ʻIolani Palace Revisited: Preliminary Zooarchaeological Reanalysis of a Legacy Collection

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

From the 1840s to the 1890s, the ʻIolani Palace, in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, was the political center of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the 1960s and 1970s, archaeologists excavated rich midden deposits and other features from the palace grounds for the purposes of cultural resource management. Just as Kirch predicted it would in Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, a recent reanalysis of these legacy collections has revealed “new aspects of everyday life amongst Hawaiʻi’s later monarchs,” and more. Preliminary zooarchaeological results document both persistence of indigenous feasting and animal husbandry practices, as well as selective adoption of foreign techniques of production and consumption. For example, traditional foods, including dog, pig, and fish, remained on the menu well into the nineteenth century. On the other hand, cut-, chop-, and saw-marked bones as well as the remains of introduced livestock, including cattle and caprines, speak to changes in the political economy and social ecology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Boxed but not Forgotten Redux or: How I Learned to Stop Digging and Love Old Collections

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 578