dynamism of island ecosystems. Although the human role in the extinction of New Zealand’s giant moa birds had long been documented (Anderson 1989), it became increasingly clear that there had been major episodes of human-induced avian extinctions throughout tropical island of Polynesia (Steadman 1995). Combined with evidence for deforestation, erosion and valley alluviation, and the widespread conversion of natural communities to highly anthropogenic landscapes, our view of island ecosystems and the role of indigenous peoples in shaping their landscape histories has been entirely transformed (Kirch and Hunt 1997).

A further outgrowth of the settlement-pattern reorientation in Polynesia throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s was a concern with wider theoretical issues in processual archaeology. The Polynesian societies had been taken as a virtual “type” instance for the concept of the chiefdom, which was regarded by many processual archaeologists as a key intermediary stage in the evolution of human societies from simpler band and tribal levels of sociopolitical organization to fully state-level polities. This made the study of variation and cultural change within Polynesian chiefdoms a topic of some theoretical import. T. Earle (1978, 1997), for example, drew upon his research on Kaua’i, Hawai’i, both to test Wittfogel’s “hydraulic hypothesis” regarding the role of irrigation in the rise of complex societies and more generally to test notions of “how chiefs come to power.” Kirch (1984) integrated ethnohistorical and archaeological approaches to construct a broad model of the evolution of Polynesia chiefdoms, arguing that the trend toward increased hierarchy and social control in certain Polynesian societies was substantially constrained by a constellation of demographic, ecological, and economic parameters. In a later study Kirch (1994) argued that a fundamental dichotomy between “wet” and “dry” agricultural landscapes strongly constrained the evolution of hierarchy and power.

New Views on Polynesian Origins and Dispersals

Perhaps because the question of how a “Neolithic” people managed to discover and colonize the most isolated islands on earth remains such an intrinsically compelling issue, the matter of Polynesian origins and dispersals did not disappear with the paradigm shift from culture-historical to processual archaeology. Rather, this question has received renewed scrutiny and been the subject of invigorated debate since the 1970s, as a result of several developments. One impetus was the expansion of modern archaeological work into Melanesia, a region that had been almost entirely neglected prior to World War II. In particular, the realization that a widespread early-ceramic horizon—the Lapita cultural complex—linked the initial stages of human settlement in both Polynesia and eastern Melanesia provoked a fundamental rethinking of Polynesia origins (Green 1979). The earliest Polynesian cultures are now seen to be a direct development out of an early eastern Lapita culture, itself the eastward extension of a process of Lapita expansion that had commenced in the Bismarck Archipelago around 1500 b.c. (Kirch 1997).

Equally important has been a rethinking of the process of dispersal and colonization of islands within the Polynesian triangle itself, where the longest voyages of discovery involved distances of as much as 3,000 kilometers against generally prevailing winds and currents. Computer simulations of the probabilities of accidental drift voyaging first led to a new realization of the high degree of intentionality in early Polynesian voyaging (Irwin 1992). But it is the dramatic experimental voyages of the replicated voyaging canoe Hokule’a that have particularly forced a new model of Polynesian colonization (Finney 1994). These voyages, conceived as a kind of “experimental archaeology,” have taken the double-hulled, 19-meter Hokule’a on journeys between many Polynesian archipelagoes without the aid of instrument navigation, the most dramatic being a voyage from Mangareva to remote Easter Island in 1999.

The investigation of voyaging and interaction between Polynesian islands and archipelagoes has also been spurred by the application of new archaeometric techniques, especially X-ray fluorescence sourcing of basalt artifacts such as adzes. M. I. Weisler and Kirch (1996) demonstrated the transport of stone adzes between