Polynesia

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This article is about the wider region in the Pacific. For the territory informally referred to as Polynesia, see French Polynesia.
“Polynesian” redirects here. For other uses, see Polynesian (disambiguation).
Carving from the ridgepole of a Māori house, ca 1840
Carving from the ridgepole of a Māori house, ca 1840

Polynesia (from Greek: πολύς many, νῆσος island) is a large grouping of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean.

Contents

[edit] Definition

Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian triangle
Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian triangle

The term "Polynesia" was first used by Charles de Brosses in 1756, and originally applied to all the islands of the Pacific. Jules Dumont d'Urville in an 1831 lecture to the Geographical Society of Paris proposed a restriction on its use, and also introduced the terms Micronesia and Melanesia. This division into three distinct Pacific subregions remains in widespread use today.

Geographically, and oversimply, Polynesia may be described as a triangle with its corners at Hawai'i, New Zealand and Easter Island. The other main island groups located within the Polynesian triangle are Samoa, Tonga, the various island chains that form the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. Niue is a rare solitary island state near the centre of Polynesia. Island groups outside of this great triangle include Tuvalu and the French territory of Wallis and Futuna. There are also small outlier Polynesian enclaves in Papua New Guinea, the Solomons and in Vanuatu. However, in essence, it is an anthropological term referring to one of the three parts of Oceania (the others being Micronesia and Melanesia) whose pre-colonial population generally belongs to one ethno-cultural family as a result of centuries of maritime migrations.

[edit] History

One theory is that the spread of pottery and domesticates in Polynesia is connected with the Lapita-culture that, around 1600–1200 BC, started expanding from New Guinea as far east as Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. During this time the aspects of the Polynesian culture developed, especially on the islands of Samoa and Tonga. Around 300 BC this new Polynesian people spread from Samoa and Tonga to the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas Islands. This was supported by Patrick Kirch and Marshall Weisler when they performed X-ray fluorescence sourcing of basalt artifacts found on both islands [1]

Around AD 300, or earlier, the Polynesians discovered and settled Easter Island. This is supported by archaeological evidence as well as the introduction of flora and fauna consistent with the Polynesian culture and characteristic of the tropics to this subtropical island. Around AD 400 Hawai'i was settled by the Polynesians and around AD 1000 New Zealand was settled as well. The migration of the Polynesians is impressive considering that the islands settled by them are spread out over great distances – the Pacific Ocean covers nearly a half of the Earth's surface area. Most contemporary cultures, by comparison, never voyaged beyond sight of land.

[edit] Cultures of Polynesia

Main article: Polynesian culture
Painting Tahitian Women on the Beach by Paul Gauguin - Musée d'Orsay
Painting Tahitian Women on the Beach by Paul Gauguin - Musée d'Orsay

Polynesia divides into two distinct cultural groups, East Polynesia and West Polynesia. The culture of West Polynesia is conditioned to high populations. It has strong institutions of marriage, and well-developed judicial, monetary and trading traditions. It comprises the groups of Tonga, Niue, Samoa and the Polynesian outliers. Eastern Polynesian cultures are highly adapted to smaller islands and atolls including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Hawaii and Easter Island. However, the large islands of New Zealand were first settled by Eastern Polynesians who adapted their culture to a non-tropical environment. Anthropologists term the Eastern Polynesian system of kinship the Hawaiian system. Religion, farming, fishing, weather prediction, out-rigger canoe (similar to modern catamarans) construction and navigation were highly developed skills because the population of an entire island depended on them. Trading consisted of both luxuries and mundane items. Many low-lying islands could suffer severe famine if their gardens were poisoned by the salt from the storm-surge of a hurricane. In these cases fishing, the primary source of protein, would not ease loss of food energy. Navigators, in particular, were highly respected and each island maintained a house of navigation, with a canoe-building area.

Settlements by the Polynesians were of two categories, the hamlet and the village. Size of the island inhabited determined whether or a not a hamlet would be built. The larger volcanic islands usually had hamlets because of the many zones that could be divided across the island. Food and resources were more plentiful and so these settlements of four to five houses (usually with gardens) were established so that there would be no overlap between the zones. Villages, on the other hand, were built on the coasts of smaller islands and consisted of thirty or more houses. Usually these villages were fortified with walls and palisades made of stone and wood [Encyclopedia Britannica, 1995]. However, New Zealand demonstrates the opposite; large volcanic islands with fortified villages. Due to relatively large numbers of competitive sects of Christian missionaries in the islands, many Polynesian groups have adopted Christianity. Polynesian languages are all members of the family of Oceanic languages, a sub-branch of the Austronesian language family.

[edit] Economy of Polynesia

With the exception of New Zealand, the majority of independent Polynesian islands derive much of their income from foreign aid and remittances from those who live in other countries. Some encourage their young people to go where they can earn good money to remit to their stay-at-home relatives. Many Polynesian locations, such as Easter Island, supplement this with tourism income[2]. Some have more unusual sources of income, such as Tuvalu which marketed its '.tv' internet top-level domain name[3] or the Cooks that relied on stamp sales. A very few others still live as they did before Western Civilization encountered them.

[edit] Polynesian navigation

At a time when European sailors were navigating by keeping a watch for the shoreline in daylight, Polynesians were navigating a vast extent of the Pacific Ocean. Polynesia comprised islands diffused throughout a triangular area with sides of four thousand miles. The area from the Hawaiian Islands in the north, to Easter Island in the east and to New Zealand in the south was all settled by Polynesians.

[edit] Theories

Knowledge of the traditional Polynesian methods of navigation was largely lost after contact with and colonization by Europeans. This left the problem of accounting for the presence of the Polynesians in such isolated and scattered parts of the Pacific. According to Andrew Sharp, the explorer Captain James Cook, already familiar with Charles de Brousse’s accounts of large groups of Pacific islanders who were driven off course in storms and ended up hundreds of miles away with no idea where they were, encountered in the course of one of his own voyages a castaway group of Tahitians who had become lost at sea in a gale and blown 100 miles away to the island of Atiu. Cook wrote that the Atiu incident ‘will serve to explain, better than the thousand conjectures of speculative reasoners, how the detached parts of the earth, and, in particular, how the South Seas, may have been peopled’ (Sharp 1963:16).

By the late 19th century to the early 20th century a more generous view of Polynesian navigation had come into favour, perhaps creating too romantic a picture of their canoes, seamanship and navigational expertise. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers such as Abraham Fornander and Stephenson Percy Smith told of heroic Polynesians migrating in great coordinated fleets from Asia to the islands now known as Polynesia (Finney 1976:5). In the mid-twentieth century, Thor Heyerdahl proposed another theory of Polynesian origins (one which did not win general acceptance), arguing that the Polynesians had migrated from South America on balsa-log boats (Sharp 1963:122-128, Finney in Finney 1976:5).

Recent maternal mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests that Polynesians, including Tongans, Samoans, Niueans, Cook Islanders, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Marquesans and Māori, are genetically linked to indigenous peoples of parts of Southeast Asia including those of Taiwan. This DNA evidence is supported by linguistic and archaeological evidence (see Sutton 1994, cited in References section below, for discussion of Eastern Polynesian origins, New Zealand Māori in particular). Recent studies into paternal Y chromosome analysis shows that Polynesians are also genetically linked to peoples of Melanesia (see "Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes" and "Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes (correction)" cited in References). Therefore it is current belief that the Polynesian people are a hybrid race between indigenous peoples of parts of Southeast Asia and peoples of Melanesia. Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through island South-East Asia – almost certainly starting out from Taiwan – into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia. In the archaeological record there are well-defined traces of this expansion which allow the path it took to be followed and dated with a degree of certainty. In the mid 2nd millennium BC a distinctive culture appeared suddenly in north-west Melanesia, in the Bismarck Archipelago, the chain of islands forming a great arch from New Britain to the Admiralty Islands. This culture, known as Lapita, stands out in the Melanesian archeological record, with its large permanent villages on beach terraces along the coasts. Particularly characterisitic of the Lapita culture is the making of pottery, including a great many vessels of varied shapes, some distinguished by fine patterns and motifs pressed into the clay. Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita culture spread 6000 km further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Tonga and Samoa. In this region, the distinctive Polynesian culture developed.

[edit] Research and practice

Polynesian (Hawaiian navigators) sailing multi-hulled canoe, ca 1781
Polynesian (Hawaiian navigators) sailing multi-hulled canoe, ca 1781

A more sober and analytical view was presented by Andrew Sharp, who amassed a wealth of evidence to challenge the ‘heroic vision’ hypothesis, asserting instead that Polynesian maritime expertise was severely limited and that as a result the settlement of Polynesia had been the result of luck, random searching, and drifting, rather than as organised voyages of colonisation (Sharp 1963). Sharp’s reassessment caused a huge amount of controversy and led to a stalemate between the romantic and the sceptical views (Finney in Finney 1976:5).

By the mid to late 1960s it was time for a new hands-on approach. Dr David Lewis sailed his catamaran from Tahiti to New Zealand using stellar navigation without instruments (Lewis 1976). Ben Finney built a 40-foot replica of a Hawaiian double canoe "Nalehia" and tested it in a series of sailing and paddling experiments in Hawaiian waters. At the same time, ethnographic research in the Caroline Islands in Micronesia brought to light the fact that traditional stellar navigational methods were still very much in everyday use there. This was also the case in the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines, where boats called vintas are used. The building and testing of canoes inspired by traditional designs, the harnessing of knowledge from skilled Micronesian and Philippine navigators, as well as voyages using stellar navigation, allowed practical conclusions about the sea-worthiness and handling capabilities of traditional Polynesian canoes and allowed a better understanding of the navigational methods that were likely to have been used by the Polynesians and of how they, as people, were adapted to seafaring (Finney in Finney 1976:6-9). Recent re-creations of Polynesian voyaging have used methods based largely on Micronesian methods and the teachings of a Micronesian navigator, Mau Piailug. See also Polynesian Voyaging Society, Hokulea.


It is probable that the Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather (Gatty 1999). See Polynesian navigation.

Scientists think that long-distance Polynesian voyaging followed the seasonal paths of birds. There are some references in their oral traditions to the flight of birds and some say that there were range marks onshore pointing to distant islands in line with these flyways. A voyage from Tahiti, the Tuamotus or the Cook Islands to New Zealand might have followed the migration of the Long-tailed cuckoo (Eudynamys taitensis) just as the voyage from Tahiti to Hawaii would coincide with the track of the Pacific Golden Plover and the Bristle-thighed Curlew. It is also believed that Polynesians employed shore-sighting birds as did many seafaring peoples. One theory is that they would have taken a frigatebird with them. These birds refuse to land on the water as their feathers will become waterlogged making it impossible to fly. When the voyagers thought they were close to land they may have released the bird, which would either fly towards land or else return to the canoe (Gatty 1999).

The peoples of the Pacific, including Micronesians and Polynesians, developed navigating by the stars into a fine art. It is surmised that the Polynesians imagined the heavens as the interior of a dome where a star proceeded along a path which passed over certain islands. They had names for over a hundred and fifty stars. A navigator would have known where and when a given star rose and set, as well as which islands it passed directly over. Thus Polynesian navigators would have then been able to sail toward the star they knew to be over their destination, and as it moved westward with time they would then set their course by the succeeding star which would have then moved over the target island (Gatty 1999).

It is likely that the Polynesians also used wave and swell formations to navigate. Many of the habitable areas of the Pacific Ocean are groups of islands (or atolls) in chains hundreds of kilometers long. Island chains have predictable effects on waves and on currents. Navigators who lived within a group of islands would learn the effect various islands had on their shape, direction, and motion and would have been able to correct their path in accordance with the changes they perceived. When they arrived in the vicinity of a chain of islands they were unfamiliar with, they may have been able to transfer their experience and deduce that they were nearing a group of islands. Once they had arrived fairly close to a destination island, they would have been able to pinpoint its location by sightings of land-based birds, certain cloud formations, as well as the reflections shallow water made on the undersides of clouds. It is thought that the Polynesian navigators may have measured the time it took to sail between islands in "canoe-days’’ or a similar type of expression (Gatty 1999).

[edit] Island groups

Cook Bay on Moorea, French Polynesia
Cook Bay on Moorea, French Polynesia

The following are the islands and island groups, either nations or subnational territories, that are of native Polynesian culture. Some islands of Polynesian origin are outside the general triangle that geographically defines the region.

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ History of Polynesian Archaeology. Retrieved on November 18, 2005.
  2. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island. Retrieved on November 18, 2005.
  3. ^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Tuvalu. Retrieved on November 18, 2005.

[edit] References

  • Finney, Ben R (1976). New, Non-Armchair Research. In Ben R. Finney (1963), Pacific Navigation and Voyaging, The Polynesian Society Inc.
  • Finney, Ben R (1976) (editor). Pacific Navigation and Voyaging, The Polynesian Society Inc.
  • Gatty, Harold (1999). Finding Your Ways Without Map or Compass. Dover Publications, Inc. ISBN 0-486-40613-X. 
  • Lewis, David (1976), A Return Voyage Between Puluwat and Saipan Using Micronesian Navigational Techniques. In Ben R. Finney (1963), Pacific Navigation and Voyaging, The Polynesian Society Inc.
  • Sharp, Andrew (1963). Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia, Longman Paul Ltd.

[edit] External links

v • d • e
Polynesia

Polynesian triangle
Austral Islands · Cook Islands · Easter Island · Gambier Islands · Hawaiian Islands · Kermadec Islands · Loyalty Islands · Marquesas · New Zealand · Pitcairn Islands · Sala y Gómez · Samoan Islands · Society Islands · Tokelau · Tonga · Tuamotus · Tuvalu · Wallis and Futuna Islands

Polynesian outliers
Anuta · Emae · Kapingamarangi · Mele · Nuguria · Nukumanu · Nukuoro · Ontong Java · Pileni · Rennell · Sikaiana · Takuu · Tikopia

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