPTIONAL MOLOKAI

Molokai, in certain locales, was a rich food producer and an irreplaceable stopover for moving armies, but these spots were too few and far between for the island as a whole to sustain population centers comparable to the larger islands. The Hālawa, Wailau, Pelekunu, and Waikolu Valleys thrived, as did the larger southern valleys, especially those joined with major fishpond complexes. These places, big enough to produce a surplus that could be siphoned off but too small to defend themselves, were vulnerable to invasion and control from outside and to the intensification imposed by conquering, parasitic chiefs. But other places were either too small or too inaccessible to be powerfully attractive to outside forces. Western and upland areas were too poor, too sparsely populated, and too far from canoe landings where armies could disembark to be effectively subdued or occupied, as the people simply melted into the woods and shadows. The Kala‘e area is celebrated in Hawaiian tradition for its stubborn independence. Its ali‘i were said to be so proud that they kept only their own kapus, even in the presence of higher-ranked chiefs.¹²⁰ Kala‘e was also known as a place of kauwa (slaves or low-status individuals), who frequently lived on the margins of the cultivated areas of settlement, such as in the kula uplands and forests: “Kala’e pe’e kakonakona” (Kala‘e hides and avoids contact.¹²¹ Another word for kauwa, reported by Malo, was nahelehele, people of the wild woods.)¹²²

Molokai acquired a mythology of resistance and its people a reputation for sorcery. Many legends in the ethnographic corpus describe powerful invaders repelled by the spiritual force of the weaker, less numerous Molokai people: O Molokai i ka Pule o’o (Molokai of the Powerful Prayer). The island was known for its traditional prophets (kaula), typically common men and women “of spontaneous inspiration,” in Sahlins’s words, who constituted “an alternative to the ‘organized religion’” that buttressed ali‘i rule. In a later context, Sahlins considered that the association of kaula with a popular religious revival “reinforces the sense of an anti-chief movement.”¹²³ The greatest school of kaula kahuna in Hawai‘i was that of Lanikaula, on the East End, and its mythology centers around the hostile visits of outside chiefs and rival priests.

The history of Molokai is notably replete with incidences of poisoning—typically by kama‘āina (children of the land) using poison against stronger malihini (outsiders). A legendary grove of trees on Mauna Loa, the kalaipahoa, was said to have intensely poisonous wood that could be made into weapons or powder. Kamehameha’s invaders were said to have been killed en masse by pule o‘o—though at least one local informant insisted that the Hawai‘i people were not prayed to death but were fed sweet potatoes mixed with ‘auhuhu, a common fish poison.¹²⁴

LESSONS: A SOCIOENVIRONMENTAL CALCULUS

Because of the central role of irrigation in Hawaiian history, Hawai‘i enters into the long-running historical debate over the supposed correlation between large-scale irrigation worldwide and Marx’s “oriental despotism,” as advanced by Karl Wittfogel (who singled out late prehistoric Hawai‘i as “a crude, agro-bureaucratic hydraulic despotism”) and elaborated and extended to the American West by Donald Worster.¹²⁵ This “hydraulic hypothesis” holds that the requirements of labor control and the management of large irrigation works assure the development of a bureaucratic elite that dominates the mass of producers. Handy, Handy, and Pukui, while agreeing with Wittfogel’s emphasis on irrigation in Hawai‘i, argued that the ali‘i overlay and dominance of the windward valleys was not inherently despotic.¹²⁶ Kirch went further, arguing that it is intensification itself, not irrigation per se, that attends social complexity: “The neglect of intensive dryland cultivation by anthropologists and archaeologists . . . has masked the fact that it was not irrigation but short-fallow dryland systems that were the most demanding of labor inputs . . . the most hierarchically structured and hegemonic Polynesian polities are usually associated, not with the irrigation-dominated production zones as the hydraulic theorists would predict, but with the intensive dryland sectors. Thus, a more inclusive analysis of Polynesian agricultural variability results in the virtual turning of the hydraulic hypothesis on its head.”¹²⁷

I would qualify this by noting that, while there may be forms of irrigation without stratification in Polynesia, irrigation as intensification—that is to say, irrigation as a phenomenon of scale—is certainly implicated in stratification—though it may not be a sufficient cause. It is intensification’s quasi-industrialization of the landscape, of production, of the division of labor, not the method used, that creates stratification. It is the hierarchy, not the technology. In Polynesia, dryland cultivation at large scale is more regimented, temporally, spatially, and socially, than wet cultivation at large scale. But it is no more than a more extreme form of the same process.

In Hawai‘i, both irrigation and dryland farming reached their greatest elaboration and complexity in the Pacific. And, on the eve of contact, the Hawaiian archipelago was the single most complex, hierarchical society in the Pacific. To most scholars, it had already passed out of the status of chiefdom and into that of an “archaic state,” having moved beyond a power/class structure based on kinship and toward one of divine kingship.¹²⁸

To recapitulate, recent Pacific archaeology has shown that human colonization of island environments is inflected toward certain patterns according to the size, resource base, climate, geology, and other physical characters of the colonized place, in dynamic interaction with the characters of the colonizing society: its economy, religion, technology, fertility, and so on. Certain combinations of these characters will push the process in certain directions—trajectories, like those seen in the chiefdom typologies of Sahlins and Goldman—that do not “determine” outcomes but help to explain, and perhaps to predict, historical outcomes—and certainly cannot be ignored in the ideological service of some notion of absolute historical contingency.¹²⁹

Water, the fundamental organizing principle of both the human and the natural in Hawai‘i, operates on a range of registers: metaphysical, social, and physical, but its effects are modulated according to the different scales and characters of the places and people involved. Just as wet and dry, wai and malo’o, are fundamental physical characters, so too do big and small structure the history of Hawai‘i at all levels. Bigness can be physical, as in types of resource “thickness”—such as high streamflow, fertile soils, broad valleys, or productive aquaculture—and it can be social, as in the high populations, surpluses, and stratified societies that resource thickness can sustain. It is a circular relation: social bigness thrives on physical bigness and makes more of it through intensified land use to obtain more surplus, thereby making more social bigness through stratification, and so on. The mechanism is at base environmental: given enough resources, bigness benefits from the environmental degradation inherent in human economic activity in fragile island environments in that it weakens the earlier, dispersed, diversified, presumably more egalitarian settlement pattern and strengthens centralized, simplified, intensified agriculture and the competitive involution that feeds on it. This in turn has its feedback mechanism in more cascading environmental degradation: deforestation, denudation, erosion, dessication, and extinction.

This sequence proceeds at varying rates and intensities, depending on the characters involved. In small environments characterized by resource “thinness”—aridity; poor soils; physical remoteness or isolation, such as in small, steep valleys; inaccessible uplands or stormy coastlines; or in the atolls that stall out in the first, simple form of chiefdom structure—it may not get started at all or, once started, may fizzle out. Physical smallness fights social bigness, as the history of Kala‘e on Molokai suggests. Small places, like Kala‘e, can become places of refuge for politically and economically weak segments of the population; these refugia, as biologists call such pockets, ironically preserve both cultural and natural diversity because of their marginality and vulnerability, not in spite of them. But, under the right conditions, social stratification and environmental degradation will tend to produce one another reciprocally, as the larger history of Polynesian Hawai‘i attests. This conclusion has important similarities to Worster’s thesis: bigness tends toward social stratification, coercion, and monopoly control of land and resources, though scholars may argue over the comparative coerciveness of the wet versus dry modes in precontact Hawai‘i. In either case, bigness constitutes itself, at least in part, on the destruction of the environmental basis of small community reproduction and by seizing control over the common resources that remain, such as streamflows, fishponds, fishing rights, and access to the kula uplands, and by instigating or coercing economic development by expansion into new areas with capital-intensive infrastructure and labor-intensive production. In Sahlins’s words, “all life begins with the chiefship”—and this is because the chiefship has, in seizing power, seized the resources that give life.

What I have been trying to do with these analyses is to sketch a moving picture, or series of pictures, of the physical Hawaiian universe on the eve of contact. I have tried to show some of the dynamic interaction of the environment and the social and how each was shaped in particular ways by it. With Kirch, I have tried to show that “by the end of prehistory the Pacific world was a constructed world, an ocean full of thoroughly modified, transformed, anthropogenic islands.”¹³⁰