Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Across five decades, Thomas Dye has made substantial contributions to Hawaiian, Oceanic, and global archaeology in cultural resource management (CRM) and academic archaeology. Tom’s research contributions have occurred throughout his varied career, providing a valuable model for archaeologists to contribute to the field from multiple positions: as an archaeologist at the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu, an instructor at Hawai‘i Pacific University and the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Historic Preservation Officer for the Republic of the Marshall Islands, as the O‘ahu Island archaeologist for the Hawai‘i State Historic Preservation Division, as a project director at a CRM firm, and as an owner and principal investigator of his own CRM company. He is best known for his more recent work building empirically grounded chronologies using Bayesian statistics and elements of graph theory. However, of equal importance has been his bottom-up, archaeologically informed analyses of social processes that have complemented and calibrated more frequent top-down approaches, as well as his championing of open science. This symposium celebrates Tom’s contributions to archaeology, from his role in transforming how archaeologists in Oceania think about chronology to his contributions highlighting how the daily lives of individuals can provide important information on social process.

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  • Documents (7)

Documents
  • Bayesian Chronological Modeling Parameters for Establishing Initial East Polynesian Colonization (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Rieth. Robert DiNapoli. Carl Lipo. Terry Hunt.

    This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tom Dye was an early adopter and advocate for the application of Bayesian chronological modeling in Pacific archaeology. Since the 1990s, this chronology-building method has advanced our understanding of key cultural and demographic events through improved and diverse software options, better...

  • Bottom-Up Data on Sociopolitical Complexity in Ancient Samoa (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Ethan Cochrane. Seth Quintus. Matiu Prebble. Ta'iao Matiu Matavai Tautunu.

    This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Explanations of sociopolitical complexity are often linked to competition over the control of resources and changes in resource structure, including productivity, predictability, distribution, and other characteristics. These explanations also reference variables of human demography and the...

  • Digging Deep: Place-based Variation in Māʻohi Agricultural Production Systems across the Late Pre-Contact Society Islands, French Polynesia (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Kahn. Dana Lepofsky.

    This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding the socio-ecological contexts of past agricultural systems in complex societies requires expansive datasets, particularly when the goal is to mesh top-down and bottom-up perspectives that generate data at different scales of analysis. Here, we bring together ethnohistoric and...

  • Ethnoarchaeological Contributions to Interpreting Pacific Archaeofish Assemblages (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Darby Filimoehala. Christopher Filimoehala.

    This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1976, Tom Dye conducted an ethnographic study of marine resource exploitation on Niuatoputapu, Kingdom of Tonga, to help provide a reference from which to interpret prehistoric patterns evident in the archaeological remains. Ethnoarchaeology provides a point of control for an expanded comparative...

  • I‘a, Loko, and Loko I‘a Kalo: The Riches of Pu‘uloa Lagoon and How They Came to Be (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Myra Jean Tuggle. Timothy Rieth. Darby Filimoehala. Matthew Bell.

    This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. I‘a (fish), loko (fishponds), and loko i‘a kalo (taro fishponds) represent the traditional riches of Pu‘uloa Lagoon, now called Pearl Harbor. With a single narrow entrance, the deeply indented and multi-lobed embayment cut 8 km deep into the central southern O‘ahu coastline, creating a calm,...

  • Methodological Considerations for Modeling the Temporal Characteristics of Hawaiian Architecture: An Example from Kekaha Kai, North Kona (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Morrison. Timothy Rieth. Anthony Dosseto.

    This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this presentation we build on Tom Dye’s pioneering approach to modeling the temporal parameters of Hawaiian architecture with an example from Kekaha Kai, North Kona, where he conducted archaeological investigations nearly two decades ago. We report a suite of uranium-thorium dates acquired from...

  • Small Islands and Constructed Landscapes: A Bayesian Cultural Chronology of the Manuʻa Group (2023)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Seth Quintus. Jeffrey Clark. David Addison.

    This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Radiocarbon and other radiometric dating techniques are pivotal for archaeological inquiries about cultural and environmental change. How we use these techniques and interpret their results to analyze and draw conclusions about archaeological data, however, can vary somewhat from one researcher to...