Kahalu`u and Keauhou on Hawai`i Island as Living, Dynamic Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments " session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper analyzes the ahupua`a Kahalu`u and Keauhou on the west coast of Hawai`i Island as living, dynamic landscapes applying methodologies from archaeology, ethnohistory, and heritage studies as well as the framework of memory. Kahalu’u and Keauhou appear to be an incredibly interesting archaeological landscape since they functioned as the island’s royal center where chiefly residences and state heiau (temples) were built from about AD 1600 on into the nineteenth century. Archaeologists documented precontact physical remains in the 1970s before the entire coastline was respatialized by tourism development. Hawaiian mo`olelo (oral histories) mention many chiefs by name and episodes from their lives; but it gets very confusing to connect them with any known specific place. My archaeological-ethnohistorical approach came to a dead end. Native Hawaiians create new mo`olelo through memory from their family lines and ancestors. Their cultural reconstructions do not match neatly with the archaeological data but present alternative truths of Indigenous knowledge. They connect with academic knowledge and today’s climate crisis with regard to land-based values condensed as mā.lama ʻāina (take care of the land that sustains physically, socially, spiritually). Academic research can have an impact by applying and disseminating this framework.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Living Landscapes: Disaster, Memory, and Change in Dynamic Environments   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36292.0