Under the direction of Dr. Michael Graves, Mr. David Addision will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. He will conduct archaeological, ethnohistoric and ethnographic research on the island of Nuku Hiva, located in the Marquesan island chain. Previous work on the island indicates an original colonization by Polynesian people about 2,000 years ago. Descendants of these inhabitants still occupy the region today. Nuku Hiva is typical of the Marquesan islands in its size and it habitat variation which ranges from drier uplands to lower-lying large valleys with permanent water sources which permit irrigation. Mr. Addison wishes to trace the development of agriculture over time and to relate variations in this to environmental characteristics and to changes in social organization. To accomplish this, he will map agricultural terraces and other features such as irrigation systems which are prominent on the landscape today. He will also excavate selected portions of them to determine construction features and sequence and to collect material for radiocarbon dating. He will consult historic records which describe agricultural practices at the time of European contact and will conduct extensive interviews with present day inhabitants. Because islands are constrained and clearly circumscribed areas they provide an excellent context to examine human-environment relationships. The Polynesian region of the Pacific also provides an important study region because it islands vary widely in size and geography and they were inhabited by a single stock of people at roughly the same time. Therefore it is possible to conduct controlled comparison studies. Such islands were originally colonized by small groups and over time population and population pressure increased. In cases such as Nuku Hiva therefore one can examine the relationships between population pressure, environmental variation and human response. This research is important because it will shed new light on human-environmental interactions. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists and further the training of a promising young scientist.
