By the early decades of the nineteenth century the islands of Polynesia were becoming the targets of increasing European interest, first by itinerant traders, followed by various missionary sects and, by mid-century, imperial efforts at colonization. The French annexed Tahiti and surrounding archipelagoes, and the British took political control of Aotearoa (New Zealand) from the indigenous Maori (but not without a protracted war of resistance). Somewhat later Samoa fell to German and then U.S. and British interests, and the legitimate Hawaiian government was overthrown by a cabal of U.S. expatriates in 1893. As was typical in other parts of the colonized world, scholarly interests in the newly subjugated populations followed missionary and imperialist expansion. The origins of modern anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, as many have argued, are closely intertwined with global European expansion.

Many missionaries and colonial officials who found themselves in Polynesia conducted pioneering ethnographic and linguistic research and used the data to construct theories of Polynesian origins and history. Although a few archaeological ruins were studied (such as the Hawaiian temple, or heiau, sites recorded by Thomas Thrum in Hawai’i), archaeology per se figured little in these nineteenth-century endeavors. Rather, great emphasis was placed on indigenous Polynesian oral traditions and narratives, by such scholars as Sir George Grey, Abraham Fornander, and S. Percy Smith. Their particular accounts varied, but these authors generally traced Polynesian origins back to Asia, with protracted migrations through the western Pacific into the Polynesian triangle. Fornander’s Account of the Polynesian Race (1878) remains a classic of this genre, tracing the Polynesians back to “the Vedic family of the Arian race” that was eventually “driven out of India” and gradually spread into Indonesia and beyond.

In New Zealand, however, direct archaeological evidence in the form of prehistoric stone implements (flake tools and ground-stone adzes) came to the fore when they were found in association with the bones of several species of giant, extinct, ostrichlike birds known as moa. As early as 1872 Julius Von Haast was excavating “moa-hunter” sites in the South Island of New Zealand and using such evidence to argue for a race of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers who had preceded the classic Polynesian Maori in these southern islands.

By the fin-de-siècle, such ad hoc scholarship was giving way to more formal academic enterprises, associated with the founding of museums, universities, and other institutional bases from which ethnological and archaeological research would henceforth be sponsored. The polynesian society was established in New Zealand in 1892 to promote such research, and the Journal of the Polynesian Society remains a prominent publication today. The Otago Museum and Dominion Museum in New Zealand and the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Hawai’i became leading centers for archaeological and ethnographic research. The Bishop Museum, in particular, would come to play the dominant role in Pacific archaeological research throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

The Problem of Polynesian Origins

In the first decades of the twentieth century archaeology began to come into its own in Polynesia. Katherine Scoresby Routledge, a remarkable woman and scholar, led a three-year private expedition to Easter Island to investigate its enigmatic, giant stone statues. Routledge combined archaeological survey and mapping of the ruins with ethnographic inquiries among the surviving Rapa Nui people to arrive at the conclusion that the statues and the temples upon which they stood were “the work of the ancestors” of the Polynesian-speaking Rapa Nui themselves, not the vestiges of some vanished race (Routledge 1919, 291). In Hawai’i, John F.G. Stokes carefully surveyed the remains of stone temple sites on Hawai’i and Moloka’i Islands to determine whether a sequence of temple forms could be inferred and possibly correlated with Hawaiian oral traditions of religious change. Stokes also conducted stratigraphic excavations on the island of Kaho’olawe and found a succession of fishhook types in the Kamohio rock shelter, although the significance of his results would remain unappreciated for nearly fifty years.