Complex, hierarchical sociopolitical systems have emerged at various times and places in world history, but the processes involved in their formation are still not well understood. The research team undertaking this interdisciplinary project will combine the approaches of archaeology, demography, and agricultural ecology to study how a complex early state-level society arose in the isolated Hawaiian Islands prior to contact with Europeans. Hawai'i offers a 'model system' because the cultural and biological processes that developed and interacted in Hawai'i, from population growth and intensification of agriculture and resource extraction, to the increasing centralization of political power and economic control, have happened everywhere and indeed are taking place globally today - but the context in which they take place is better-defined in Hawai'i than elsewhere. The research team will integrate quantitative modeling (ecosystem, demographic, and agricultural production models) with carefully-focused field analyses of landscape biogeochemistry, agronomic systems, human demography in relation to agricultural infrastructure and productivity, household-scale archaeology, and the development of social and cultural complexity in societies based on both dryland and wetland (irrigated) modes of agricultural intensification. The field research and landscape-scale ecosystem and demographic modeling will focus on the Kohala region of Hawai'i Island, which encapsulates the diversity of pre-contact production systems. Specifically, the project will: (1) Extend integrated analyses of dryland agricultural systems to the irrigated wetland agricultural systems that dominated the economies of windward landscapes of the older Hawaiian Islands. (2) Analyze the dynamics of an agricultural population coupled to a nutrient-cycling model of agriculture, thereby illuminating the dynamics of agricultural populations subject to variable climate over a spatially heterogeneous habitat. (3) Investigate temporal changes in the domestic economy and production of surplus, to determine how changes at the household level were linked to the emergence of a regional-scale integrative political economy. (4) Evaluate the consequences of different forms of social organization for population growth, stability, and well-being, and for resource surplus, shortage, and sharing. The project results will contribute to fundamental understanding of how soils, ecosystems, agriculture, population, and sociopolitical structure interact over time spans of hundreds of years.
The research team represents a combination of social, biological, and physical scientists, and research will integrate approaches and methods from archaeology, anthropology, demography, soil science, ecology, and computer modeling and simulation. The project will contribute to the education and training of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as several post-doctoral scholars, adding to the capacity for cutting-edge interdisciplinary research that integrates the social, biological, and physical sciences. The project team will also contribute to secondary education in Hawai'i by developing curricular material in partnership with the State Board of Education. Outreach to Native Hawaiian communities and to the broader public will focus on the little-appreciated intensity and diversity of agriculture and the complexity of society in pre-contact Hawai'i - and on the Island's status as a globally-significant model system.
