Unearthing the Polynesian Past: Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist by Patrick Vinton Kirch (review)

Most attempts at synthesizing the archaeology of the Pacific Islands have presented the big picture of human migration and adaptation to these diverse and insular environments over the last 3,500 years, none yet exceeding Patrick Vinton Kirch’s book On the Road of the Winds (2000). In the twenty-four chapters of Unearthing the Polynesian Past, Kirch instead presents a personalized account of the conflict between the development of scientific theory, the politics and funding of research institutions, and the political and logistical challenges of conducting archaeological research with indigenous communities over the last fifty years. Hypotheses will stand if data are repeatable and testable, but in archaeological research, especially in the Pacific Islands, this is not often possible, as Kirch attests. What could be excavated or collected in the 1970s and 1980s may now be irretrievable on some islands, with sites destroyed by development or environmental change, and in an increasing number of cases, access to sites denied to archaeologists by indigenous societies or institutions that are struggling to control their identities under existing or impending social, economic, and environmental pressures. As Kirch laments, most archaeology conducted on the Pacific Islands since the 1990s is contract and development based, initially failing to engage with the indigenous community, and with little regard for empirical theory. This book offers some clues as to how to address the current practices of archaeology, which in some ways act against the primary goal of understanding the past.

With books like The Evolution of Polynesian Chiefdoms (1984) and Feathered Gods and Fishhooks (1985), Kirch’s research has inspired many of my peer group with anthropological or biological science backgrounds to undertake research on the Pacific Islands. But it was his later The Wet and the Dry (1994), which examined the ecological engineering of wetland irrigated and dryland cultivation systems in the development of complex sociopolitical structures on Futuna (East) and Alofi, that got me hooked. I had earlier read Douglas Yen’s classic The Sweet Potato and Oceania (1974), which led me on to Kirch and Yen’s collaboration in Tikopia: The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier (1982). In 2010, I was lucky enough to spend a month on Tikopia, “the most stunningly beautiful island” (121), with the aim of extending Kirch and Yen’s work on environmental change. I was therefore intrigued to read this book, especially its three chapters on the Southeast Solomon Islands, to discern how different our experiences were.

As in 2010, the only way to get to Tikopia in 1977–1978 was by freight boats, which still only service the island every six to eight weeks or more. In May 1977, Kirch traveled to Tikopia on the mv Bilikiki, which is now a diving adventure ship still operating in Solomon Islands. During his voyage, the ship got blown off course, as the captain was navigating without charts and only using dead reckoning. Over thirty years after Kirch’s visits to Tikopia, I traveled there on a four-day trip from Honiara on a similarly retrofitted but overloaded long-line fishing boat, the Solfish I—which, after again being overloaded with cargo, tragically sank in a storm off the coast of Makira eighteen months later. (Fortunately, all forty-nine passengers survived, but they were stranded in life rafts for three days before being rescued.) Other things that haven’t changed since the 1970s include the accommodation with the back-breaking low ceiling (4.5 feet high) in a furnitureless but cyclone-proof thatched fare (house); the fabulous fruit (eg, natu, Burckella obovata) and nut (eg, voia, Canarium harveyi) orchards; the majestic tāmanu (Calophyllum inophyllum) groves; the masi (fermented mei, Artocarpus spp, like a more subtle Vegemite); the flies; and the “haere ki te moana” (go down by the sea) toilet facilities. Our return voyage to Honiara...