Jennifer Kahn, Ph.D. - US grants

With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Patrick Kirch and Dr. Jennifer Kahn, assisted by an international team of scholars will conduct two field seasons of archaeological work in the Society Islands of Central Eastern Polynesia. The team brings together specialists based in U.S., Australian, French, New Zealand, and French Polynesian universities to investigate emerging social and political complexity, and centralization of elite power, in the chiefdom societies of the Society Island archipelago. The project focuses on archaeological sites in the 'Opunohu Valley, a major productive and agricultural zone on the island of Mo'orea; the valley also served as a residential center, loci for elite ritual activities, and seat of chiefly political power. The late prehistoric period (AD 1400-1800) in the Society Islands was a time of major social transformation, whereby political and economic power was increasingly controlled by high status chiefs and other elites. These transformations greatly affected the nature and intensity of agricultural subsistence, surplus production, and ritual activities. These changes presumably had lasting effects on daily life and inter-personal interactions, creating a wider divide between the lives of commoners and those of high status and economically privileged elites.

Historic sources document that the Society Islands are an exemplar of a complex chiefdom (similar to Tonga and Hawaii) in which social inequality, hierarchy, and status differences were notably pronounced, however some fluidity in social status was retained, similar to less complex chiefdoms. The study will thus provides an unparalleled opportunity to combine documentary and archaeological research to investigate a major anthropological problem: the development of social complexity, hierarchy, and status differences in chiefdom societies (the precursors to states). The goal is to develop an understanding of the particular avenues leading to the development of inequality, and rank and status differences, and how these processes, in turn, affected social relations, access to resources, and the production of daily goods and surplus items at the local, community, and regional levels.

The scale of research requires that basic data, principally in residential areas and monumental temples, be gathered to develop a chronological and settlement pattern sequence. Sites will be mapped and excavated to reconstruct social differentiation, the household economy, and ritual practices. Specific tasks are: 1) to survey and map major residential and religious site complexes in two traditional polities; 2) to conduct large-scale excavations at house structures and smaller excavations at temple complexes and specialized elite sites; 3) to complete spatial and functional analysis of recovered sub-surface features (cooking areas, food storage features); 4) to analyze the recovered stone tools and to source the raw materials from which they were produced; and 5) to integrate the survey date with the excavation data.

The intellectual merit of the research is that of testing models of emerging socio-political complexity and the development of rank and status inequality, two highly contentious issues confronting current anthropological archaeology.

Broader impacts include contributing significant information on a complex Polynesian chiefdom, the Society Islands, that has previously lacked any major investigative work. The work will provide a sustentative increase in knowledge allowing for major revisions in the scientific understanding of chiefdoms societies, generally acknowledged as precursors to the state. French Polynesian, Australian, and U.S. students will participate in the project to enhance their training and increase their knowledge of archaeological techniques and Polynesian prehistory.

This project will improve our understanding of coupled natural-human systems and advance the frontiers of natural and social sciences, integrating them through a focus on model systems comprising four well-studied islands before and after a millennium of human occupation. The project team will develop and test conceptual and quantitative theory that emphasizes feedbacks between humans and the complex ecological systems that support them. The project applies archaeological and paleo-ecological methods to increase understanding of the relationships between initial conditions and subsequent developmental trajectories in the four study socio-ecosystems. This understanding will be used to develop and constrain computational models which will be used to test theories regarding long-term human-ecology feedbacks. The project seeks in particular to integrate the dual roles of humans as subsistence consumers of resources and as market-driven exploiters of resources. The understanding and integrated models will be used to explore the sustainability of people's extraction of biomass (e.g., fish, fiber, fuel, and timber) from complex ecosystems in the context of ecosystem services and environmental change. This work includes three activities: 1) Build a comprehensive network theory of dynamic coupled natural-human systems including their robustness and resilience to external and internal change; 2) apply the theory to, and test it against, the introduction, persistence, and dynamics of Polynesians on four Pacific Islands; and 3) explore how the development and application of the theory might support further advances in our understanding of diversity and complexity and their interactions with ecosystem management.

This project will help us to understand how and why humans succeed or fail to live sustainably within their environment. The research examines four French Polynesian islands where humans arrived about one thousand years ago and lived sustainably on some islands but not on others. Historical and current data will be used to help develop a clearer picture of the social and ecological changes that have taken place since the islands were first occupied. The project team will build and test sophisticated computer models of humans interacting with wild and managed ecosystems. The data and models will help more fully describe and explain fundamental properties such as the resources required by human populations and the ability of ecosystems to provide food and shelter for humans over hundreds of years. They will also highlight interactions between ecosystem services and the human use and exploitation of the islands' resources. Such knowledge is critical to understanding the role of humans with respect to ecosystems and environments well beyond these islands. The project will provide fundamental knowledge about how humans can interact more sustainably and beneficially with a wide variety of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. This work will also demonstrate how environmental and social sciences such as ecology, hydrology, oceanography, archaeology, demography and economics can be integrated to push forward the frontiers of interdisciplinary science. Such advances are vital for addressing critical problems at the intersection of social and natural sciences including resource overconsumption, climate disruption and the collapse of civilizations.