Coral Islands, High Islands: A Case of Continued Contact and Cultural Divergence in East Polynesia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Polynesian atolls are often viewed as outlying provinces or "outer Islands" as compared to larger high islands. These often remote and diminutive coral islands are, and were, home to relatively small populations. Many coral island groups trace ancestry to, and had sustained contact with, high islands. These past connections and modern sociopolitical ties make it easy to view coral islands as off shoots of larger polities, and to project the social, political, and economic forms found on high islands onto them. Manihiki and Rakahanga, in the northern Cook Islands, are coral atolls with modern sociopolitical, linguistic, ancestral, and oral-historic ties to the high island of Rarotonga in the southern Cook Islands. However, recent excavations and zooarchaeological analysis on Manihiki and Rakahanga support and further contact-era ethnohistoric accounts that suggest the in-situ development of novel sociopolitical structures, as well as innovative resource management strategies. This is manifest in the importation, differential management, and extirpation of multiple domestic taxa, as well as the cycling habitation, subsistence, and political forms that developed as the coral islanders culturally diverged from, yet appear to have remained in contact with, high island groups.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Rethinking Hinterlands in Polynesia

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23175