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The term Polynesia was an invention of the European Enlightenment, a direct consequence of the great voyages of Pacific exploration associated with such famous navigators as Louis de Bougainville, James Cook, George Vancouver, and La Pérouse. The first use of the term (derived from the Greek words for “many” and “island”) is generally attributed to De Brosses in his 1756 Histoire des navigations aux terres Australes, where it applied to all of the islands of the “Great South Sea.” The modern definition of Polynesia, as the islands found within the vast triangle subtended by Hawai’i in the north Pacific, New Zealand in the southwest, and easter island (Rapa Nui) in the far southeast, dates to the French explorer Sebastien Dumont d’Urville (1790–1842). In his 1832 Notice sur les Iles du grand océan, he set Polynesia apart from Melanesia, the islands of the southwestern Pacific from New Guinea to Fiji, and from Micronesia, the islands north of the equator ranging from the Marianas and Palau in the west to the Marshall Islands in the east. This tripartite segmentation of Oceania continues to have geographic salience, even though its value for historical understanding has been greatly diminished.
Culture historians such as roger c. green (1991) have recently recognized that a more meaningful way to partition Oceania is between Near Oceania (comprising New Guinea, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Solomon Islands) and Remote Oceania (comprising all of Micronesia, the Melanesian archipelagoes of Vanuatu, the Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia, Fiji, and all of Polynesia). This distinction recognizes the deep history of the Pleistocene human occupation of Near Oceania (beginning at least 40,000 years ago) and the relatively late expansion of Austronesian-speaking peoples into Remote Oceania (after about 2000 b.c.). Nonetheless, the term Polynesia retains considerable salience, for the island cultures found within this vast triangle (along with a few Polynesian “outliers” scattered to the west of the triangle proper) do cohere as a single cultural region.
The high degree of relatedness among the peoples of Polynesia was first recognized, on the basis of language similarities, by Enlightenment voyagers such as J. R. Forster, the naturalist of Captain Cook’s second voyage, who published a comparative table of Polynesian words in 1778. Modern historical linguistic studies confirm that the thirty-six documented Polynesian languages form a single branch of the great Austronesian language family. They can all be traced back to a proto-Polynesian language, for which more than 4,000 words have now been reconstructed (Kirch and Green in press). As biological populations the Polynesian islanders also exhibit considerable phenotypic homogeneity and common genetic markers. Recent studies in molecular biology suggest that the Polynesian ancestors passed through a “genetic bottleneck” at some point in their early history, quite probably associated with the initial colonization the Fiji-Tonga-Samoa region.
Ethnographically Polynesia is generally subdivided into two major sectors: Western Polynesia, which includes Tonga, Samoa, Futuna, ‘Uvea, and a few smaller islands in this region, and Eastern Polynesia, including both the central-eastern archipelagoes of the Cooks, Australs, Societies, and Marquesas and the more isolated islands of Hawai’i, Easter, and New Zealand. The formal distinction between Western and Eastern Polynesia was first defined on comparative ethnographic evidence by Edwin G. Burrows in 1939. Archaeological research has subsequently demonstrated that Western Polynesia was settled first, around 1000–900 b.c., and was the geographic homeland of the ancestral Polynesians (the speakers of proto-Polynesian language; see Kirch and Green in press). Subsequent dispersals out of this homeland region, to the east, north, and southwest, led to the settlement of Eastern Polynesia. Dating the settlement of Eastern Polynesia remains a controversial matter, but scholars would agree the process began sometime after 500 b.c. and was completed by a.d. 800–1000.
As already noted, the late-eighteenth-century voyagers recognized the coherence of Polynesia (Captain Cook wrote of the “Polynesian Nation”), and they began to advance theories of Polynesian origins, generally suggesting that the Polynesians were related to similar peoples found in the Malay Archipelago (modern indonesia). Again, linguistic similarities provided key evidence.
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