Polynesia (from Greek: πολύς "polys" many + νῆσος "nēsos" island) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are termed Polynesians and they share many similar traits including language, culture and beliefs.[1] Historically, they were experienced sailors and used stars to determine their night hours.
The term "Polynesia" was first used in 1756 by French writer Charles de Brosses, and originally applied to all the islands of the Pacific. In 1831, Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a restriction on its use during a lecture to the Geographical Society of Paris.
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Polynesia is characterized by a small amount of land spread over 70 million square miles of Pacific Ocean. Most Polynesian islands and archipelagos, including the Hawaiian islands and Samoa, are composed of volcanic islands built by hotspots. New Zealand, Norfolk Island, and Ouvéa, the Polynesian outlier near New Caledonia, are the unsubmerged portions of the largely sunken continent of Zealandia. Zealandia is believed to have mostly sunken by 23 mya and resurfaced geologically recently due to a change in the movements of the Pacific Plate in relation to the Indo-Australian plate, which served to uplift the New Zealand portion. At first, the Pacific plate was subducted under the Australian plate. The Alpine Fault that traverses the South Island is currently a transform fault while the convergent plate boundary from the North Island Northwards is a subduction zone called the Kermadec-Tonga Subduction Zone. The volcanism associated with this subduction zone is the origin of the Kermadec and Tongan island archipelagos.
Out of about 117,000 or 118,000 square miles of land, over 103,000 square miles are within New Zealand. The Zealandia continent has approximately 1.4 million square miles of continental shelf. The oldest rocks in the region are found in New Zealand and are believed to be about 510 million years old. The oldest Polynesian rocks outside of Zealandia are to be found in the Hawaiian Emperor Seamount Chain, and are 80 million years old.
Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian Triangle although there are some islands that are inhabited by Polynesian people situated outside the Polynesian Triangle. Geographically, the Polynesian Triangle is drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. The other main island groups located within the Polynesian Triangle are Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Niue, Wallis and Futuna and French Polynesia.
There are also small Polynesian settlements in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, The Caroline Islands, and in Vanuatu. An island group with strong Polynesian cultural traits outside of this great triangle is Rotuma; situated north of Fiji. The people of Rotuma have many common Polynesian traits but speak a non-Polynesian language. Some of the Lau Islands to the southeast of Fiji have strong historic and cultural links with Tonga.
However, in essence, Polynesia is a cultural term referring to one of the three parts of Oceania (the others being Micronesia and Melanesia). DNA studies suggest that the indigenous Pacific Islands population migrated from Taiwan thousands of years ago and dispersed throughout the region into three distinct cultural groups.
The following are the islands and island groups, either nations or overseas territories of former colonial powers, that are of native Polynesian culture or where archaeological evidence indicates Polynesian settlement in the past.[2] Some islands of Polynesian origin are outside the general triangle that geographically defines the region.
The Polynesian people are considered to be by ancestry a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian people and the tracing of Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in the Malay Archipelago.
There are three theories regarding the spread of humans across the Pacific to Polynesia. These are outlined well by Kayser et al. (2000)[8] and are as follows:
Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread throughout the islands of Southeast Asia. These people, according to linguistic and archaeological evidence, originated from aborigines in Taiwan[9][10][11] as tribes whose natives were thought to have arrived through South China about 8,000 years ago to the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia, although they are different from the Han Chinese who now form the majority of people in China and Taiwan. In fact Taiwan, previously inhabited mostly by non-Han aborigines, was Sinicized via large-scale migration accompanied with assimilation during the 17th century.
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. It is thought that roughly 3,500 years ago,[12] the Lapita culture appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago, northwest Melanesia. This culture is argued to have either been developed there or, more likely, to have spread from China/Taiwan. The most eastern site for Lapita archaeological remains recovered so far through archaeology in Samoa is at Mulifanua on Upolu. The Mulifanua site, where 4,288 pottery shards have been found and studied, has a true age of circa 3,000 BP based on C14 dating.[13]
Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita culture spread 6,000 km further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga, and Samoa which were populated around 2,000 years ago.[10] In this region, the distinctive Polynesian culture developed.
The spread of pottery and domesticates in Polynesia are connected with the Lapita culture that started expanding from New Guinea to as far east as Fiji, Samoa, and Tonga. During this time the aspects of the Polynesian culture developed. Around 300 BC this new Polynesian people spread eastward from Fiji, 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.[14]
The dating of the settlement of Eastern Polynesia, including Hawai'i, Easter Island, and New Zealand is not agreed; most recently a 2010 study using a meta-analysis of the most reliable radiocarbon dates available suggested that the colonization of Eastern Polynesia (including Hawaii and New Zealand) instead proceeded in two short episodes: in the Society Islands from 1025–1120 and further afield from 1190–1290,[15] with Easter Island being settled around 1200.[16][17] It has been suggested that these migrations were driven by ciguatera poisoning (reef fish became poisonous), which in turn was caused by climate cooling.[18][19] Traditional archeological theories, which are contradicted by the more recent radiocarbon dating suggests a date of between 300 and 500 AD, or alternatively 800 AD (as supported by Jared Diamond) for the settlement of Easter Island, and similarly, a date of 500 AD has been suggested for Hawaii.
The Lapita culture in Fiji (3500 BCE) and in much of Melanesia was largely displaced by Austronesian-speaking New Guinea and/or Solomon Island aborigines around 4500 years ago. (See: Lapita, History of Fiji.)
Perhaps the oldest extensive political entity was that of the Samoa-based Tu'i Manu'a Confederacy, ruled by the holders of the Tu'i Manu'a title, which may well be the oldest chieftain title in Polynesia. This confederacy likely included much of Western Polynesia and some outliers at the height of its power in the 10th and 11th centuries; most notably: the Samoa, Tonga, Lau Islands and perhaps the main islands of Fiji. The Tongans revolted around 1000 years ago and formed their own Tu'i Tonga empire that came to dominate Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji, with an influence stretching from Nauru in the Northwest, to Niue in the East. The empire ruled for much of the Medieval period, until the Samoan revolt and subsequent rise of the Malietoa dynasties in Samoa, and ended with their capitulation to the Tongan Tu'i Ha'atakalaua dynasty in the 15th century.
After a bloody civil war, political power in Tonga eventually fell under the Tu'i Kanokupolu dynasty in the 16th century.
In 1845 the ambitious young warrior, strategist, and orator Tāufaʻāhau united Tonga into more Western-style kingdom. He held the chiefly title of Tuʻi Kanokupolu, but had been baptised[by whom?] with the name Jiaoji ("George") in 1831. In 1875, with the help of missionary Shirley Waldemar Baker, he declared Tonga a constitutional monarchy, formally adopted the western royal style, emancipated the "serfs", enshrined a code of law, land tenure, and freedom of the press, and limited the power of the chiefs.
Tonga became a British-protected state under a Treaty of Friendship on 18 May 1900, when European settlers and rival Tongan chiefs tried to oust the second king. Within the British Empire, which posted no higher permanent representative on Tonga than a British Consul (1901–1970), Tonga formed part of the British Western Pacific Territories (under a colonial High Commissioner, residing on Fiji) from 1901 until 1952. Despite being under the protectorate, Tonga retained its monarchy without interruption.
On June 4, 1970 the Kingdom of Tonga received independence from the British protectorate.
Samoa remained under Malietoa chieftains until its East-West division by Tripartite Convention (1899) subsequent annexation by the German Empire and the United States. The German-controlled Western portion of Samoa (the consisting of the bulk of Samoan territory) was occupied by New Zealand in WWI, and administered by it under a Class C League of Nations Mandate until receiving independence on January 1, 1962. The new Independent State of Samoa was not a monarchy, though the Malietoa title-holder remained very influential. It officially ended, however with the death of Malietoa Tanumafili II on May 11, 2007.
See: Pomare Dynasty.
See: Kingdom of Hawaii.
On October 28, 1835 members of the Ngā Puhi and surrounding iwi issued a "declaration of independence", as a "confederation of tribes" to resist potential French colonization efforts and to prevent the ships and cargo of Maori merchants from being seized at foreign ports. They received recognition from the British monarch in 1836. (See United Tribes of New Zealand, New Zealand Declaration of Independence, James Busby.)
Using the Treaty of Waitangi and right of discovery as a basis, the United Kingdom annexed New Zealand as a part of New South Wales in 1840.
In response to the actions of the colonial government, Maori looked to form monarchy inclusive of all Maori tribes in order to reduce vulnerability to the British divide-and-conquer strategy. Pōtatau Te Wherowhero high priest and chief of the Ngāti Mahuta tribe of the Waikato iwi was crowned as the Maori king in 1858. The king's territory consisted primarily of the lands in the center of the North Island, and the iwi constituted from the most powerful non-signatories of the Treaty of Waitangi, with Te Wherowhero also never having signed it.[20] (See Kingitanga.)
All tribes were pressed into subjection to the colonial government by the late 19th century. Although Maori were given the privilege of being legally enfranchised subjects of the British Empire under the Treaty, Maori culture and language were actively suppressed by the colonial government and by economic and social pressures from the Pakeha society until efforts were made to preserve indigenous culture starting in the late 1950s and culminating in the Waitangi Tribunal's interpretation of language and culture being included in the treasures set to be preserved under the Treaty of Waitangi. Moving from a low point of 15,000 speakers in the 1970s, there are now over 157,000 people who have some proficiency in the standard Māori language according to the 2006 census[21] in New Zealand, due in large part to government recognition and promotion of the language.
Maori are very much integrated into New Zealand society, and many are of mixed Maori and European, Asian, or Pacific Islander heritage. The New Zealand Defense forces are over half Maori, and the New Zealand Special Forces are 2/3 Maori. Jerry Mateparae, the former chief of the armed forces, now serves as Governor-General of New Zealand. A Canadian delegation was sent to New Zealand in order to gather information on New Zealand's recruiting process and culture at large in order to create a plan to increase the proportion of Canadian Aboriginals in its armed forces. However, despite major achievements towards equality, Maori are still under-represented in many fields.
(See: History of Fiji, Seru Epenisa Cakobau, Fiji during the time of Cakobau.)
The Lau islands had after the Tu'i Mana'u dynasty were subject to periods of Tongan and then Fijian control until their eventual conquest by Seru Epenisa Cakobau of the Kingdom of Fiji by 1871. In around 1855 a Tongan prince, Enele Ma'afu, proclaimed the Lau islands as his kingdom, and took the title Tui Lau.
Fiji itself had been ruled by numerous divided chieftains until Cakobau unified the landmass. The Lapita culture, the ancestors of the Polynesians, existed in Fiji from 3500 BCE until they were displaced by the Melanesians about a thousand years later. (Interestingly, Samoans and subsequent Polynesian cultures adopted Melanesian face painting methods.)
In 1873, Cakobau ceded a Fiji heavily indebted to foreign creditors to the United Kingdom. It became independent on 10 October 1970 and a republic on 28 September 1987.
See: Kingdom of Rarotonga.
The stories as to the ancestors of the Tuvaluans vary from island to island. On Funafuti and Vaitupu the founding ancestor is described as being from Samoa;[22][23] whereas on Nanumea the founding ancestor is described as being from Tonga;[22] These stories can be linked to what is known about the Samoa-based Tu'i Manu'a Confederacy, ruled by the holders of the Tu'i Manu'a title, which confederacy likely included much of Western Polynesia and some outliers at the height of its power in the 10th and 11th centuries; and the extent of influence of the Tuʻi Tonga line of Tongan kings, which originated in the 10th century; while the existence of the Tuʻi Tonga Empire is disputed, Tuvalu is thought to have been visited by Tongans in the mid-13th century and was within Tonga's sphere of influence.[23] (See: History of Tuvalu.)
The sweet potato, called kūmara in Māori, which is native to the Americas, was widespread in Polynesia when Europeans first reached the Pacific. Remains of the plant have been radiocarbon-dated in the Cook Islands to 1000 AD, and current thinking is that it was brought to central Polynesia circa 700 CE and spread across Polynesia from there, possibly by Polynesians who had traveled to South America and back.[24]
Thor Heyerdahl proposed in the mid-20th century that the Polynesians had migrated from South America on balsa-log boats.[25][26] Many anthropologists have criticised Heyerdahl's theory, including Wade Davis in his book The Wayfinders. Davis says that Heyerdahl "ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnobotanical evidence, augmented today by genetic and archaeological data, indicating that he was patently wrong."[27]
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 northwestern Polynesian outliers.
Eastern Polynesian cultures are highly adapted to smaller islands and atolls, principally the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Hawaii, Rapa Nui and smaller central-pacific groups. The large islands of New Zealand were first settled by Eastern Polynesians who adapted their culture to a non-tropical environment.
Unlike in Melanesia, leaders were chosen in Polynesia based on their hereditary bloodline. Samoa however, had another system of government that combines elements of heredity and real-world skills to choose leaders. This system is called Fa'amatai.[28] According to Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, "On Tahiti, for example, the 35,000 Polynesians living there at the time of European discovery were divided between high-status persons with full access to food and other resources, and low-status persons with limited access."[29]
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 of both luxuries and mundane items was important to all groups. Periodic droughts and subsequent famines often lead to war.[29] 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—in the case of atolls, on only one of the group so that food cultivation was on the others. Usually these villages were fortified with walls and palisades made of stone and wood.[30]
However, New Zealand demonstrates the opposite: large volcanic islands with fortified villages.
As well as being great navigators these people were artists and artisans of great skill. Simple objects, such as fish-hooks would be manufactured to exacting standards for different catches and decorated even when the decoration was not part of the function. Stone and wooden weapons were considered to be more powerful the better they were made and decorated. In some island groups weaving was a strong part of the culture and gifting woven articles an ingrained practice. Dwellings were imbued with character by the skill of their building. Body decoration and jewellery is of international standard to this day.
The religious attributes of Polynesians were common over the whole Pacific region. While there are some differences in their spoken languages they largely have the same explanation for the creation of the earth and sky, for the gods that rule aspects of life and for the religious practices of everyday life. People travelled thousands of miles to celebrations that they all owned communally.
Due to relatively large numbers of competitive sects of Christian missionaries in the islands, many Polynesian groups have been converted to Christianity. Polynesian languages are all members of the family of Oceanic languages, a sub-branch of the Austronesian language family.
Polynesian languages show a considerable degree of similarity. The vowels are generally the same—a, e, i, o, and u, pronounced as in Italian, Spanish, and German—and the consonants are always followed by a vowel. The languages of various island groups show changes in consonants. R and v are used in central and eastern Polynesia whereas l and v are used in western Polynesia. The glottal stop is increasingly represented by an inverted comma or 'okina. In the Society Islands, the original Proto-Polynesian *k and *ng have merged as glottal stop; so the name for the ancestral homeland, deriving from Proto-Nuclear Polynesian *sawaiki,[31] becomes Havai'i. In New Zealand, where the original *w is used instead of v, the ancient home is Hawaiki. In the Cook Islands, where the glottal stop replaces the original *s (with a likely intermediate stage of *h), it is ‘Avaiki. In the Hawaiian islands, where the glottal stop replaces the original k, the largest island of the group is named Hawai‘i. In Samoa, where the original s is used instead of h, v replaces w, and the glottal stop replaces the original k, the largest island is called Savai'i.[1]
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.[32] Some have more unusual sources of income, such as Tuvalu which marketed its '.tv' internet top-level domain name[33] or the Cooks that relied on stamp sales.
After several years of discussing a potential regional grouping, three sovereign states (Samoa, Tonga and Tuvalu) and five self-governing but non-sovereign territories formally launched, in November 2011, the Polynesian Leaders Group, intended to cooperate on a variety of issues including culture and language, education, responses to climate change, and trade and investment. It does not, however, constitute a political or monetary union.[34][35][36]
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 were all settled by Polynesians.
Navigators traveled to small inhabited islands using only their own senses and knowledge passed by oral tradition from navigator to apprentice. In order to locate directions at various times of day and year, navigators in Eastern Polynesia memorized important facts: the motion of specific stars, and where they would rise on the horizon of the ocean; weather; times of travel; wildlife species (which congregate at particular positions); directions of swells on the ocean, and how the crew would feel their motion; colors of the sea and sky, especially how clouds would cluster at the locations of some islands; and angles for approaching harbors.
These wayfinding techniques along with outrigger canoe construction methods, were kept as guild secrets. Generally each island maintained a guild of navigators who had very high status; in times of famine or difficulty these navigators could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighboring islands. To this day, original traditional methods of Polynesian Navigation are still taught in the Polynesian outlier of Taumako Island in the Solomon Islands.
From a single chicken bone recovered from the archaeological site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula, Chile, a 2007 research report looking at radiocarbon dating and an ancient DNA sequence indicate that Polynesian navigators may have reached the Americas at least 100 years before Columbus (who arrived 1492 AD), introducing chickens to South America.[37][38] A later report looking at the same specimens concluded:
A published, apparently pre-Columbian, Chilean specimen and six pre-European Polynesian specimens also cluster with the same European/Indian subcontinental/Southeast Asian sequences, providing no support for a Polynesian introduction of chickens to South America. In contrast, sequences from two archaeological sites on Easter Island group with an uncommon haplogroup from Indonesia, Japan, and China and may represent a genetic signature of an early Polynesian dispersal. Modeling of the potential marine carbon contribution to the Chilean archaeological specimen casts further doubt on claims for pre-Columbian chickens, and definitive proof will require further analyses of ancient DNA sequences and radiocarbon and stable isotope data from archaeological excavations within both Chile and Polynesia.[39]
Knowledge of the traditional Polynesian methods of navigation were 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. By the late 19th century to the early 20th century a more generous view of Polynesian navigation had come into favor, perhaps creating a romantic picture of their canoes, seamanship and navigational expertise.
In the mid to late 1960s, scholars began testing sailing and paddling experiments related to Polynesian navigation: David Lewis sailed his catamaran from Tahiti to New Zealand using stellar navigation without instruments and Ben Finney built a 40-foot replica of a Hawaiian double canoe "Nalehia" and tested it in Hawaii. Meanwhile, Micronesian ethnographic research in the Caroline Islands revealed that traditional stellar navigational methods were still in every day use. Recent re-creations of Polynesian voyaging have used methods based largely on Micronesian methods and the teachings of a Micronesian navigator, Mau Piailug.
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. 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. 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. It is likely that the Polynesians also used wave and swell formations to navigate. 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.
Also, people of the Marshall Islands used special devices called stick charts, showing the places and directions of swells and wave-breaks, with tiny seashells affixed to them to mark the positions of islands along the way. Materials for these maps were readily available on beaches, and their making was simple; however, their effective use needed years and years of study.[40]
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