Field Systems, Urbanism, and State Formation in the Hawaiian Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The significance of urbanization and royal centers in the development of productive agricultural systems and state formation has been minimized in the Hawaiian Islands. Today, thanks to several key methodological advances, especially remote sensing using lidar, we are closer than ever to an integrated and fine-grained model of economic, political, and religious developments that speak to historical processes that occurred independently many times in world prehistory. We begin by presenting the results from research on the island of Hawai‘i where aircraft-mounted lidar has been used to map upland fields at level similar to pedestrian survey over an area of 240 km2. Next, we discuss new maps of coastal settlement, including examples of royal centers, created using the first use of UAV-mounted lidar for large scale archaeological survey. Finally, we connect the upland agricultural zone and the coastal habitation zone through a chronology of ritual and monument construction that shows a previously undocumented shift in religious practice that appears to mark the transition to an archaic state society.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Finding Fields: Locating and Interpreting Ancient Agricultural Landscapes   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32811