Hawaii I

  General Description   Hawai’i, also known as the Big Island, is the largest island of the Hawaiian archipelago. Recent estimates for the date of initial settlement by Polynesian voyagers have varied from 800 to 1250 CE, but the latest Bayesian model, based on palaeoenvironmental data and a carefully defined set of archaeological radiocarbon dates, suggests that the archipelago was first colonized between 1000 and 1100. ^[1] Our ’Hawaii 1’ designates the earliest phase of Hawai’i’s prehistory, from around 1000 to 1200, before most of the changes characteristic of Kirch’s ’expansion period’, including a rapid rise in population, took place. ^[2]
Population and political organization
According to reconstructions of Hawaiki, the ancestral Polynesian homeland, ancient Polynesians recognized the authority of the *ariki, that is, the head of a lineage, who had both secular and sacred authority and was in charge of most, if not all, rituals. ^[3] However, a few thousand years separate Ancestral Polynesians from the earliest Hawaiians, and it is not clear how much the latter retained of the former’s culture and sociopolitical organization. The earliest island-wide unitary kingdom on the Big Island emerged around 1580; ^[4] before then the Big Island was probably divided into several small, independent polities. ^[5]
The founding population was probably about 100 people, due to the limited capacity of the canoes the first settlers likely used to reach the islands. ^[6] This population probably grew somewhat between 1000 and 1200, but no up-to-date estimates could be found in the literature — an estimate of 20,000 inhabitants for the entire archipelago around 1100 dates to 1985, when the earliest phase of human occupation was thought to have begun around 600 CE. ^[7]

[1]: (Athens, Rieth and Dye 2014) J. Stephen Athens, Timothy M. Rieth and Thomas S. Dye. 2014. ’A Paleoenvironmental and Archaeological Model-Based Age Estimate for the Colonization of Hawai’i’. American Antiquity 79(1): 144-55.

[2]: (Kirch 2010, 127) Patrick V. Kirch. 2010. How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai’i. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

[3]: (Kirch 2012, 45) Patrick V. Kirch. 2012. A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

[4]: (Kirch 2010, 174) Patrick V. Kirch. 2010. How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai’i. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

[5]: (Kirch 2016, personal communication)

[6]: (Kirch 2010, 129) Patrick V. Kirch. 2010. How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai’i. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

[7]: (Kirch 1985, 302) Patrick V. Kirch. 1985. Feathered Gods and Fishhooks: An Introduction to Hawaiian Archaeology and Prehistory. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.