Monumentality and the Archaic State: Heiau Distribution in Kaupo, Maui

Summary

In the early 18th century, competing archaic states on the islands of Maui and Hawai’i were engaged in a long-standing conflict to establish primacy over the Hawaiian Archipelago. To better oversee preparations for war, Maui’s King Kekaulike moved his entire royal court to the fertile, but politically peripheral district of Kaupo. Oral traditions speak of Kekaulike expanding a network of ritual structures throughout the region, resulting today in a landscape covered with some the largest heiau in the archipelago. In this paper I discuss the monumental structures of Kaupo and their distributions both across the region and through time. Combining extensive AMS dating of these, and residential structures, with GIS analyses I demonstrate that virtually all of the heiau in the district were in fact constructed well before the arrival of King Kekaulike. This indicates that despite its position on the fringes of the Maui polity, Kaupo’s sociopolitical infrastructure was established without the direct oversight of the central regime. The network of temples therefore represents a local expression of increasing sociopolitical complexity, mimicking, at a smaller scale, the developments ongoing in the larger rise of Hawaiian states.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Ceremonial architecture in Eastern Polynesia: Development & Variability

Keywords

Spatial Coverage