Island Landscapes, Or Sauer Among the Polynesians

[00:00:00] MEG CONKEY:
I think on both, I think on both of the clocks, it says that it’s 4:10 of Berkeley time. And so, I’d be delighted to begin our wonderful event late this afternoon. My name is Meg Conkey.

I’m the current chair of the Carl Sauer Lecture Committee, which is co-sponsored by the Archaeological Research Facility and the Graduate Division. And as you know from your program, if you’ve had a chance to read it, the Carl Sauer Memorial Lectures were established in 1976 by colleagues, friends, family, and students to commemorate the contributions and their continuing influences and transformations of Carl Sauer, who was one of the most influential geographers of the 20th century. His works are veritably cross and transdisciplinary, and there are many concepts and approaches that he pioneered and/or championed that scholars today use without even realizing their origin and history.

Sauer was a professor of geography here at Berkeley from 1923 to 1957, and an emeritus until his death in 1975. This was a formative time of what became a distinctly Berkeley cultural geography, and you would not be surprised to learn that being a contemporary here with the anthropologist, Alfred Kroeber, there were discussions and debates between the two and their students, both leaving a legacy of promise and challenges to the understanding of human cultures, their landscapes and histories. We are honored that at least one member of the Sauer family is with us today for the 22nd Sauer Memorial Lecture, and we’re grateful for the family’s continuing support of the endowment.

And of course, need I, I don’t think I need to add that should you feel inspired to contribute to the endowment, it’s very easy to find out how by going on the CAL, Give to CAL website. It is the endowment that makes these lectures and all of the activities associated with them possible. The lecturer today is someone quite near and dear to us, and we will introduce him in a moment.

He will be introduced by Professor Laurie Wilkie, the director of the Archaeological Research Facility. But I’d like to draw your attention to the slide here about a forthcoming biography of Carl Sauer that was begun by Michael Williams, who was to have been our 2009 Sauer Lecturer and talk about the biography, but due to one of those unfortunate ironies of life and death, he actually died on the day that he was to give the Sauer Lecture.

[00:02:32] PROFESSOR WILKIE:
However, thanks to the work of David Lowenthal and Bill Denevan, this very voluminous and detailed, and insightful work that charts the life and the contributions of Carl Sauwer is now about to be published in 2014 by the University of Virginia Press. And since at least Bill is here today, we’d like to thank you for work with him.

(applause)

Something, something really to look forward to, and I’m sure at the reception, if you have any questions or comments, Bill would be available to talk to you about it. And I also want to say, before turning it over to Professor Wilkie, for the introduction of our speaker, that many people might think, “Well, the Sauwer Lectures, we’re supposed to invite people from near and far, and this is one of our own faculty members here at Berkeley.” But I would like to say that the inspiration for this came from one of the longtime supporters of the Sauwer Lectures, who said, “Why?” to the committee, “Why are you bothering to spend a lot of time looking for other wonderful people when you probably have someone who is among the most Sauwerian of contemporary practitioners right in your own midst?”

And we said, “Oh, but of course.” And Professor Kirch had been, and still is, on the Sauwer Selection Committee, but we proceeded without his input

(laughter)

and proceeded to select him, for which we realized immediately that this was, in fact, very much the right thing to do, and we’re very, very pleased that he’s able to do this this afternoon. So, I’ll turn it over now to Professor Wilkie for the introduction of our speaker. I’ll just remind those of you that have come in late, cellphones– Off, please, and there will be a reception immediately following the question and answers.

Since this is being videotaped, it’s about 10 minutes. So if you actually would like to see the whole thing again, it will be available, but there will. Be microphones passed around for question and answer.

Give me that. Yes. Welcome everyone.

Thank you for coming today. I have the difficult responsibility of trying to provide a brief overview of the very long and distinguished career of my colleague, Professor Kirch. Professor Kirch completed his PhD at Yale in 1975, studying with the great K.C. Chang.

He then was at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu.

[00:05:04] LAURA:
He became the director of the Burke Museum in Seattle in 1984, and is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Washington. We stole him from there in 1989, and since 1994, he has held the Class of 1954 Endowed Chair. Professor Kirch was born and raised in Hawaii, and he has dedicated his career to studying the archeology of the Pacific Islands, with an emphasis on Melanesia and Polynesia, in particular.

His research looks at the earliest settlements of the islands to European contact and beyond. His work underscores the complex and dynamic relationships between the peoples of the Pacific and the many island ecologies that they lived within. Kirch’s work is characterized by a commitment to bringing the highest scientific rigor to his archeological research, something that led to his election to the National Academy of Sciences.

It was also awarded him the John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science. Professor Kirch’s work is on the forefront of scholars who have turned their attentions towards using the archeological record as a laboratory for understanding human environment and climate change relationships. His earliest work cemented him as one of the leading thinkers in archeology on the development of social complexity in ancient societies.

Professor Kirch also pushes methodological boundaries, being one of the first archeologists to truly embrace technologies like GPS in the field and the use of GIS, all while maintaining a steadfast commitment to his plane table maps.

(audience laughing)

He has even contributed to the development of new dating techniques, including the use of coral, which is just fascinating stuff. He has been regularly funded by the National Science Foundation throughout his career, an important measure of how his colleagues perceive his work. But it is not Professors Kirch’s scientific prowess that has distinguished him as one of the generation’s leading archeologist.

It is his scientific rigor combined with a profound ethnographic understanding, empathy, and respect for the peoples of the Pacific, and the symbolically rich landscapes they created that makes Kirch’s archeological contribution so rich. Don’t get me wrong. Professor Kirch does not simply graft ethnographic knowledge onto the past.

Instead, his understandings of the ethnographic and ethno-historic world has shaped the kinds of questions he asks of archeological data and infuses his interpretations so that he considers the possibility that issues other than economic rationality shape prehistoric Pacific Islanders’ engagements with landscape and one another. Kirch’s book collaboration with Marshall Sahlins, Anahulu, a two-volume set which was awarded the Staley Prize by the School of American Research, demonstrates this creative commitment to using archaeology as a line of evidence in historical anthropology. Professor Kirch has been very prolific in sharing his research.

Google will tell you, as of an hour ago, that he has been cited 7,092 times. I’m sure it’s gone up by now. It’s really very difficult in looking at the record without his CV in front of you to count how many books and monographs he has written and edited.

It’s at least a dozen. His most recent book, A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief, was recently awarded the 2013 Society for American Archaeology Book Prize for accessible writing. So, he has a strong commitment to engaging many, many audiences.

At Berkeley, he is also well-remembered for a famous memo to the faculty club regarding cocktail glasses, the martini glass memo.

(laughter)

We remember that fondly. For his commitment to research in the Pacific, and particularly Hawaii, Professor Kirch received the 2011 Gregory Medal for distinguished research in the Pacific from the Bishop Museum. And there are many, many, many more honors.

But with no further ado, I would like to introduce you to Professor Pat Kirch, a scholar and often a gentleman.

(applause)

[00:09:16] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Can you hear me okay? The sound? All right.

Thanks, Laura. That was a very generous introduction there. I’ll have to try and live up to it now with this talk.

I first encountered the work of Carl Sauer when I was a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania, 1968. I–when Meg told me that they were gonna invite me, the committee was inviting me to give this lecture, I went to my bookshelf And I found my copy of Land and Life with my yellow highlighter underlinings very carefully through the whole thing.

And the date on it is sometime early in spring of 1968 when I was a freshman at, at Penn. Another book that influenced me a few years later when I was a graduate student at Yale was Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. So these two works in particular, in my own career, were very influential early in my undergraduate and graduate student days.

[00:10:04] STANLEY:
And most importantly to me, I think is the recognition that Sauer in his work was a real precursor to the fields of human ecology and historical ecology. In recent years, last decade or so, I’ve come to regard a lot of my own recent research as falling within historical ecology. So certainly, Sauer is there in the tradition of those who really led to this field.

So, it’s an honor to give this lecture. I just wanted to start with a couple of quotes from Sauer. I’m not going to refer much to Sauer, per se.

I think it’s just implicit in what I’m gonna talk about. But I wanted to just bring a couple of quotes in. These were both from essays that were published, in ‘Land and Life,’ this summary, but they come from different times in his career.

These two quotes are from his essay, The Morphology of Landscape, and it’s landscapes that I’m gonna be talking about today. Or you can read them, I hate when people read the quotes in PowerPoint, so you read them yourself. But you get the point that, you know, Sauer was saying, “Landscapes are dynamic and they involve both physical and cultural interactions together.

I mean, I think that’s the essence of the Sauerian view about landscape. And much later in his life, in 1957 from an article that, I know I pored over as an undergraduate, ‘Man and the Ecology of Tropical America.’ Of course, you know, used man.

We should now say humans, people. But, again, you get this point that we can’t have any ecology, any biogeography without considering humans and their input on the landscape. Although many people, I think, still try to promulgate that view at times.

All right. Let me get into the essence, the meat of my talk today. And what I wanna do is talk to you about three landscapes in the Pacific areas that I’ve all three have worked in.

These are the islands of Mangareva on the far southeast corner of French Polynesia, Moorea Island, right next to Tahiti in the center of French Polynesia, and then the Hawaiian archipelago. I’ve chosen these islands very explicitly because they demonstrate a range both in terms of the natural aspects of landscape and the cultural aspects. And here, I’ve just plotted them in terms of two of the basic physical environmental aspects.

Geologic age, which is just on a linear scale here, two to eight million years.

[00:12:32] LAURA:
And their area in square kilometers on a logarithmic scale going up to 10,000 square kilometers. You can see, and I’ll talk in this order, Mangareva, Moorea, and Hawaii. So Mangareva, the first case I’ll talk about, a very small islets.

It’s actually a set of about 14 little islets within one barrier reef lagoon, but totaling only 25 square kilometers. Very small land area. But know that it’s the oldest of these three island cases, about six million years, and that will be very critical, as you’ll see as we progress.

Moorea it’s still a fairly small island, but at 134 square kilometers, you know, substantially larger than Mangareva, and a lot younger about, between one and a half and two million years old in geologic age. And then the Hawaiian Islands, and I’ve just put the two biggest ones here, Maui and Hawaii, are, you know, more than an order of magnitude larger, the Island of Hawaii a little over 10,000 square kilometers. I’ll talk quite a bit about that.

And the youngest, I mean, Hawaii, the Island of Hawaii is still erupting hot rock. So parts of it are zero age right now as we speak. And so just kinda keep this in mind as we progress through these three case studies.

‘Cause I’ll start with Mangareva, this smallest and geologically oldest. And this slide right here is, it actually captures the essence of what I’m going to talk about. I don’t know what strikes you looking at this, maybe the white sand beaches where you wish we were right now.

Beautiful reefs or the coconut palms, but what strikes me as an island ecologist, an island archaeologist, is this denuded landscape, the deforested landscape, these grasslands. And the only vegetation we really see is human introduced coconut, little scrub coastal pandanus. It really stands out, to me at least, as very something is going on here.

It’s very different. As an anthropologist, if we look at Mangareva at the time of early European contact, it also stands out. The Mangarevan society that was encountered by Beechey in 1824 and other missionaries soon afterwards was one of small tribelets on these 14 little islands constantly fighting with each other for control of territory.

It’s the descriptions of conflict are very sort of gruesome. But other things were going on as well, one of which was these, now these were Polynesians. We think of Polynesians, we think of people with big canoes and sailing canoes and outriggers.

They had no canoes, right? This is Beachy’s drawing of a bunch of Mangarevan warriors sort of paddling on a silly looking raft of purau logs, Hibiscus tiliaceus logs across the lagoon. Something had happened here where they actually had no more hardwood to make canoes.

Mangareva’s very weird in this regard. So on the cultural side as well, some things were happening in this island landscape. When a biological and anthropological expedition from the Bishop Museum went to Mangareva in 1934 they went there thinking they were gonna find rich biodiversity, which most of the islands in Southeast Polynesia have in terms of land snails, and birds, and endemic insects, and plants.

And they were really, really disappointed. You read Harold St. Johns. He said no other part of the world had he seen so decimated.

So again, very weird. No endemic species. What was going on in this place?

And there are hints, however, that it was not always like this in Mangareva. So the Mangarevan expedition, the malacologist, sea Montague Cook, found subfossil land snail shells of various endemic species in eroded deposits around the base of the islands. You see some of them here.

And these told him that there must have once been forests on this island, which would have been the habitat for these endemic snails. Just very recently, by the way, a recent Berkeley graduate, David Hembrey, some for an extinct insect that he found from the herbarium specimens collected years ago of a gall that’s like, he found the where the gall was burrowing into the leaves. So there are all these hints that something was different at one time.

But there’s no question that Mangareva is amongst the most deforested, the most barren of not just Polynesian, but oceanic islands in general. Jared Diamond, who collaborated with a colleague at the University of Hawaii, Barry Rolette, in an article in 2004 in Nature compared, I think it was 69 islands across the Pacific statistically in terms of the extent of deforestation and tried to statistically ferret out what the causes of this might be. And among other things, they noted that Mangareva and Easter Island are the, the two most deforested, depauperate islands in the Pacific, and they hinted at some statistically, some contributing factors and so on.

I’m gonna tell you what I think really was the contributing factor in a minute. And the clues to that came in my, I’ve made four expeditions to Mangareva. Well, the clues came in my second trip to Mangareva in, I think it was 2002 on the island of Taravai, second largest of the Mangareva islands inhabited today by three people.

One’s sort of a crazy man, one’s an alcoholic, and the other guy, I don’t think I ever saw. But

(audience laughing)

on the back of the island, this little bay of Onomea we came into, and here you could see there’s an eroding shoreline. That’s a whole nother topic of what’s going on with the landscapes in terms of the shores, the coconut tree in the water and so on. But when archaeologists see this kind of a situation, we rush in, of course, and begin poking about here because we’re looking for exposed deposit stratigraphic sections.

And indeed there was a midden site beautifully exposed. And so we put in a test pit here and another one back farther up in the bush, got this nice stratigraphic sequence about a meter deep of cultural deposit, dark gray. So burning lenses right at the interface, and then down to sands here, which seem to be pre-cultural, although they’re actually probably crypto-cultural.

And we got a radiocarbon date right around 1000 AD, which is about the time that Polynesians were coming into this part of the Pacific. But the really fascinating thing was the concentration of bird bones right at that interface. Beautifully preserved.

You can see that nice beak there. Primarily seabirds. And this little plot is just from one square test bit, shows you the 153 bird bones concentrated right there at the bottom.

Again, with a date of around 1000 AD. We subsequently went back to this site in 2005 and got about 1,000 more bird bones. And it’s well dated now between about 950 and 1250 AD.

So, and I should say that today, Mangareva is noteworthy, again, for the paucity of birds. There are a few seabirds, but they’re very rare. They’re not big nesting colonies.

There are no endemic land birds and so on. So this was a, you know, striking discovery. We had the bones identified by bird experts in New Zealand.

And these are some of the main species. And the most common was this one, a Pseudobulweria petrel, which is not in Mangareva today. It, it’s in fact largely absent from all of French Polynesia.

It’s confined to subantarctic islands for the most part. And yet the largest number of bones, of those 1,000 bones out of that site, are Pseudobulweria petrels.

[00:20:01] PROFESSOR WILKIE:
Just this last, not this summer, but the summer before in a, it’s an error, it should say 2012. I went back to Mangareva with some of my grad students. Julian Swift in the back one.

And we excavated this site, a rock shelter on the little island of Angikauitai. Small little rock shelter, but beautifully stratified. And in this site, here’s some of the radiocarbon dates, which it goes just slightly later than that Onemea site, about 1200 AD and on up, more or less, to European contact.

We again recovered a very nice faunal record, and this is what I wanna point to primarily. This is the oldest deposit deep way down here, the bottom of this trench. And these are archeologists refer to NISP, number of identified specimens of faunal material.

So from this one, this is just from this one trench, 180 bird bones, and then rapidly dropping down the next stratigraphic layer to 100. And then, as you see, 55 or so, and then essentially none in the most recent record. So again, a very clear record of considerable if not extinction of birds, extirpation of species in the Mangareva Islands.

So, if we get back to this question, why is this such a severely deforested landscape? What, what’s going on here in Mangareva, and what have birds got to do with grasslands? Well, a lot, I think.

And I have to just digress for one second into nutrients on oceanic islands. So the rock-derived nutrients, and in particular, it’s phosphorus we’re concerned about, that support terrestrial ecosystems, plant growth, essential for plant growth on any oceanic islands. They come out of the hot rock when it’s first produced with the lava flows.

And over time, the amount of phosphorus and certain other rock-derived nutrients decline. And this chart from the work of my colleague Peter Vitousek shows you the, the general trend over time, say 100% of phosphorus gradually declining. But some of it gets occluded, bound up in compounds that plants can’t access.

Some ends up in the soil organic component. Some is in actual plant growth themselves. And Peter’s work on the Hawaiian islands, summarized in this chart here, shows you the amount of, this is phosphorus remaining percent, if you can’t read it, from about 90% on an island surface that’s maybe 1,000 years old, to very close to zero when you’re down here at over a million years old.

Okay? So on these, this is where you get back to island age. Remember I told you, so Mangareva’s our oldest island, five to six million years old, about the same age as the island of Kauai.

And on the island of Kauai, in the Hawaiian group, Vitousek’s research had shown that the rock-derived P still remaining on the old land surfaces on Kauai essentially is doing nothing to promote the plant growth on the Hawaiian Kauai shield forest. Its dust blown from Mongolia across the Pacific Ocean dropping into Hawaii that’s actually providing the P necessary for ecosystem maintenance on Kauai. Now, when we look at Mangareva, Kauai is up in here, this is a, a map of dust input, dust fallout over the Pacific, all right?

And what we see is that Mangareva is down in this great white hole of no dust, basically. So on island of Kauai, at least it’s getting, you know, whatever this is, 100 parts per something of of dust input. Mangareva’s getting basically nothing.

And by the way, Easter Island is about here as well. I’m not gonna talk about Easter, but the implications are the same. So we didn’t have the dust input to help us out.

That’s absent. We’ve got an island where phosphorus is gonna be severely depleted. What was maintaining this ecosystem at the time that people came in?

Birds. This is my hypothesis, is that these big seabird nesting populations that we have very clear faunal evidence for you know what seabirds do. They go out to sea and they fish.

They eat fish and they come back on the land. And what do they do? This is a delicate audience, I don’t wanna say, but, you know what they do.

They poop on the land. They produce guano, right in large quantities. And some ecological work, for example, in the Gulf of California islands, shows that up to sixfold concentrations of what would be there otherwise result from seabird inputs.

So our hypothesis is that there was indeed, at 1000 AD, at the time Polynesians arrived, the kind of, of terrestrial forest supporting land snails, insects, and so on that other Pacific islands in this sector had. But it was being maintained by birds who were functioning as the nutrient transporters from the ocean, bringing nutrients into the land. When that got truncated by Polynesians both taking these critters for food, these would have been naive fauna and very tasty.

And you could just walk up to that guy and say, “Hi, I’m putting you in my earth oven tonight.” These are very small islands too, so it wouldn’t take much to have, to really disrupt their nesting and roosting patterns. And as people began to clear forest and try to make gardens, ’cause these Polynesians were horticulturalists, they destroyed habitats.

So through a combination of direct predation, habitat destruction, et cetera, the birds go, as you see. And so what do we get? We get this landscape that, it was severely deforested, I was never able to return to a state of forested.

It could not recover. It was highly vulnerable. So my first case here is about vulnerability, where the natural circumstances of geologic age, et cetera, led to a situation where when humans came in after a few years, there were consequences that were basically irreversible.

And that led, in time, of course, to cultural adaptations, things like the lack of hardwood, for example, the simple rafts, the restriction of cultivation to tiny little valley bottoms where there was some alluvial soil, the conflict, and so on. So we can see how in a Sauerian sense, the natural and the cultural environments here in Mangareva were so closely intertwined. That’s my first case, my smallest, probably my most disturbing from a point of view of how humans can really disrupt ecosystem functioning.

Now turn to the island of Moorea, a beautiful place. Professor Stoddard here is, I’m sure, remembering the days of the field schools at the gum station. UC Berkeley has this wonderful Gum Station, just out of view, that I’ve also worked at.

I’ve been working on Moorea for about 12 years now intermittently with a number of my grad students also, focusing particularly on this vast big valley in here, the Valley of the Opunohu which I want to talk about. Now, the island of Moorea, while you look at it here, it’s obviously it’s not deforested. There are patches on ridges where we get terminal grasslands.

But for the most part, it’s forested. In fact, the forest up in the valley has regrown over archeological sites, climax forests or what looks like climax in 200 years since depopulation has recovered.

[00:27:17] STANLEY:
So it’s not vulnerable like a Mangareva. Partly because it is young, there’s still a high nutrient input or output of the rocks, if you will. It doesn’t have that kind of nutrient limitation that the Mangareva situation has.

And when we look ethnographically, ethno-historically at what was going on on Moorea as opposed to Mangareva at the time of European contact, we don’t find a situation of, you know, people in, there was war, it’s true, but it was a different kind of war organized politically top-down, war for conquest of entire islands. It wasn’t this constant inter-tribal strife and competition. And the society that occupied Moorea and adjacent Tahiti was very complex.

It was what we call a complex chiefdom. This is a scene, one of my favorite engravings from the, in this case, the third voyage of Captain Cook. There he is, Captain Cook.

I love this because it’s a sort of dispassionate enlightenment, you know, image of the explorer who’s witnessing a human sacrifice, right, on this temple, but he seems unmoved. He’s just observing it all. And it’s Weber, the artist, is recording it.

And here they’re drumming, you know, and then you see the skulls on the altar and the pigs on the offering table and so on. It’s a wonderful representation. But anyway, the point is, a different kind of society was occupying Moorea, a very complex society politically, socially, not at all like a Mangareva.

But let’s look at the valley of the Opunohu and this landscape, this island landscape. And here, I’m gonna focus on this particular valley landscape one of two great valleys in the interior of the island. Now, where my, well, my mentor is actually Roger Green, initiated archeological work in the 1960s, then we have carried on.

And I’ve had several of my students now pick up where Roger left off. So the valley is quite well-studied archeologically and also by national scientists. Well, here just show you a little bit of the archeological evidence.

So the Opunohu Valley was very densely inhabited. There’s evidence of populations. While we don’t know the exact numbers, but estimates of certainly up into the low thousands of occupants in the valley.

There are elaborate, round-ended house terraces. There are substantial numbers of religious structures, Morai. So evidence of a very substantial human occupation.

But when we mapped out the settlement patterns in the interior of the Opunohu, we don’t find a uniform distribution by any means. This landscape is actually very patchy in terms of where the evidence of human occupation is concentrated. There are sectors where there’s very dense concentration of these house sites and these temples.

And I just show you a few images of these kind of temple, it’s a Paopao where they have these backrest stones where priests sat while praying and so on. So these archeological complexes are in very discrete clusters, if you will. One of them for example is running on this ridge here.

But if you go next door here and there’s nothing. So this puzzled me for a long time. Why was the archeological landscape so disparate, highly concentrated in some areas and very little evidence of occupation in others?

And here, this is just showing you some of these temples. Here’s a big temple complex at the top of the Tupauruuru sector, a digital image we made of one of these sites. Well, I think to understand this landscape, we need to understand a different kind of physical process going on.

Young islands, high rainfall in this case. So while this island is only, you know, at most the oldest parts two million years old, you can see the great degree of dissection here. Mount Rotui, you know, these steep sides coming off of it, deep embayments of the Opunohu Bay and the Paopao Bay.

And note the cliff topography. I was trying to get my best, sort of pictures that just show you these cliffs. So what’s going on in the Opunohu in terms of natural processes of valley formation are a couple of things in particular.

One is massive land sliding that goes on quite often, mass wasting as the geomorphologists call it. Big sections will come off these cliffs and come roaring down into the valley, leaving big landslides or debris flows. At the same time, there’s about, where I’m standing taking this picture, we don’t have really good rainfall records as the French haven’t maintained them, but the estimate is 250, 300 inches of rain a year back at that valley head.

It’s constantly raining or fog dripping. So you get constant chemical erosion as well and deep leaching going on. Now, when we turn to looking at the soils of the Opunohu then, the French have done some nice soil mapping.

Here’s the bay and we see the streams coming up.

[00:32:18] PROFESSOR WILKIE:
What you see is, again, a very patchy kind of soil distribution there. And the very dark red probably can’t read it here and it’s in French anyway, but these are the ferrallitic soils, they call them. Iron rich.

These things are very red. Can you see them? They’re like the color of my shirt, whatever.

And then we get these other patches in here, it’s more in this color, that are eutrophic soils. They’re brown soils. And you can really see as we, with my soil scientist colleague, Oliver Chadwick, a couple of years ago, we did a series of sampling through there.

And, you know, we had the Munsell color chart book out, and it just got so boring. It’s like, “Okay, yep, that’s the something, you know, red that it’s either Y5, YR, whatever, the eutrophic.” Of course, we dutifully recorded it, but we could have just said it, you know?

So what we’re getting, it turns out these eutrophic soils are what form on these young landslides that come down, these big huge debris flows, right? Because that brings the fresh rock and the nutrient. And even though it might be scary thinking about living on a landslide, well, the problem is living there before the landslide comes down and getting covered.

But once it’s come down, maybe that’s a safe place. So what it turns out is that people were targeting actually the landslide debris flows as where they were concentrating their settlement. And here’s an example.

So we did this soil transect, it’s about a kilometer long here. This is the most important temple complex to the upper end of the valley. And there’s a big concentration of agricultural and residential sites and so on all through here with these temples right at the top.

So Oliver Chadwick and I, he’s at UC Santa Barbara, a soil scientist, we did a transect down here, took soil samples. He took them back to Santa Barbara and ran nutrient analyses on them. So the numbers here are giving you what we call base saturation, which is a percent value basically of bases, including things like phosphorus and other soil nutrients.

But just think of 100 would be fantastic, like, you know, your sweet potatoes, whatever would just grow incredibly. And these zero, forget it. There’s no nutrient in the soil.

As we came down this thing, we’re tracing an old debris flow basically. There’s the lip of it, and we come to another debris flow, and then we come to ferrallitic soil. So these are all eutrophics in our color scheme; these were ferrallitics.

And if you can read the numbers in a percent, 58, 52, 56, 49, 33, 29, 9, 5.4, right?

[00:34:47] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
The nutrient just is gone. Okay? And this is, guess what?

Archaeological features, here to here. Okay? So it’s a simple story in some ways but an interesting one, where in this landscape people were adapting to the mosaic, if you will, of available soils and nutrients.

And, you know, their settlement pattern was very highly determined at the gross level, not the, you know, where the houses necessarily in relation to the temples and so on, that’s cultural, but at a gross level, their settlement pattern is highly determined by this kind of island landscape. And we looked in more micro detail, that was a big, long transact, but here are two smaller settlements up in the Mahiti. And you probably can’t see these maps terribly well, but I mapped in here all the little agricultural terraces and house sites and et cetera, et cetera.

And then in the blue, we’ve shown where the high nutrient value is. That’s actually the debris flow. And what they did there, this is all agricultural stuff, there’s an irrigation system in here.

But where the values are low, they got their house sites out on the ferrilytic soil around them. I mean, they really were micro-positioning their use of the land in relation to, you know, garden on these eutrophics, take every bit of it, don’t waste it for house sites, put the house sites here out on the red muddy soil. Okay.

Same thing here. Big huge debris flows. This is a huge debris tongue, high nutrient value, temple at the top, agricultural terraces going all the way down, house sites to the side.

So, a simple story in some ways, but very different from Mangareva. But again, I think we see the, you know, to take this Salvarian view, this interaction between humans, culture, and various aspects of the physical environment, which they couldn’t, you know, they couldn’t change, they couldn’t control, they just adapted to it. They adapted their landscape, their settlement pattern to this.

But we don’t see in Moorea anything like this degradation that we did in Mangareva. That sense a much more benign environment than Mangareva. Now I wanna turn for the last part of my talk to Hawaii.

This will be slightly longer because Hawaii is bigger and more complex. This archipelago in the northern Pacific, which I think probably many of you actually probably visited as, as tourists if not as scientists. When we look at Hawaii, again, anthropologically, ethnographically, it stands out as well within the whole realm of Polynesia, also the opposite extreme of a Mangareva.

[00:37:20] STANLEY:
I’ve taken this painting from the late Hawaiian artist Herb Kawainui Kane. I love his representations, very detailed, accurate representations. This is supposed to be King Kamehameha I, who unified the Hawaiian Islands soon after European contact with his high priest, Hewahewa, standing in front of his temple at Ahuana, which has actually been restored.

If any of you have been to Kona, you might have seen this site. It’s been reconstructed in front of the King Kamehameha III Hotel. But it doesn’t quite look like that today.

But, so Hawaii, at the time that Captain Cook arrived in the early, time of early European contact was obviously this extremely complex society, so complex that some of us are now arguing that we shouldn’t be calling this a chiefdom at all, that these were early emergent archaic states in the last couple of centuries prior to European contact. I’m not gonna go into that argument today, but I’ll just sort of assert that. But what was it about these set of landscapes, these archipelago-range landscapes, that might have, and I don’t wanna say determined because I don’t believe in environmental determinism, but might at least have provided the opportunities for archaic states to emerge in this part of Polynesia?

And so here, we want to look at some agricultural landscapes across the Hawaiian archipelago, and I use these two images sort of iconically as representing the two major kinds of agroecosystems that emerged across Hawaii during the pre-European period. The one, and that mean, if that isn’t a classic, iconic kind of landscape terracing, Belle Delavan’s sitting there which we find across, all over the world. But here in Hawaii, it was highly elaborated irrigated terracing for wet taro Colacasia cultivation, very much like rice in terms of the way these operated, but for taro.

The Hawaiians didn’t have rice. And then, a totally different kind of landscape, the dryland rain-fed systems, extensive field systems, if you can see these lineations in the landscape, all plot boundaries, actually human-manipulated embankments separating fields. We had these two major kinds of agroecosystems in Hawaii, and I’ll talk primarily first about the dryland and then briefly just show you how the wetland comes in in contrast at an archipelago scale.

Before the last, well, what it is now 12 or so years, I’ve been involved in a fairly major multidisciplinary project investigating these kinds of landscapes, these agricultural landscapes in Hawaii, the Hawaii Biocomplexity Project. We were funded by NSF’s initial Biocomplexity and the Environment Program and then a second phase by the Human Social Dynamics Program. We’re kind of in a low-key phase right now, thinking about how we’re gonna get some more funding and go back for a third phase, because we, as yet, have really concentrated only on the dryland systems, and we sure would like to get in and work on the irrigation systems at the same level of detailed investigation.

But yeah, there’s a multidisciplinary team. I won’t go into all the cast of characters, I just wanna, Peter Vitousek over at Stanford has been my main co-principal investigator in this work, and I wanted to acknowledge him this evening. So, we’ve looked at a number of study sites, but I’m gonna talk just about this one, the northern tip of Hawaii Island, the Kohala district.

Now, you see it there in this kind of enhanced aerial view. So the Hawaiian archipelago, just to point out, is an age-progressive volcanic hotspot archipelago. So we’ve got a hotspot down here under the island of Hawaii that’s currently active.

It’s actually pushing up a new island, Loihi, here. If you’re interested in long-term real estate investment, it’s out there.

(audience laughing)

About a half million years, and you’ll have realized your investment. But so islands emerge here, and because the plate, Pacific Plate gradually moves like that, islands move off the hotspot, become dormant. Volcanism ceases, they gradually erode, and you get the beautiful sort of weathered landscapes of Oahu or Kauai, the Garden Isle, as they call it, that, you know, people are very familiar with.

So it provides a very nice kind of model system, as we say, because it’s all the same kind of basic geology, basaltic rock, but we get this geologic progression up to about six million years old here in Kauai. We also get a windward-leeward cross-cutting contrast in terms of the amount of rainfall, so that sets up a nice orthogonal set of two main physical variables. Here’s this dryland landscape, and if that isn’t an iconic landscape, an anthropogenic landscape, I don’t know what is.

I hope you can make this out. Again, see these lineations, thousands of them, right? Every one of those is a field boundary created by Native Hawaiian gardeners in the pre-European period.

And even though this has been ranched now and cattle ranching for 200 years, more or less, it still dominates the landscape. It’s not the cows, or the fences, or the, you know, barbed wire fences that dominate the landscape. It’s the imprint of centuries of intensive Hawaiian cultivation that still dominates this landscape.

As you get down in the drier zone that disappears because it was too arid down here to cultivate. But a whole central section of the leeward slope of the Kohala mountains, about 60 square kilometers continuously was in agricultural system, and that’s a big archaeological site, 60 square kilometers. And you really can’t walk more than about 10 meters in any direction without encountering an actual physical wall, a house site, you know, a trail, or whatever.

So we’ve mapped this system out intensively initially using aerial photographs, all the blue lines are field and trail boundaries. They just merge into a blue mush there’s so many of them. It’s mapped against rainfall here, which you can see there’s a pretty tight correlation to.

When we began this work in the early 2000s, one of the first things we were looking at is again the relation of the human Polynesian land use to the nutrient situation on the soils. And Peter Vitousek ran these transects, which you see here, five of them across the boundaries of the archaeological field system, which is shown in the shaded area. And we found a very distinctive pattern in relation to soil nutrient availability that which is plotted in those two charts.

Basically, and the reason there are two, there’s a white and a yellow, is we have two geologic main ages on this. So you have to separate those out. One’s about 150,000 years, the other’s about 400,000 years.

So the 400,000-year one is gonna have lower nutrient just ’cause longer time for leaching, but the patterns. So this is the older one in yellow, but the patterns are the same. And the field system boundaries are shown by the vertical lines.

Basically to cut to the quick, the Hawaiians over several centuries identified a sweet spot, as we like to call it, a seam running right along this mountain, and they maxed out every piece of that that they could cultivate and intensified it over several centuries. As Peter put it once, they were farming the rock. Very interesting.

They wanted the rock of a right age. Like, it better be too young and not too old, but just right. It’s the Goldilocks theory of farming in Hawaii, right?

And this is what they found. They found the same thing on Maui, but I’m not gonna talk about that one. So we mapped this landscape in more recent years.

We’ve applied LiDAR. Some of you know of the technique of LiDAR airborne, radar, and this has given us a chance to really map. We used to go out with GPS.

I used to go out with a plane table, but– and then we go out with GPS and walk these lines. Well, now we just fly a plane over it and get, you know, five billion points or whatever. But look at the– it’s just gorgeous mapping.

This is just a very small piece. This was done by Greg Asner at Stanford at the Carnegie Airborne Laboratory in collaboration with our group. So you see again, this is running up and down slope like this.

And all of these field embankment lines, and then you can see the trails that cross-cut. And the trails were not just trails for people moving. They were social boundaries between territorial land units held and managed by chiefs or sub-chiefly family groups.

This is a habitation site, a stone enclosure. There’s another one here et cetera. So really incredibly anthropogenic landscape, highly managed.

We have explored this in other ways. We wanted to know not just what the landscape looked like spatially, of course, and map it out, but how did it develop over time? And so we did a number of excavations through these field embankments.

You don’t worry too much about using trowels when you’ve got several thousand square kilometers of embankment length, you go in with a backhoe. So we just trenched across these. But then we very carefully sectioned and recorded stratigraphy and sampled.

And what we found were these pockets of original soil under embankments. When people began to build embankments in separate fields, that little area that was under the embankment got taken out of cultivation, that provided us interesting little windows into the original soils. But they also provided material for radiocarbon dating, and so now we have a pretty good chronology, AMS radiocarbon dates for the field system.

We know that it began to develop around 1400 AD and then continued right up, and it was still operating at, of course, at European contact, probably at peak maximum intensity. And then after the decimation of Hawaiian population with European diseases to which they had no resistance, the whole system collapsed. And by missionary accounts, by the 1850s or ’60s, the whole thing was basically in a state of almost total collapse, and then the cattle come in.

But then, so we have a pretty nice idea of the timeframe now, the formation of this landscape, and we’ve studied parts of it in much more intensive detail. I just wanna show you here how we’ve sort of deconstructed and reconstructed, as it were, this landscape, how it evolves over time. So here’s a chunk, it’s the same one I showed you with the LiDAR image, that’s a Google Earth image.

These things are very visible on Google Earth. This is a map produced from the LiDAR imagery, an archaeological map, and you can see it’s a very complex-looking. This is a very small area here, so it’s 100 meters on this scale.

So we’re looking at maybe five, 600 meters across this half a kilometer. You see all these walls, these embankments, see enclosures, you see other small, the red dots are the small kinds of features, and you see these trail divisions running, you know, cross-cutting the embankments. And what does it all mean?

How did this thing evolve? Well, if you stare at this long enough, you’ll start to see that the embankments, actually some of them are going under trails and some of them are coming and abutting. These two don’t actually go under.

There’s a funny abutment or let me find another one. Look at this one, it abuts and it doesn’t continue there. And so when you actually tease this out, you can get a relative sequence of the formation of this system, increasing intensification, increasing partitioning of the system over time.

So I’ll just run you through this thing. It began like this. That’s the oldest set of embankments that we can tease out, the longest ones which go under trails, big widely spaced out fields, maybe one division.

These two names, these are two ahupua’a, which are territorial units controlled by chiefs. So the one oldest trail is separating that. Next phase comes in, they start subdividing, more field subdivisions, okay?

Next phase comes in, ah, we’re getting more social boundaries inserted into this, not just the ahupua’a division, but some sub-ahupua’a divisions. Probably what the Hawaiians called ili, suggesting a degree of management control, imposition of this very regular landscape as– And remember now– We’ve got Hawaiian Society increasingly hiararchical complex, chiefly control think of the implications of this. There we go again.

We get into the next phase, even more regular spacing of these things. As we worked on it, I kept thinking of, of Clifford Geertz, actually, in his original work on agricultural involution in Indonesia, and what he called, you know, how intensification proceeds to this ultimate shared down, sort of squeezed-down poverty. Something like that was going on in Hawaii.

So we get this, and that’s the sort of final phase, I think, that we see. Now, we could also put the habitation sites into it. So we studied this, as I say in detail over one summer and excavated, so here are all the habitation sites now shown, and guess what?

They phase in in a very similar way. So there’s the first and oldest habitation site. Those of you who like House-Society Theory, maybe the ancestral house within this area.

There come the next phase of habitation sites. There’s the next one. There are the next two.

And this is what the landscape then was like at its endpoint basically, the time of European contact, highly divided partition landscape, each household, all of households with these narrow territorial divisions, cultivating these very neatly spaced out fields. Okay. So that’s the dryland landscape, and one example of how it evolved over time.

Let me just briefly bring in the irrigation systems. And I’m gonna do this at a more archipelago-wide scale, not gonna show you in detail the same kind of archaeological data, but remind you again about Hawaii as a kind of model system for understanding these landscapes. The geological age progression, zero to six million years old, the cross-cutting windward/leeward climate contrast, wet on this side, windward, as the oceanic trade winds come in bringing moisture.

All the rain falls on the windward sides of the islands, and so it’s very dry on the leeward sides. If you’ve been to Waikiki there, you know that’s leeward. That’s why Waikiki’s there, because it only gets 10 inches of rainfall a year.

But you just drive 20 minutes to the Pali and you’re at 250 inches of rain a year. So just to illustrate this again, hot rock, Zero Age down in Big Island of Hawaii. Get up to, Maui there, make you, my student, Alex Saber works there.

Might make him homesick. That’s Kaupo and up on the island of Kauai at about 5.1 million years there. Great valley dissection, you know, very, very deep valleys.

I’ve been talking a lot about soils and nutrients. They’re obviously extremely important. I just wanna show you this chart which shows you, particularly this chart.

This is, again, base saturation, nutrient availability, base cation saturation plotted over four different age substrates. So, and it’s plotted so each color is age, we’re getting progressively younger as I’m going out like this, or older as we come this way, and that’s rainfall. So the relationship at any particular landscape of a given age, right, is this kind of a non-linear relationship.

That is, we start out say, let’s take the 10,000-years-old landscape, and we’ve got 100% base saturation initially, and we get up as rainfall increases, rainfall increase going to the windward side, we hit about 1500 millimeters of rainfall and what happens? It’s not a linear para– It’s boom, it falls right down, okay?

So we’ve got a threshold where leaching occurs and nutrients disappear. Now, if we push that back, so we’re getting back to, say, 400,000 years, that’s part of our Kohala thing, you can see that was the threshold, for example, that bound the upper edge of the field system. People couldn’t expand any farther inland.

We get to Kauai and it’s basically so old that, you know, there’s essentially no nutrients left. So, this is another way of plotting that if you want rainfall against parent material age, basically, you could take any place in a Hawaiian landscape, any given place, and it might fall anywhere on this chart. These are all real places in a sense on the Hawaiian landscape.

But only down here could you actually run an intensive field system for century after century without having the thing collapse. Only there would it be sustainable. Okay?

That’s the point. So there’s only a small space, if you will in terms of age and rainfall relationships where you can do that kind, where you can have a Kohala field system. So with that in mind, those parameters, we set out to model the possibility for these kinds of landscapes across the archipelago scale.

So we started with a dry system, which we now understood very well with 10 years or more of working on it. So we mapped out the actual, you know, system say here in the dark line, approximately. By then, using those parameters of soil and rainfall age, soil nutrient availability, we modeled the potential for doing this kind of dryland agriculture.

The fit is actually pretty damn good. I think Nico, our GIS guy would probably say, it’s not too bad of a fit. We got this little tail out here, which is, was bothering us.

Gotta go out there and see what’s going on. But we said, okay, after we think we’ve got the parameters tied down pretty well, now let’s apply them to the rest of, say, the big island. So there’s our Kohala field system, what we found is that, you know, of this 10,000 square kilometer island, actually only a small part of it would have supported these kinds of entirely intensive agricultural systems.

The other main area, actually bigger than Kohala, was Kona. Guess where King Kamehameha and Kalani’opu before him, and guess where the royal centers are and all that stuff. Right there in Kailua and at Honaunau and so on.

And we know a lot about, there are parts of this archaeologically that still remain. A lot of it’s been torn up by resort development and so on. But it is there.

And we know of it archaeologically. And the other great one was down here in Kau, another major center of chiefly control and interest. So this one is a little difficult because it all got put into sugar cane plantations in the late 19th century and we can’t see anything left of it.

But basically, we can now model where on Hawaii Island you could have done this kind of intensive, very intensive field system cropping. Then we extended the model to the whole archipelago and what we found is there are zones on Maui, my dear area of Kahului and Alex’s area of Kaupo is one, and over in Kula where you could do this. The tip of Molokai because it’s young geologically, and a few parts of Oahu because again, they’re young rejuvenation lava flows, so they actually are young enough where you could do that.

You’ll notice Kauai is not even on this map because Kauai is so old you cannot do this kind of dryland cropping. The shield services are just depleted of nutrients. Now, as I’m almost through with this, let’s just flip it over and look at this other kind of landscape, the irrigation systems, these systems for taro, not the dryland but the rainfed.

So we said let’s try to model that. Took the island of O’ahu, where we knew from ethnohistoric accounts that there was lots of taro cultivation that went on and still actually goes on. Some native Hawaiians have been rejuvenating these techniques so you could actually go there and see it in a few places still going on today.

So we used ,again, GIS. We looked at what are the parameters for irrigation. Well, you’ve gotta have permanent streams, permanent stream flow.

Fortunately, we have good data in Hawaii from the State Natural Resources Department, et cetera. So we could map in the streams. We had put buffers around them.

We would look at, I don’t know what this is ’cause I can’t read it myself, but something to do with stream flow. Anyway, combine the parameters in GIS modeling and we come up with a map of where potentially you could do this kind of irrigation agriculture on the island of O’ahu. Quite a lot, quite extensive as you can see, but all associated with the alluvial plains at the base of these streams, these permanent streams.

This one was a little bit of a glitch I think ’cause it actually relates to some damming and some historic period modification. I don’t really believe that big one in the center, but that’s what the model tells you, so you gotta be true to, you know, what it’s generating. In any event, what we did with the O’ahu one, I should say, is we then turned to the ethnohistoric records particularly the records of the Great Mahele of 1850s, the division of lands between the king and the government and the common people where there are all these claims made for taro fields people were still cultivating.

And we compared that and we have a very good fit that these are exactly the same areas that people were claiming and cultivating into the early post-contact period. So with some confidence then that our parameters were right, we then apply this again to the other islands, the archipelago, and we find Kaua’i is the gem of all gems for irrigation. Although you can do no dryland intensive cultivation there, it has the most irrigation land of potential of any of the islands.

Parts of Molokai on the south coast and the valleys doesn’t show very, very well, but it’s there. Significant areas on West Maui and the northern coast of Maui, but not down here where the dryland potential is. And along the windward coast of Hawaii Island and small valleys and gulches and particularly in Waipio, another royal center there according to oral traditions.

So if we plot this out island-wide and we look at the total areas even though Hawaii Island is the biggest island by far of the archipelago, 10,000 square kilometers, only about 43 of those square kilometers could have been irrigated. And again, mostly up in Waipio here. As against Kaua’i, a much smaller island, and yet 145 square kilometers.

And this is my last slide. Here are the dry and the wet systems plotted out then across the archipelago. I kind of schmoosed it together a little bit to fit on one slide.

So you can see, unfortunately, the color coding probably should have been done a little differently. I should put the irrigation in blue because that’s more logical. But it’s the dryland in blue, so not to get confused, and the green is showing you the irrigation potential.

But you can see as you go up and down this archipelago, it’s the young big islands that were supported by dryland, intensive dryland cultivation. It’s the old islands somewhat smaller in the northwestern part of the archipelago that were hugely supported by irrigation. I’m not gonna go in great detail and talk to you about the implications for this socio-politically, but I’ll just briefly mention them.

So at the time of Cook’s arrival, what do we have? We had emergent archaic states on Maui and Hawaii supported by these big intensive dryland systems. They’re big enough, they supported big enough populations, 100,000 people at least, probably on Maui, maybe more on Hawaii, to support an archaic state.

But at the same time, these were the systems that were so susceptible to drought, to perturbation, probably surpluses were declining. We do have evidence for nutrient drawdown. Guess where the aggressive war leaders were coming out of in these emergent archaic states.

Well, Kamehameha for one, Kalani’opu, Kahekili on Maui. Just before Cook’s arrival, Kahekili had conquered O’ahu, right? Why did he want O’ahu?

Well, all of that irrigated taro land, right? And what did Kamehameha want? He wanted O’ahu, too, and Kaua’i.

And after Kahekili died, Kahekili told him, “You’ll have to get O’ahu over my dead body.” Which turned out to be true. And when Kahekili died, Kamehameha made his push.

Of course, he had European arms and so on to help him, but what he was really after was all this irrigated land. And he tried to get Kaua’i. He had to finally get it by diplomacy.

So Kamehameha settled in here. He lived here for quite a long time. All his warriors were settled around this island.

So this landscape, this complex in some ways and other ways fairly simple in terms of these cross-cutting variables, these agricultural landscapes really were critical, I think, to the dynamics, the sociopolitical dynamics that were playing out in late Hawaiian pre-contact history. So that just summarizes it. So that’s it.

I’m not gonna have any sort of grand conclusion to this. I wanted to, I think I’ve sort of made the case with the three case studies. Island landscapes very different, and yet certain key variables, soil nutrient, geologic age playing out in all of them, but playing out in different ways.

Not, I don’t think as Sauer would have said, a deterministic model of environment determining the form of culture, but influencing it, constraining it, challenging it in very, very interesting ways. So I’ll just leave you with another iconic landscape there. That’s the island of Bora Bora in French Polynesia.

Okay, thank you.

(applause)

[01:02:56] LAURA:
Can I take some questions?

[01:02:57] STANLEY:
Yeah.

[01:02:58] LAURA:
Why don’t you do the questions and–

[01:03:00] STANLEY:
I think you’re gonna have my mic.

[01:03:01] LAURA:
We’ll walk around. So if there’s anybody with a question?

[01:03:05] STANLEY:
Question. I have two questions. Very somewhat peripheral to the main points you were making, but for those of us who don’t know much about the prehistoric of this landscape, how did agriculture come into and how did irrigation come here?

That’s number one. And what was the proportion of reliance on agriculture to fishing? ‘Cause you see so much water, and that did not play, except for the irrigation part, much into what you were saying.

Were there settlements, non-agricultural settlements where people were mainly relying on marine life? Yeah. It’s both really good questions, Stanley.

To the first one, it’s fairly simple. Polynesians, like other Austronesian-speaking peoples across the Pacific, were horticulturalists from the beginning. So they brought with them a set of crop plants, particularly taro, yam, breadfruit, sugarcane, these things, in the voyaging canoes, along with pigs, dogs, and chickens, three domestic animals, and introduced them to island after island after island.

So they were horticulturalists, brought this stuff with them. But they were also a fishing people, you’re right. And I didn’t get into the marine thing at all, but just briefly if you look at Mangareva, that first case, you have a huge barrier reef lagoon system surrounding these tiny little islets, right?

And it all went to hell on the islets, as I’ve showed you with the birds going and so on.

[01:04:40] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
The marine ecosystem was in some ways what saved them in Mangareva. And we’ve tried to see if we can find any evidence of human impact on the marine ecosystem, you know, what we call resource depression, diminution in sizes of shellfish, fish, that kind of thing. Nothing.

The marine resources were so big compared to the small size of the humans that the land could even support, that we can’t detect any measurable impact on the marine. So yeah, they were eating lots of fish. And Te Rangi Hiroa, the famous, or Peter Buck, ethnographer, who, who worked in Mangareva, talks about how the, in Mangareva, fishermen had very high status because of this.

And so they could actually bring down a hereditary chief by denying the gift of a fish to the chief, things like this. Now in Hawaii also, and, and in Moorea, you know, fishing is also very important. You did have some communities, small ones, in very arid areas on the coast that were specialized in fishing and would salt fish and then trade them for taro or yams.

So you had, you know, some specialization on that. The thing about the island of Hawaii with your marine resources, thing about the archipelago for that matter is, if we look at these marine landscapes, if we could call them that, they also evolve over time from these young islands to the old islands. And the young islands have the worst resource base from a marine point of view, because you’ve got basically cliff, you know, rocky coast.

Corals haven’t yet had time to colonize. You don’t have developed reefs. So it’s only when you get to like a, a West Maui, Molokai age, two, three million years old, you have nice coral reefs, which means that you have, you know, the the biomass being produced, and you have the herbivore fish, you know, and then you have a nice trophic chain, and now you can get up to your, you know, tasty ululas and things like that.

So from that point of view, the, the older islands, Kauai and Oahu in particular, not only had all that irrigation land, so they, they were rich in, you know, the possibility for terrestrial production, they also had the best fishing. So, so you wanna think of the pressures again on the populations down on Hawaii and Maui, you know, the short end of the stick in terms of your dry land and susceptible to drought and so on, and the least marine resources.

[01:06:54] LAURA:
Okay, yeah. Fabulous talk, Professor Kirch. I like this very much.

[01:07:00] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Thank you, sir.

[01:07:01] LAURA:
Could you take us back to Mongolian dust, please, and do your transect?

(laughing)

[01:07:06] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Mongolian dust.

[01:07:08] STANLEY:
I don’t know a lot about Mongolian dust, so that’s sort of par beyond my ken. I just know that in Hawaii, what happens is, when you get to the island of Kauai in particular, so you’ve got no phosphorus left in those old shield services, okay? So this dust is constantly blowing across the Pacific, right?

And it is a source, it’s rock particles basically. It is a source of P. And so, and you can actually see this stuff.

Chadwick and Vitousek took me up to some craters on the big island. It falls across all the islands. It just, it gets swamped out on the younger islands.

It doesn’t matter. But on Kauai, it’s the onlysource so it’s really important. And you can dig down to this peat in these craters in the, in Kohala, and you got it in the right light, and you actually see these sparkles of this little Mongolian dust.

I was blown away when they showed this stuff to me. Yeah. I’m just wondering, trying to reconcile, I know, that the trade’s flowing in the other direction though and–

Oh, I think it’s coming, no, because– It’s coming in the jet. Oh, you want to, okay.

That’s what your question was. So, yeah. No, you’ve got the whole North Pacific Gyre.

So this stuff is, I think, coming out from Mongolia, Asia, getting picked up into that North Pacific gyre, then coming down with the trades. Yeah. You’re probably aware that a lot of the exotics, the invasive exotics in the California Coast Range, are being driven by not just Mongolian dust but also the heavy metals from the Industrialization in China.

I’m not familiar with that, but doesn’t– Matter. Yep. There was a question, I think, in the back.

Somebody had a hand up.

[01:08:37] MEG CONKEY:
Fascinating talk. You talked a lot about increasing intensification. So I have three related questions.

First, what’s your definition of agriculture intensification? Second, do you see gradual increase through time or do you see a big jump at one point? And the third, what do you think is the cause?

[01:08:59] STANLEY:
Okay. My definition is basically that of Harold Brookfield, so it’s increased production per unit area, all right? And you can effect that through different means.

You can effect it, you know, like we are today, through some, like, petrochemical fertilizer inputs, for example. But they didn’t have that back in Hawaii. You can effect it by increased labor, so you’re doing things like weeding and mulching and so on to increase production.

You can effect it by modification of your crops, by selecting for higher-yielding crop varieties, even, you know, even without genetic, with Monsanto and so on, yes or no, you know, indigenous people did this over long periods of time. Think of the evolution of corn kernels and so on in, in Mesoamerica, very well-documented, from small to much larger. So there are different ways that you can achieve intensification, but I define it as increased yield per unit area over time.

What they seem to be doing in Hawaii, what was the second part of your question? Oh, abrupt or slow, right? In the dryland systems that we’ve studied in Kohala and elsewhere, it, we’re looking at about a 400-year period overall for this.

And I think it, I would see it as a more steady. If anything, it may be picking up in pace a bit more at the end increasing pressures toward the end, but I don’t see any, like, qualitative big jump. It’s just a steady progression.

You saw that in the physical evidence of the continued subdivision of plots over time. What was your third question?

[01:10:33] CHRISTINE:
The cause. The cause?

[01:10:37] STANLEY:
The cause of this. Well, I think it’s multi-causal. I mean, I’m a big believer in multi-causal explanations.

But certainly one driver of this, I’ve argued, for example, in my book about how chiefs became kings, one driver is certainly population increase. I actually was gonna have some slides in here today. And I took them out ’cause I thought I, that it’s gonna take too long.

But one of the things we’ve been doing with this multidisciplinary team is modeling population increase and testing it archeologically, all right? So in Kohala, we were pretty clear there was an exponential increase in population numbers over this 400-year period. But one of the interesting things of the, the modeling that’s come out is the work of Tuljir Pukar, the demographer over at Stanford, and some of his post-docs is if you look at if you model food availability in these systems, all right?

What probably is happening is you start with fairly small populations in terms of density, all right? And you end up with pretty high population numbers. And the food availability, which is a measure that they have come up with, where one food availability of one is basically sustaining your population without any impact on mortality or fertility, all right?

You start out above that, a number higher than one, but you pretty quickly, no matter what nutrient levels, this is the interesting thing, you tend to the same kind of S curve and drop down to a level where you’re below one at, after about 250 years. It’s interesting in these models. And I think something like this was going on in these Hawaiian dryland systems, so that demographically there were real impacts, feedback loops, if you will, on fertility and mortality in these Hawaiian dryland systems.

We also have evidence, as I mentioned, I didn’t put the slides in, of we can actually measure some of the nutrient drawdown that occurred toward the end by comparing soil from under these field embankments to the cultivated walls. So I think that these dryland systems were being pushed so hard at the end that, you know, this was, I’m arguing, was driving some of the sociopolitical dynamics, but totally different for the irrigation systems. The irrigations are another story entirely, all right?

Lots of hands. Here you go.

[01:13:00] CHRISTINE:
Again, great talk. Thank you. I was just wondering, you mentioned a little bit of the history, especially when talking about Hawaii. I was wondering, have you been able to correlate any of this with more cultural history or oral history?

[01:13:14] STANLEY:
Yeah, I have. And I wish I, you know, had time to go into it. But I would just refer you to this book that Lori mentioned ‘The Shark Going Inland is My Chief,’ where I correlate the Hawaiian oral traditions. Hawaiians had very rich oral traditions,

(unintelligible)

they’re referred to in Hawaiian especially relating to about the last 400 years or so, the period that we’re talking about, talking in great detail about the chiefly lines about wars, about alliances, marriages. It’s all about, you know, lust, war, that sort of good stuff. So, you know, like any civilization.

But you can, in fact, make a lot of, I think, linkages. And I regard these, these Hawaiian to me are not just some sort of, you know, myths, whatever. They’re real history.

Maybe manipulated a bit, but they encapsulated a real history. And you know, it’s interesting just as this, these systems, for example, are intensifying the last 200 years, what do we see? We see increased references to warfare, inter-island competition.

The same time, inter-island marriage between chiefly royal line. So they’re doing all the strategies that people do. We’re gonna fight you and try to take your land and when that doesn’t work, we’ll marry your daughter, you know, and see if we can achieve it a different way.

But yes, I mean, so there, there is, and I’ve gone into the, in this other book. Yeah, Christine?

[01:14:33] CHRISTINE:
Can I ask you about.

(unintelligible)

(background laughter)

[01:14:40] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Hi, I’ve got the microphone here, sorry.

[01:14:42] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Oh, sorry, okay.

[01:14:44] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I feel bad about that. So I really appreciate your talk, and I just wanted to– I wondered a little more about, you know, some people have referred to the dogs, and chickens, and pigs and the plants they brought along by Polynesians as transported landscapes. That’s a term that some scholars have used.

And I think this is–

[01:15:03] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
I’ve actually used that.

[01:15:05] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Okay.

(audience laughing)

So maybe that’s where I read it. And so there’s an interesting tension, I think, between landscape, this idea of landscape as a sort of in situ bounded space, static space, versus mobility and movement. In that, that’s what I really liked about where you brought the seabirds into Mangareva.

We got a sense that the landscapes actually depended on birds going out and getting energy from the ocean, bringing it back, and so on. So one question is the Polynesian introductions of pigs, and dogs, and. Chickens, for example, have you been able to trace any impacts that those had on changing the landscape in these islands?

And secondly, I have to ask this because I, I’m curious to get your opinion of another transported landscape the Polynesian contact with the Americas. What is your take on the most recent. And there’s always this new reassessments about the evidence of that.

What is your take on Polynesian contact with the Americas pre-Columbus?

[01:16:00] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Okay. That’s a lot of things. The transported landscape, just first off, that’s actually a concept that I’ve written about.

And I borrowed it, I have to say, from Edgar Anderson, another early influence in my career. I read Plants, Man, and Life, I think about the same time I read Land and Life. So, and he used that term transported landscapes.

And it to me, it fit perfectly with Polynesian and other Oceanic islands, not just the physical transport of the crop plants and the pigs, dogs, and chickens, but the mental concepts, right? So I was saying to Stanley, so these are horticulturalists, so they come in with these plants and things, but they bring with them a whole set of mental concepts about how landscapes should be cultivated, manipulated, about water control, all these sorts of things. So to me, you know, transported landscape is a very important concept, and it involves mental constructs, as well as the physical stuff that you transport.

You asked a whole lot of things there, but the South American one, I’ll just get to that. Yes. So, the sweet potato, which these Hawaiian landscapes that I was showing, these dry island, that was the most important crop, was the sweet potato in those dry island landscapes.

They’re also doing some in taro. They were growing sugarcane, various things, but sweet potato is the most important crop. That’s a South American domesticate, as my colleague Pasdorff can tell you.

Domesticated how many years ago in thousands, yeah. And it unquestionably now, there used to be, 20, 30 years ago, there were arguments about whether it came into the Pacific with the Spanish, that some early Spanish galleons, ’cause the Spanish were across the Pacific well before Captain Cook and so on. They were there by the late 1500s, whether they introduced the sweet potato.

But we’ve unquestionably, in my view now, resolved that debate because we’ve excavated sweet potato tubers, carbonized, the parenchyma of these things, in contexts that are way before any Spanish in the Pacific. In Mangaia, where I excavated, they’re at least by 1200 AD, there’s sweet potato in Mangaia. It’s in New Zealand, well-dated in pre-European context.

In Hawaii, we have it dated back to around 1200 AD. Now, you know, who transferred it? Of course, there’s debates about was it Polynesians who got to South America and brought it back?

Which is what I think, because they would have recognized, you know, sweet potato is very similar ecologically to their yams, that they had true yams, the Dioscorea yam, not the orange stuff we have at Thanksgiving, we call yam. Those are sweet potatoes, right? You know, Polynesians landing on the coast of Peru or Chile would not, if they saw sea corn, you know, kernels, they’d think it was some paving pebbles to put on their house floors.

They wouldn’t have a clue. These weren’t generally seed cultivars. They wouldn’t have a clue about those kind of crops.

But they’d see a basket of sweet potatoes, and they’d say, “Ah, yeah, It’s another kind of uhi, another kind of yam.” And they would readily pick that up and transport it back on a, you know, return voyage in canoe.

And of course, there’s other evidence, you know, more recently, I’m not gonna get into it, about chickens being dropped off in South America and so on. It’s still very, very controversial. But I think the sweet potato transfer and probably also the bottle gourd, the legendaria–

[01:19:20] LAURA:
All about genetics. There’s some new genetic work.

[01:19:24] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
I know. I’ve seen it, but I don’t believe it. I think it’s Polynesians carrying it, out with the, we can debate that later.

(laughter)

Anyway, you can have the microphone.

(laughter)

[01:19:35] LAURA:
I wasn’t gonna ask about that, but we can do it another time.

[01:19:40] STANLEY:
I’m not a ball of gore genesis.

[01:19:42] LAURA:
I wanted to ask about guano. Your friend, Guano, which you talked about the birds going away on your little islands. But when we go back to your third example, especially your dry fields.

Big extent for many years in your sweet spot, I can understand that that’s linked to the sort of the original soil.

[01:20:02] STANLEY:
Yeah.

[01:20:02] LAURA:
But what about their access to bird guano? I mean, there’s no doubt that they would have tuned in to that in their horticultural worldview.

[01:20:12] STANLEY:
Yeah. There’s no evidence that I know of that there were large bird populations in Hawaii extending into this time period that the intensification was taking place. Earlier in Hawaii, more like around 1000 AD when people first got there, we have some indications of nesting seabird populations in certain areas.

Bird bone concentrations in some rock shelter sites and things, which again, seem to have gone out quite quickly. And there also land birds, very weird, endemic. These big flightless geese and flightless ibises and things like that.

They disappear within a century or so of people arriving. Again, probably naïve fauna that just got picked off. So while there may have been some significant seabird populations in Hawaii in the first few centuries, they don’t seem to have persisted.

They sort of went off and sat on the offshore islands or, you know, various areas away from people. That’s where you find them today, up in the Northwest Islands or so on.

[01:21:10] LAURA:
Well, that’s kind of what I meant. In Peru, there are guano islands, and so, there could’ve been guano deposits like banks sitting there.

[01:21:17] STANLEY:
There are some minor guano deposits. Not big. There were other parts that looked like it had big guano deposits, which were later mined industrially.

It fertilized a lot of Japan before World War II, for example. But no. We have no evidence for that sort of thing in Hawaii.

And I’ll just anticipate, you know, probably what you’re driving at here. So what was fertilizing these Hawaiian fields? I mean, this is a question, if anything.

And this has really been something bugging us. And especially it’s not so much the phosphorus, ’cause we can study that and understand that. It’s the nitrogen that we wonder about.

Unfortunately, nitrogen’s highly mobile in soils. And so while we can go out and measure nitrogen today in these fields, it’s telling us about the latest cow poop on the pasture and not anything about hundreds of years ago.

[01:22:03] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
So it’s a little bit of a mystery to us. We know that in these fields, from early ethnohistoric descriptions, they were mulching intensively. So lots of green, you know, mulching.

But if your mulch is just coming off your fallow fields, it’s not doing anything. It’s just recycling, basically, right? It’s not a real input.

Unless they were going up into the forest, the upland forests, getting fern, that sort of thing. That’s a possibility. How about seaweed?

These reefs are so underdeveloped, like I was telling you, that, you know, the amount of seaweed you’d get off of that wouldn’t do much. And anyway, they like to eat it. The bit that there was, they were eating directly.

Any last questions? I think Bill has a question. Yeah, maybe.

One or two more, and then I think it’s time for that glass of wine.

(laughing)

[01:22:50] BILL DENEVAN:
Bill Denovan.

[01:22:51] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Yeah.

[01:22:53] BILL DENEVAN:
As population builds up, as intensification approaches its maximum, and the soils decline, are people moving off the good soils and farming poorer soils?

[01:23:09] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Yeah. There’s some evidence of people trying to eke out existence in very marginal areas outside of these big field systems. But though they’re pretty small populations.

I think they may have been more marginalized people anyway. So what I think they are, I say they, the people of Hawaii Island and Maui Island in particular, what their strategies were to try to move, actually up the archipelago. This is what I’m telling you about the attempts to control territorially and conquer Molokai, Oahu, Kauai, because there was basically no place else to move within Hawaii Island or Maui Island itself.

I mean, you could not sustain this kind of intensive agriculture, other than those areas where they already had developed these big systems. There was no other place to move off to, especially on the Big Island, because you’re talking about moving off to basically lava fields, and where the rain is so low you can’t even, you know, you’ve got 50 millimeters, 100 millimeters of rain. Forget it.

You just couldn’t do it. So, you know, I think they had maxed out or highly intensively working those zones, those sweet spots where they could do it. And they were pretty much, you know, constrained to that.

[01:24:25] BILL DENEVAN:
You know, in Amazonia, where I’ve worked, we get permanent intensive cultivation on extremely poor oxy soils.

[01:24:40] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Well, there’s certainly no-

[01:24:41] STANLEY:
The question is, how, how’d they do it?

[01:24:43] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
Yeah.

[01:24:43] STANLEY:
But we know they did it.

[01:24:44] PROFESSOR PAT KIRCH:
But at least in the Amazon, I think you’ve got, but you’re talking about areas, probably where the rainfall is adequate. What I’m saying here is you haven’t even got the rainfall. So if you go between Kohala with that field system and say, Kona, that big zone between is a big area of extreme aridity.

You know, and you’ve got no river to get water out of. It’s not an Amazonia.

(laughter)

You know, you’re talking about lava flows and essentially no rain. So, yeah.

[01:25:11] HOST:
Okay. I think we’ll put it there since Pat has already indicated his interest in something liquid instead of land-based.

(laughter)

(cheering and applause)

I think the suggestion that even though we have someone close at home be the Sauer Lecturer was shown to us exactly how much Pat’s work has embodied the spirit of what Carl Sauer imparted. So thank you so much. And there is a reception. Please join us.

(applause)

(crowd murmurs)