inhabitants, were able to demonstrate sequences of material cultural change, primarily in ceramic styles. As a result materially documented time depth and culture change were finally shown to exist in Oceanic archaeology. Within Polynesia proper Kenneth Emory of the Bishop Museum also began a program of excavations in Hawaiian archaeological sites, beginning about 1950. The prehistoric Hawaiians had never used pottery, but Emory and his colleagues Yosihiko Sinoto and William Bonk realized that they could apply the methods of seriation to changing styles in bone and shell fishhooks, thus outlining a culture-historical sequence for the Hawaiian Islands (Emory, Bonk, and Sinoto 1959).

Equally important to the reapplication of stratigraphic methods were the discovery and implementation of radiocarbon dating by willard libby, beginning in the late 1940s. Emory, Gifford, Spoehr, and others were quick to take advantage of Libby’s offer to date samples from various parts of the world, and by the early 1950s a number of radiocarbon dates had been published for sites ranging from Hawai’i to New Caledonia and the Marianas. The significance of this technological development cannot be underplayed, for it provided an independent means of assessing chronology, and the dates themselves left no doubt that the time depth of Polynesian prehistory could now be counted in thousands—not hundreds—of years. As Emory put it, radiocarbon dating “opened up undreamed of possibilities for reconstructing the prehistory of [Polynesia]” (Emory, Bonk, and Sinoto 1959, ix).

By the mid-1950s there was a veritable resurgence of field archaeology throughout Polynesia. In New Zealand the pioneering excavations of roger duff (1950) at Wairau Bar were followed by a series of careful excavations conducted by jack golson, a young Cambridge-trained archaeologist who had been appointed to a faculty post at the University of Auckland (Golson 1959). As mentioned earlier, Thor Heyerdahl privately financed and led his own Norwegian Archaeological Expedition to Easter Island and other Eastern Polynesian locales in 1955 and 1956, with excavations conducted by four professional archaeologists (Heyerdahl and Ferdon 1961, 1965). Their work also put the statue cult of Easter Island within a radiocarbon framework. At the same time, Robert Suggs of the American Museum of Natural History took up where Ralph Linton had left off in the Marquesas Islands, quickly demonstrating that the latter’s assumptions about a dearth of stratified sites had no empirical justification. Suggs found a wealth of artifact-rich deposits, and his monograph outlined one of the first well-defined culture sequences for a Polynesian archipelago (Suggs 1961).

Coming less than two decades after Hiroa’s migrationist theory had been at the fore, the new outpouring of archaeological results inspired a radical rethinking of Polynesian culture-history. Suggs (1960) wrote the classic synthesis of this period, The Island Civilizations of Polynesia, not only debunking the older ethnographic theories of Handy, Hiroa, and their peers but also attacking the rival Heyerdahl theory of American origins. Suggs’s synthesis privileged the material evidence of “dirt archaeology,” but it also drew widely upon newly emerging linguistic and human-biological research. Polynesian origins were now traced back to a Southeast Asian homeland, with a dispersal route through the Melanesian archipelagoes (not Micronesia, as Hiroa had advocated), this latter evidenced by a ceramic style that would shortly come to be named Lapita. The Western Polynesian archipelagoes of Tonga and Samoa were now argued to be the immediate Polynesian homeland, with subsequent voyages of colonization to the Marquesas and Society Islands and thence to the farthest islands of Eastern Polynesia.

Settlement Archaeology in Polynesia

The rejuvenation of stratigraphic archaeology in Polynesia and its expansion beyond Polynesia into the western Pacific was initially driven by a strong culture-historical orientation, encouraged by rapid success in defining considerable time depth and sequences of material culture change (whether in ceramic styles or in fishhooks and stone adzes). Under this culture-history paradigm, the emphasis in fieldwork was