An Astonishing Life

Dr. Sinoto in 2014 in his office at Bishop Museum holding a Marquesan-style adze found in Hawai‘i. The kite in the background was given to him by the Japan Kite Association for his role in reviving the sport of kite flying on Huahine, including a competition in 1996 in Maeva Village. The association promotes cultural exchange through kite building and flying. Photograph by Dana Edmunds.

Yosi Sinoto’s landmark work in Polynesia began completely by chance. The catastrophes of World War II had interrupted normal life in Japan, including the educational system. Yet in 1943, when Yosi was nineteen, he was already a practicing archaeologist. That year, he published his first scientific article, on Japan’s Neolithic Jōmon Period. By 1951, he had published nearly a dozen articles and coauthored a dictionary of Japanese archaeology. In 1952, he coauthored a second book, The Shell Mound of Ubayama, concerning one of the major archaeological sites in Japan. The book reports the first radio-carbon dating of a site in Japan, indicating it to be about 4,500 years old.

Despite the significance of this research, Yosi was interested in still older periods. However, the existence of Paleolithic culture in Japan was a topic of fierce debate among Japanese scholars. Fieldwork was limited, and researchers interested in paleontology were mainly working in libraries, reading books about archaeological excavations in Europe and America. Yosi therefore decided to apply to the University of California at Berkeley, which had a strong program in paleontology, and was accepted. In order to get a visa, he needed an American sponsor, and Peter Throckmorton, a GI he had met in Japan, agreed to sponsor him.

In June 1954, Yosi departed for California from Yokohama, on a ship scheduled to stop over in Honolulu on July 4. Throckmorton, who was then living in Hawai‘i and

Dr. Sinoto holds a long, slender two-piece fishhook made of bone.

studying archaeology, telegrammed Yosi en route and urged him to go to the Big Island to meet Dr. Kenneth Emory, head of the anthropology department at Bishop Museum. Hesitantly, Yosi met with Emory and his excavation team at an archaeological site at Ka Lae, or South Point. Yosi’s initial days of observing and helping out at the site turned into a month. Impressed with his skills, Emory urged him to abandon his plans for the University of California and to instead remain in the islands. After all the effort Yosi had made to be admitted to Berkeley, changing his plans and enrolling at the University of Hawai‘i seemed like an outlandish idea. Nevertheless, full of uncertainty but with Emory’s assurance of support, he agreed. And so began Yosi’s new life in the Pacific and his career in Hawaiian archaeology.

At the end of Yosi’s first semester, Emory asked him to lead the winter field session at Ka Lae. Yosi said he would, but on the condition that he could excavate the way he had been trained in Japan: carefully recording the natural layers, or stratigraphy, of the site and using the metric system. Emory agreed, and Yosi spent the semester break at Ka Lae.

That field session in late 1954 was a turning point not only for Yosi but also for Pacific archaeology. In Japan, as elsewhere, archaeologists were trained to excavate layer by layer, looking for variations in pottery sherds or comparable artifacts to establish cultural sequences and relative chronology. But in Hawai‘i, there was no ancient pottery—a fact that led most archaeologists to conclude that it was not productive to do fieldwork in Polynesia. At Ka Lae, however, dozens of fishhooks were being unearthed every day from the sand dune. Yosi observed that the hooks varied considerably in form and material, depending upon the depth at which they were found. Perhaps in place of pottery, he reasoned, fishhooks could be used to establish the relative chronology of cultural layers. This would allow researchers to compare and correlate sites across Polynesia...