Journal
JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL ARCHAEOLOGY
Volume 30, Issue 2, Pages 116-134Publisher
ACADEMIC PRESS INC ELSEVIER SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1016/j.jaa.2010.12.004
Keywords
Polynesia; Cladistics; Phylogeny; Bark cloth; Prehistory; Cultural evolution; Tongan maritime empire; Inter-island contact
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The origin and dispersal of the first human inhabitants of the Polynesian Triangle have been studied from many perspectives and significant progress in our understanding of Polynesian prehistory has derived from an intermingling of linguistics, archaeology, and genetics. Contributions from the ethnographic record, however, have been limited by the dearth of comparative methods that are useful for reconstructing prehistory and identifying and analyzing cross-cultural trends. For more than fifty years, cladistic phylogenetic methods have been used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of biological systems from contemporary trait distributions. These rigorous methods are applied herein to reconstruct the prehistoric evolution and dispersal of Polynesian bark cloth, using ethnographic data recorded since European contact with Polynesian cultures. Contrary to expectation given the earlier settlement of Western Polynesia, the Eastern Polynesian bark cloth traditions retained many ancestral features. In contrast, a suite of innovations appear in the Western Polynesian bark cloth traditions and it is asserted herein that the distribution of these traits may be associated with the rise of the Tongan maritime Empire. Within Eastern Polynesia, the pattern of diversification of bark cloth traditions is consistent with the breakdown of interaction spheres late in the settlement era. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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