Digging Deep: Place-based Variation in Māʻohi Agricultural Production Systems across the Late Pre-Contact Society Islands, French Polynesia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Understanding the socio-ecological contexts of past agricultural systems in complex societies requires expansive datasets, particularly when the goal is to mesh top-down and bottom-up perspectives that generate data at different scales of analysis. Here, we bring together ethnohistoric and ethnoarchaeological documentation, archaeological data on settlement patterns and the distribution and potential productivity of agricultural systems, and ecological information on agricultural potential in five discrete polities in late precontact Māʻohi society. Our sample can be divided into those polities that are elite- versus commoner-centric and those that are located in productive versus marginal agricultural landscapes. We explore how the lives of the farmers in each of these social-ecological settings might differ in terms of everyday life, the annual calendar, and more extraordinary events. We hypothesize, based on the association of agricultural sites to commoner households, as well as other archaeological and ethnographic evidence, that the labor demands will differ in these two general settings. We further hypothesize that farmers in commoner-centric settings will tend toward collectivism as a response to food pressures and tribute pressures, whereas the farmers in elite-centric settings, who have to contend with more frequent elite demands for tribute, will not have this adaptive response.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Supporting Practical Inquiry: The Past, Present, and Future Contributions of Thomas Dye   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35561.0