With National Science Foundations support Dr. Michael Kolb will conduct two seasons of archaeological excavation and survey in the Kahikinui district on the island of Maui. The goal of the work is to understand how stratified chiefly society developed and what mechanisms chiefs used to accrue and consolidate their power. The rise of complex society in Hawai'i occurred over an 800 year period which witnessed the rapid development of chiefdoms. Hawai'ian temples and large-scale dryland and pondfield agricultural systems attest to significant central leadership and social ranking and the first Westerners to visit the island encountered a ranked society with a noble ruling class. In the anthropological literature Hawai'i stands as one of the most important archaeological and ethnographic examples of a complex chiefdom. The rural nature and arid climate of Kahikinui provide an excellent venue to examine this development process since the entire archaeological landscape has been preserved essentially intact. Thousands of stone features, including habitation sites, agricultural terraces, shrines and temples are still visible and until recently the region has received scant archaeological attention. Through study of individual temples and the contents they contain and through comparative analysis across sites it is possible to build up a broad picture of how society was organized and how this changed through time. Kolb is particularly interested in how chiefs used ideology to consolidate their power and can gain insight into this through the study of pig remains. In addition to their role as food, pigs served important ceremonial roles and most often they were slaughtered in ritual contexts. Through the analysis of such faunal remains across sites and examination in how their distribution changed over time it is possible to relate ideology to political power. Kolb and colleagues will make detailed maps of individual temple sites. These will provide data for measuring labor investment costs. Excavation will be conducted at all of them to recover cultural and faunal remains as well as materials for absolute dating. Archaeological evidence indicates that civilization arose independently in many parts of the world and that similar stages of development are common across all cases. This strongly indicates that a basic developmental process underlies these common trajectories and anthropologists wish to understand the forces involved. Because of the excellent ethnographic and ethnohistoric data available as well as the presence of well preserved archaeological remains Hawai'i provides an excellent context in which to examine this question. The results of this research will be generalizable well beyond an individual group of islands.
