Priests' Houses and Architectures of Ideology in East Polynesia

Summary

Most studies of East Polynesia religion focus on the largest monumental sites, those related to the "marae complex". Yet ethnohistoric documents indicate that a wide range of site types had ritual importance, including specialized structures within monumental ritual centers that had diverse functions. Priest houses form one element of the architecture of ideology. Can we identify the houses of full time ritual specialists in the archaeological record of East Polynesian in order to enrich our understanding of religion and social complexity in prehistory? Utilizing ethnohistoric data and archaeological case studies drawn from the Society Islands and the Hawaiian archipelago, I argue that priests’ houses conform to specialized house sites and differ in sometimes dramatic ways from mundane sleeping houses, both in their spatial context and in their suites of artifacts and sub-surface features. I conclude that identifying formalized occupational specialists in the archaeological record adds to our understanding of the integrated nature of ideology and social and economic control as important power bases for socio-ritual elites in complex societies. Such a bottom-up perspective draws on the strengths of household archaeology while allowing for a contextualized approach to identify ritual practitioners and their association with monumental architectures of ideology.

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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

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