Integrating Archaeological and Historical Information to Identify Agricultural Features and Reconstruct Traditional Hawaiian Irrigation Networks in windward Kohala, Hawai‘i Island

Summary

Where landscapes have been modified by recent development, identifying surface archaeological features requires a different analytical approach. In windward Kohala, Hawai‘i Island, after more than 150 years of land conversion to commercial agriculture features that comprised traditional Hawaiian irrigation agriculture have been mostly obscured. To address this, several sources of information were collected including historic documents and maps, previous and recent archaeological surveys, and remote sensing. These were georeferenced, converted to GIS files, and combined. From this it was possible to reconstruct not only the locations and extent of former fields and irrigation ditches, but also to identify the spatial linkages among them. Agricultural networks were formed that linked water sources from streams in the uplands with ditches and natural drainages to deliver irrigation to a series of plots and fields at lower elevations. Water was transported out of its stream drainage onto neighboring ridge lands where plots were established and occasionally diverted into other drainages. These networks not only linked agricultural features across the landscape, they also crossed traditional community boundaries suggesting cooperative organization at larger social scales dated from AD 1650-1850.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 15199