Household Units in the Analysis of Prehistoric Social Complexity, Cook Islands

Taomia, Julie M. E.

doi:10.1353/asi.2000.0014

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 19 publications

(4 reference statements)

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“…Today, for the most part, the detailed study of precontact house sites in Polynesia is commonly carried out as part of household archaeology research by academic institutions and not as a part of CRM-based settlement pattern studies. (Anderson 2001;Kahn 2003Kahn , 2005Kirch and O'Day 2003;Kirch and Sahlins 1992b;Oakes 1994;O'Day 2002;Sutton 1990a;Taomia 2000;Van Gilder and Kirch 1997;Walter 1993; for an early exception see Weisler and Kirch [1985], discussed below). Weisler and Kirch's (1985) study of the ''structure of settlement space'' within households and communities at Kawela, Moloka'i, was a revolutionary departure from the functional approaches taken by most prior studies.…”

Section: Household Archaeology In Polynesia: History and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Weisler and Kirch, an emerging and growing field within Polynesian archaeology is the study of precontact variability in residential sites and variability within and between household clusters. Recent studies derive mainly from precontact East Polynesian contexts, with research carried out in the Society Islands (Kahn 2003(Kahn , 2005(Kahn , 2007Kirch 2004, 2013;Oakes 1994); the Cook Islands (Endicott 2000(Endicott , 2002Taomia 2000;Walter 1993Walter , 1998Walter , 2004; the Marquesas Islands (Allen 2009); New Zealand (Sutton 1990a(Sutton , 1993Sutton et al 2003); Norfolk Islands (Anderson and Green 2001); and Hawai'i (Field et al 2010;Kahn 2014b;Kirch 1998;Kirch et al 2010;Van Gilder 2001;Van Gilder and Kirch 1997). Comprehensive historic period household archaeology projects are limited to the Hawaiian archipelago and New Zealand (see Anderson 2001;Flexner 2010, Jacomb 2005Kirch and Sahlins 1992b;Middleton 2003Middleton , 2007Middleton , 2009; many of these data are in the unpublished gray literature (e.g., Klieger and Lebo 1999; for New Zealand see Smith 2004).…”

Section: Household Archaeology In Polynesia: History and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While informed by ethnohistoric records, microscale household studies contribute empirical data to understanding variation in precontact Polynesian societies, including evidence for shifts in social relations and production activities that went hand in hand with increasing sociopolitical complexity in Polynesian chiefdoms. In fact, an emerging pattern from Polynesian household archaeology is that data from excavated precontact houses typically exhibit more variation than expected from the historical records (Kahn 2003;Oakes 1994;Taomia 2000;Van Gilder and Kirch 1997), likely because of the lack of temporal and regional variation present in the ethnohistoric data and the idealized nature of many of the historic descriptions.…”

Section: Social Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Weisler and Kirch (1985) suggest specialized adze production is present in dwellings at Kawela, Moloka'i (see Fig. 3), and Taomia's (2000) research in the Cook Islands established that specialized adze production and wood working were found at a joint residential area/craft production locale. The presence of specialized activity areas within residential structures or locales of craft production adjacent to domestic areas have been advanced for the Hawaiian archipelago (Dixon et al 1994;Weisler et al 2006;Weisler and Kirch 1985), the Society Islands (Kahn 2005;Oakes 1994;Sinoto 1979), and other areas of the Cook Islands (Walter 1998).…”

Section: Specialized-use House Sites and Occupational Specializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Household Archaeology in Polynesia: Historical Context and New Directions

Kahn

2016

J Archaeol Res

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This review highlights archaeological investigations of precontact and historic house sites in Polynesia, a region noted for its diversity of chiefdoms in terms of scale and elaboration. Anthropological and historical perceptions of the Polynesian household have shifted over time, influencing the ways in which the household has been defined in archaeology. Early research emphasized houses as a unit of study within settlement pattern archaeology and as a means of delineating formal variability between sites and communities. Current studies stress a more holistic view of the household as a nexus of economic, social, and ritual activities. Diverse theoretical perspectives, such as the analytical concept of house societies, feminist archaeologies, landscape approaches, and agent-based models, have led to new archaeological approaches engaged with both the material and the nonmaterial aspects of the house and, in particular, how social relations structure the household. Current prominent themes include functional identification of house sites, understanding social variability, articulation of the household with the community, and comparative analyses of social complexity.

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Section: Household Archaeology In Polynesia: History and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Household Archaeology In Polynesia: History and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Social Variabilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Specialized-use House Sites and Occupational Specializationmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Household Archaeology in Polynesia: Historical Context and New Directions

Kahn

2016

J Archaeol Res

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“…For the Society Island examples, cultural deposits within temple enclosures were remarkably ''clean'', lacking high frequencies of charcoal or other debris, while the interiors and exteriors of priest houses typically had moderate to high charcoal frequencies, either from small hearths used to warm or light the house interior or cooking and ritually burning activities in the house exterior. This divergence is likely due to a common failing of ethnohistoric and historic accounts world-wide, notably a lack of detail concerning what happened in and around ancient house sites and a lack of attention to daily life or variation in social status, gender, or occupational specialization at the local level (Allison, 2001(Allison, , 2006Carballo, 2011;Kirch and Kahn, 2007;Nash, 2009;Taomia, 2000;among others). In East Polynesia, European explorers most often recorded aspects of priests' activities and use of material culture at large communal ceremonies.…”

Section: Convergence and Divergence Between The Ethnohistoricethnogramentioning

confidence: 99%

Identifying residences of ritual practitioners in the archaeological record as a proxy for social complexity

Kahn

2015

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology

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a b s t r a c tDedicated ritual specialists often had indispensable roles in ancient religions and significant impacts on political histories. Few studies have developed methodologies for recovering direct evidence for ritual practitioners in the archaeological record. I argue that the study of religious practitioners must take a holistic micro-scale approach, documenting not only the places where ritual paraphernalia (sacra) were stored, but places where priests and their assistants lived and practiced intimate and communal rituals. I begin with a discussion of ethnohistoric and ethnographic data to model what priests did in ancient societies, and what the material correlates of their dwellings and activities might look like. I then present archaeological data from two late prehistoric house sites identified as priest dwellings from East Polynesian. Utilizing multiple lines of evidence, including portable artifacts, botanical specimens, site architecture, and site distribution patterns, I argue that there is close complementarity between the eth nohistoric-ethnographic model and the archaeological remains. That priests' houses houses are often situated within corporate ritual centers speaks to the import of such sites and their associated ceremonial activities in the strategic use ideology to institutionalize social hierarchies and political status, a pattern seen in many other ranked societies in Polynesia and other case studies world-wide.

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Evaluating Mask R‐CNN models to extract terracing across oceanic high islands: A case study from Sāmoa

Quintus

Davis

Cochrane

2023

Archaeological Prospection

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Lidar datasets have been crucial for documenting the scale and nature of human ecosystem engineering and land use. Automated analysis methods, which have been rising in popularity and efficiency, allow for systematic evaluations of vast landscapes. Here, we use a Mask R‐CNN deep learning model to evaluate terracing—artificially flattened areas surrounded by steeper slopes—on islands in American Sāmoa. Mask R‐CNN is notable for its ability to simultaneously perform detection and segmentation tasks related to object recognition, thereby providing robust datasets of both geographic locations of terracing features and their spatial morphometry. Using training datasets from across American Sāmoa, we train this model to recognize terracing features and then apply it to the island of Tutuila to undertake an island‐wide survey for terrace locations, distributions and morphologies. We demonstrate that this model is effective (F1 = 0.718), but limitations are also documented that relate to the quality of the lidar data and the size of terracing features. Our data show that the islands of American Sāmoa display shared patterns of terracing, but the nature of these patterns are distinct on Tutuila compared with the Manu'a island group. These patterns speak to the different interior configurations of the islands. This study demonstrates how deep learning provides a better understanding of landscape construction and behavioural patterning on Tutuila and has the capacity to expand our understanding of these processes on other islands beyond our case study.

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Household Units in the Analysis of Prehistoric Social Complexity, Cook Islands

Cited by 11 publications

References 19 publications

Household Archaeology in Polynesia: Historical Context and New Directions

Household Archaeology in Polynesia: Historical Context and New Directions

Identifying residences of ritual practitioners in the archaeological record as a proxy for social complexity

Evaluating Mask R‐CNN models to extract terracing across oceanic high islands: A case study from Sāmoa

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