The Ancients - The First Hawaiians

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Tristan Hughes goes on an exploration of Hawaii's earliest settlers, guided by the insights of Dr. Patrick Kirch, a leading expert on Hawaiian archeology. From the arrival of Polynesians around AD 1000, using sophisticated double-hull canoes, to their unique agricultural practices and the construction of monumental architecture, they delve into the impact of Polynesian settlers on Hawaii's pristine ecosystem, the use of petroglyphs, and the development of highly stratified societal structures shedding light on Hawaii's ancient past.MOREPolynesian MythologyThe First South AmericansPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor and producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone, welcome to today's episode of The Ancients, and I'm delighted to say that we are venturing to the Pacific Ocean, to the incredible archipelago of islands that is Hawaii today. I love it when we cover once in a while the story of the Polynesians and how they settled these isolated groups of islands in the Pacific Ocean, the world's largest ocean. It is an incredible story, and this episode did not disappoint. Our guest is Dr. Patrick Kerr. He dialed in from Hawaii, so the time difference between us was pretty insane. It was the late afternoon for myself in our office in London, and I had a beer right next to me. It was the early morning for Patrick in Hawaii. But really glad he made it work. Patrick is a leading expert on the archaeology of Hawaii, and he did not let us down. This was fantastic. Let's go. 1,000 years ago, humans reached one of the most isolated archipelagos in the world. Today, it is a famous tourist destination, renowned for its beautiful beaches, its Aloha spirit, rainforests, volcanoes, cuisine, surfing, and of course, if you know your World War II history, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. This is Hawaii, a group of islands situated in the middle of the Pacific

ocean. Long before Captain Cook reached this archipelago in 1778, Polynesian settlers had arrived on its shores and made Hawaii their home. To this day you can still see archaeological traces left behind by these people, from their agricultural systems to their rock art and so much more. This is the story of the first Hawaiians with our guest, Dr. Patrick Kirch. Patrick, it is such a pleasure to have you on the podcast today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. And I think this episode holds the record for having two people from the right opposite ends of the world. I'm in London and it is 6 o'clock at night.

You are in Hawaii, Patrick, and it's right early in the morning. Yes, it is. seven, little after 7 a.m. And it's a lovely, sunny, Hawaiian morning. Well, I'm very jealous indeed. I can't say that about the evening in London today. But you've got your coffee. I've got my beer. And we're going to be talking all things, the first Hawaiians. Patrick, what a story this is. The story of the first people who reached Hawaii, has there been a lot of research, a lot of work done on Hawaiian archaeology in recent decades? Has there been a big interest in it? There has. A lot of your listeners may not be aware of this, but there's been active archaeological

research going on in Hawaii for more than a century, actually. And it's been, you know, the core of my career. I've actually been working on this subject for more than 50 years now, both in Hawaii and the South Pacific, where the Hawaiians themselves came from. There's active archaeological research, both academic. I'm at the University of Hawaii, for example, but there's also a lot of archaeology here that's what we call cultural resource management archaeology, you know, contractual archaeology, because we've had so much development in the islands for tourism and housing and, you know, other infrastructure and so on. So federal and our state laws require archaeological survey and research, you know, when there's to be any development or construction.

So that has added immeasurably to the database about Hawaiian archaeology in recent decades. And is there a lot of interest in Hawaii today about, you know, this archipelago's ancient past? There is, and a lot of it is coming from Native Hawaiians themselves. We have a very, you know, active Native Hawaiian population who have in, I'd say the last 30 years, undergone what's sometimes called a cultural renaissance here, in language and other aspects of culture. And we have a lot of Native Hawaiians now who have become archaeologists. I've actually trained several of them, formerly when I was at University of California at Berkeley and then here in Hawaii. And for learning about the earliest settlers of Hawaii, Patrick, is it just archaeology that helps us learn more about this, or do we have other types of sources too? Yeah, we have a number of sources. The native Hawaiians themselves have a rich oral history, oral traditions. We call those mollello in Hawaiian language.

They don't necessarily go back all the way to the first settlement of the islands, but they become increasingly detailed and rich as you get into, with the 15. 16, 1700s accounts of the various ruling chiefs, marriages, wars. That is a very important source of information on Hawaiian, the Hawaiian past. Comparative linguistics help us to understand how the Hawaiians are related to other Polynesian groups, because Polynesia is a big family of related cultures. Biological information recently has been very interesting. DNA analysis has shown us that Polynesians contacted people in South America, probably around 1,2008. There was actually some intermarriage. Native Polynesians carry a section of DNA that came from South America.

So, yeah, there are various different sources of information that we draw on. Well, let's delve into the arrival and what the latest information is suggesting about it, Patrick. You mentioned Polynesians in passing there. So when do we think the first people reached Hawaii? And who were these people? Yeah, the first people were Polynesians. The Hawaiians are a branch of the Polynesian larger cultural family, if you will. And the Polynesians are a branch of an even larger family we call the Austronesians.

It trace all the way back to Taiwan. We could talk about that later if you want. But the first people, first Polynesians to arrive in Hawaii, we now are pretty confident as around AD 1000 and put a plus or minus 100 on that. We used to think that it was earlier, but that was because of some problems. with the radiocarbon dating that we, of course, used to tie down these kinds of events. The problem was, you know, back when I was first getting involved in Hawaiian archaeology as a student, 50 years ago, it was thought that Polynesians arrived here maybe as early as AD 300.

And that was because we were getting radiocarbon dates around that age. But these were from sites along the coast, and the charcoal that was being radiocarbon dated was not identified as to what kind of charcoal. Now, in more recent time, we've developed methods to identify wood charcoal to species from the anatomy of the wood and so on. What we now think happened is that some of those early dates were from driftwood that had come from the northwest coast of America, big old trees, cedars, pine, things like this, which regularly come down, say, the Columbia River and float around the North Pacific

and end up on Hawaiian beaches. So early Hawaiians coming here and settling and they'd find big logs and break them up with their ads and put them in their earth ovens and then later archaeologists we date them. Well, the problem is if the logs were 400 years old to begin with and then drifted around for maybe another century and ended up on a beach for another century or two. So the radiocarbon date was accurate as far as the age of the old tree, but not as to when it was burned and used by humans, which is what we want to know. So in recent decades, with advances, both in identifying what we're dating, and in, you know,

there have been advances in radio carbon methodology itself as far as the age error, you know, plus or minus factor, right? So in recent years, we don't get any of those older ages anymore. And everything is coming down around about 1,000 AD as far as arrival of Polynesians. Not only here, but in other parts of eastern Polynesia, there was a very rapid. rapid diaspora of Polynesians out of their western Polynesian homeland that's in the Tonga Samoa area, right out to Tahiti, as far as Easter Island, Rapa Nui, up to Hawaii, and so within about two centuries, Polynesians just expanded all over the eastern Pacific.

So should we be imagining it's almost like island hopping and that Hawaii is one of the last groups of islands that the Polynesians settle on just because of where it is? Yes, I mean, it's in the North Pacific, right? If you look at a map of the Pacific, the expansion of Polynesians was pretty much from west to east out along the sort of equatorial zone. To get to Hawaii, they had to sail north. They had to cross the equator, the doldrums, as sailors called it, where winds are often, you know, there's no wind often. So if you're in a sailing canoe, it's difficult. And they get into the North Pacific and find this island group.

And, you know, we often wondered what drove people or pulled people to make such an. venturesome voyage. It takes about a month in a voyaging canoe to get from Tahiti to Hawaii or vice versa. And one possibility is that there's a migratory bird, the golden plover. The Hawaiians call it the Kolea. These plovers come from Siberia and Alaska. The winter sets in in the northern hemisphere. They fly south. Some of them arrive in Hawaii, but others go down to Tahiti and islands in that vicinity. They spend the winter months there, nice and warm, you know, on the beaches. Very nice indeed, yes. Tourist birds, you know.

But then they return every year, and they do this, and they come by the same patch of grass every year. So it may be that Polynesians in the Tahiti area were observing this and saying, okay, these birds are coming back every year, and then they're leaving, they're flying north. There must be land up there, right? They surmise, okay, let's go in that direction and see if we can find other islands. This is just speculation on my part. We know that Polynesians were great observers of nature,

And so this is possibly one factor. Somebody said, we're going to follow the Kolea and see where these things go. And do we know much about the boats that they use that were able to endure the treacherous conditions of the Pacific Ocean? So that's, you know, some groups of them could reach Hawaii. Yes, by the time that the Polynesians were expanding into eastern Polynesia, they had invented the double-hauled canoe. We would call it a catamaran, basically. We believe the older Polynesia ancestral canoes, a thousand more years ago, were smaller canoes.

But in the Tonga Samoa area, probably around the time of Christ and up to when they began to expand to 1,900 AD, they had removed the outrigger and replaced it with a second hull. And they'd also developed technology to cut planks and sew them on so you could heighten the canoe, you know, the hull. You could make it bigger, right, by adding planks. using set coconut rope to lash these together and breadfruit sap is cocking and had quite an amazing technology all in wood and fiber and so on so these double-hauled canoes you know they were capable of carrying you know easily 40 50 people sometimes perhaps more wow you know they had platforms between the two balls right and you get actually a little house on there some of them were

two masted. So these were formidable craft. And, you know, they were, these kinds of canoes were observed by early European explorers like James Cook, Captain Cook from England and so on. So we have a pretty good idea of what they look like. Cook himself was really in awe of the Polynesian canoes. I mean, he wrote about how fast they were. They could sail around his ship while he was sailing. They were, you know, a really remarkable watercraft. Presumably they had the space for, you know, lots of supplies so that they could survive if they were out in the oceans for weeks on end before they found, you know, this lad mass of Hawaii. Yeah, they would have to have had, obviously, sufficient supplies. They probably would catch fish

as they were sailing along, but they would need, you know, some probably dried breadfruit and other starch. And, of course, they could catch rain water when there was rain, but they probably had coconuts on board also to drink. Coconuts are great, you know, food source. But they would also be carrying planting material for their own crops, because Polynesians were agricultural people. We think of them as maritime people, and they were, but they were also agriculturalists. They were land and sea people. So wherever they went, they would carry the planting stalks of their taro, their bananas, their yams, have breadfruit, and so on. And they had domestic animals, they had pigs, they had dogs, and they had chickens, those three main domestic

animals. And so they would be wanting to carry those as well in these big canoes. So when they got to the New Island, you know, they could, you know, have all the necessities to establish a new permanent home there. So it's got the starter pack with them in their canoe. That's fascinating. And do we have any names? I mean, do we hear of any mythological stories about these first people to reach Hawaii? Are there myths surrounding this? Not of the really first settlement. It's interesting. I think that is far enough back in time that these traditions didn't carry on. And this mythological, yes, there's a voyager named Hawaii law,

but it's not tied into any of the real genealogies. But we do have our oral traditions of voyaging a little bit later in time after Hawaii was settled. There are several accounts. There's one involving an individual named Mojkeha, and with a brother, Ola Pah. And these were like third generation descendants of a chief who came from Tahiti, named Maveke, and they knew about. their ancestral land and apparently knew how to get back there.

And so this would be around the 14th century. And the tradition talks about Mojkeha and Olopana. They had a co-wife. Hawaiian chiefly women often had two or more husbands. Interesting. So Lulkea was the wife, and the three of them sailed down to Tahiti. And Olipa stayed there, but Mojkeha ended up returning. It's a very long story.

I don't go under all the details. But Luquia also stayed. But Moikeha came back to Hawaii. But he had had an affair with the Tahitian chiefess while he was there, and he knew she had born him a young son before he left. So later on in his life, when he's back in Hawaii, he wants to see this baby. So he sends one of his sons from Hawaii back to Tahiti to fetch this baby named La. It was now a young, grown young man.

And so La'a, and he gets a new name La Maika Hiki, which means Laa from Tahiti, he comes up to Hawaii and has various adventures there and marriages and so on and so forth. And then he eventually sails back to Tahiti again and never to returns. It's quite a long, you know, story. And I think it's absolutely true. I mean, I think it's no reason to think it's mythological. I think it's an actual account of one family that maintained voyaging connections to Tahiti. But this is after the period of, you know, very first settlement. But it's also testament to their amazing navigation, isn't it?

The fact that, you know, they find Hawaii, but then people are able to get back to Tahiti afterwards to let people know about the discovery and then more people go to Hawaii over time over the following centuries. That's extraordinary. And do we know much about what Hawaii looks like when these first people arrived there? Yes, there's been quite a lot of research myself, but my colleagues also on trying to reconstruct the ecology, the environment of the island. islands at the time of first settlement. Some of this comes from coring in wetlands and then extracting pollen to identify the various species of plants. And you look at changing frequencies in the sediment cores over time. We radio carbon date the sediments, et cetera. So you can get a picture of changing vegetation. That's one angle that we've looked at. And of course, also analyzing the bones of various

animals that, you know, whether it's fish or birds and so on. So all of this has led to a picture of, you know, Islands, before the Polynesians came, there had been no humans in Hawaii, right? So it was a totally, you know, pristine ecosystem that evolved here over millions of years in the middle of the Pacific. One of the things about islands like this that are isolated is land vertebrates, other than birds, can't get out here. So there were no mammals, for example, other than two species of bat. But there were a diversity of birds. They were both seabirds. They were probably very plentiful.

But there were also various kinds of forest birds that had evolved from flighted ancestors that had flown in. There were also flightless birds. And this is something we didn't know until a few decades ago. Large birds that were related to geese, probably their ancestor was something like the Canada goose, which does fly out here occasionally. But there were no predators. So if a little bird evolves, a mutation that is flightless, it's not going to get, you know, chomp down by some tigers. And so flightnessnesses actually evolves over and over again on islands. it turns out like the dodo the dodo yes yeah you know and the moa and new zealand and so on well we had

these flightless birds also quite large right this size of well bigger than turkeys closer to an ostrich sort of side turns out they didn't survive long after people arrived in the islands they probably were nice food packages and what we call a naive fauna so they they'd had no predators so a polynesian you know arriving on the beach and walking up to one of these big birds a bird probably just look at them and say, well, you know, I don't know what you are. You're not part of my consciousness. I don't have any flight response or other than just walk up and grab the bird and put them in the oven, you know, in the earth oven.

They'd be good food packages. Anyway, they're very rare, the bones of them in early sites. So we know they went out early. So that's one example of, you know, a change that was due to human arrival. Another aspect of Polynesian arrival is they also had on their canoes a small rat. We call the Pacific rat. It's really like a mouse size, but it's a rat, according to the zoologists. Now, we don't know whether these rats were just on a storeways because they're commensal animals.

They live in thatch and so on. So they could sneak on to canoes. Or maybe they were carried on purpose in small cages because you can eat them. And Polynesians on some islands did eat them. They're probably pretty tasty. I've never had the opportunity to try one myself, but I wouldn't mind if the opportunity arose. But anyway, we know that everywhere the Polynesians went, these rats went as well. We find the bones of them in archaeological sites everywhere.

Now, they reproduce very fast, these little rats, right? A female Pacific rat can have multiple litters a year and multiple pups in each litter. So you can imagine an exponential increase in these rats. And they're omnivorous. So they'd come ashore on, you know, Hawaii, they'd start reproducing, and they would begin to eat both little seedlings and seeds of native plants and so on. So what do we see in those pollen cores from the lowlands, we see a real change in the native forest over the first two centuries or so, almost the collapse of the lowland forest. And we think it's not so much due to people, although some of it probably due to clearing

forests for gardens and so on. But these rats may have had a major effect, especially in these lowland areas, you know, eating seedlings and seeds so the forest didn't regenerate. So these are some of the changes that we now know occurred after first. human arrival. The higher mountains, the higher forests and so on, didn't see a lot of impact from human arrival. And Patrick, can you describe just for someone like me who's never had the fortune of going to Hawaii, or at least not yet, can you describe us what the topography of Hawaii looks like generally? Is it largely tree cover or is there volcanic material there

as well? What do we know? It's really varied. The thing about Hawaii that's, you know, I really strike you if you do get a chance to come out here. It's highly varied. There are so many micro-environments, and it's different up and down the archipelago, because we have like the island of Hawaii itself, we call it the big island. It's volcanically active, so yes, there are big areas of lava flows and fields. It's erupting right now this morning's paper said Kilauea volcano was fountening 500 feet high yesterday. But then you come to up the island chain, which the islands get older because it's age-progressive of volcanic archipelago.

So here on Oahu, where I live, it's about three million years old. There's no active volcanoes, obviously. The topography is very eroded, and we have these, you know, mountain peaks and ridges. And yes, they're covered in native vegetation, native forest. We have beautiful reefs around Oahu, whereas on the young islands, it's too young to have reef development. So it's really highly varied. Ever wondered what it was like to plot the assassination of Julius Caesar? To stage the Boston Tea Party? Or to orchestrate Blackbeard's final stand on the high seas? I'm Matt Lewis. I'm Holly Mielsen, and we're the hosts of Echoes of History,

the podcast that goes behind the scenes of the iconic game series Assassin's Creed. We're on a mission to uncover just how the game creators recreate all of the most nail-biting pivotal moments in history from the bloody aides of March to the rise and fall of a pirate republic. So grab your hidden Assassin's Blade and Blueprint

and join us every week on Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. And so the animals that they bring along with them, Patrick, just a refresher. I know you mentioned it earlier, but just to recap. So the rat, maybe a stowaway. Sheep and pig and dogs.

Are those the other three? Dogs, pigs and chickens. Sorry, my apologies. Yeah, no sheep. Of course. And the types of fruits that they had as well, so is that breadfruit, tarot, and any others as well? Yeah. So the Polynesians, wherever they sailed, they took with them.

a variety of crop plants, mostly root crops, fruit crops, a few trees. Taro, which is a root crop, is very important, bananas, breadfruit, yams, sugar cane. These are all things that they brought along with them. And a very important crop was the sweet potato, which Polynesians obtained from South America. We know that Polynesian canoes got to the coast of South America and picked up this tuberous crop, which have been domesticated in the Andes. and by around the 1400 AD, if not slightly earlier, sweet potato begins to show up in Polynesian sites. So we find the carbonized remains of tubers.

So we know, you know, it's here. And it became a really important crop in the drier areas of Hawaii. These islands have a windward side that's wetter and a leeward side that's drier. And the drier areas, sweet potato was really a very important crop. So they arrive with their foodstuffs and their animals, they reach Hawaii. Has the archaeology revealed a lot or anything about the nature of the settlements that they found? What do we know about the settlements? We only have one archaeological site from that very earliest period, and I was privileged as a student years ago to be involved in the excavation of that site, so I'm quite familiar with it.

It's here on the island of Oahu, on a beach ridge, just a few meters above the beach at Waimanalo, beautiful, beautiful beach. and it consisted just of a cluster of small thatched houses low to the ground. We found the post molds where the posts have been set. The floor was paved with river gravel, smooth river gravel. There were little hars, you know, for fire, and there were earth ovens. The Polynesians cooked their food in pits dug into the ground and they heat rocks, you know, sour fire and heat rocks and then put the food on that and cover it over. and, you know, it makes a really lovely, smoky-flavored, you know, food.

And we found at least one of those earth ovens in that site. The artifacts there were included fish hooks made of pearl shell and bone, Adzes, you know, which are like an axe, but in Europe, I think you call them a selt or kelton and woodworking tool. They had those out of basalt. We found some ornaments, necklace ornaments, that sort of thing. So a simple little hamlet, probably a cluster of sites next to a, a freshwater stream where they get their fresh water, and they're probably planting their gardens

just inland. And are their houses made out of organic materials, or do we have stone buildings as well as surviving? The bases or foundations of the Hawaiian house, especially the later ones, of which we have hundreds of thousands of examples. They have stone foundations often, a platform or terrace faced up with stone, and again, often paved with fine gravel, smooth, water-worn gravel, also nice on your feet. But the super structures were all of wood and thatch, so wooden posts, and then thatching most commonly out of a native grass called pele, but sometimes out of pandanus leaves or woven coconut leaves. So how much further forward do we go before we get those lots more examples of these early settlements spring up? Because I don't mind going a bit further forward in time if that means there's more archaeological evidence there.

Yeah, where you start to get more abundant archaeological evidence by the 13th century. Oh, okay, that's fine, yes. Yeah, by then we know all of the main islands were, at least had some settlements on them by the 13th century. By the 15th century, people are moving into the more marginal drier areas that I've talked about, the leeward areas. They preferred initially the windward areas because with greater rainfall, it's better for the agriculture, for crops and so on. After a few hundred years, the population clearly had built up to a level where there was some competition for land territory and people began to shift over into these

drier leeward areas and onto the younger islands like Maui and Hawaii that don't have as much arable land. And that's where the sweet potato is really important because having the sweet potato allowed them to garden and produce sufficient food in the drier areas. Well, let's explore that now. So do we know much about how they farmed the land back then, you know, almost a thousand years ago? Yeah, we do. We've done a lot of research on the ancient farming techniques and there's lots of archaeological evidence for this in the form of, first of all, there's a kind of wetland cultivation. This was for the taro where they would level valley bottoms, create level terraces, sort of cutting and filling, and usually face up the terrace with stone, very nice stonework, a meter or too high. and then they would construct a canal that down the river and dig a canal would come in and then transport water from the stream into these terraces.

So your listeners might have images in their head of rice terraces in Asia that's more familiar with that, exactly the same kind of technology, right? So irrigated valley bottoms. And then in the dry land areas, they were constructing what we call field systems. So again, they were delineating fields with stone walls. or embankments between them. This seems to have been as much a matter of ownership, you know, laying out individual plots, marking them out, but also probably served a function of erosion control. A lot of these areas are windy, so having these embankments would help to catch soil

that was being blown. And some of these dry island areas, as they were described in early European contact, along these embankment walls, they grew sugar cane. A sugarcane, it's a plant that was domesticated in the Pacific in the New Guinea area and carried out by the Polynesian. The cane will grow to heights of about 10, 12 feet. And as the wind sweep down off the mountain, they're carrying some moisture still. And these sugarcane barriers acted to catch moisture and sort of like a fog drip. And we've done this experimentally, a colleague of mine from Stanford University, a set of experimental gardens on the Big Island.

And he's shown that these sugar cane rows will catch the rain or the mist, and they allow water to drip, drip, drip, drip down. So very clever, you know, it's a technology, sort of biological technology there of using the cane to catch water in an area where water is scarce. And is it also a very sustainable way of farming, too? Is it those methods that allow the settlements to grow, and I'm presuming, go from, as you mentioned earlier, these very early hamlets, maybe into the equivalent of towns.

That's a good point you raise about towns. The settlement pattern in Hawaii, we don't get urbanism. We don't really get towns or cities as such. We get some concentrations, and that's where the chiefly elites tended to be. I refer them as royal centers. So you'll get concentrations of housing along with temple sites are quite large stone foundations of these temples where the elites perform various kinds of ceremonies.

But the common people were more dispersed over the landscape. So they were living either along the coast, where, of course, fishing is important. The houses, in other words, were interspersed with the gardens, with the farming. So we have this more dispersed settlement pattern. Ever wondered what it was like to plot the assassination of Julius Caesar? To stage the Boston Tea Party? or to orchestrate Blackbeard's final stand on the high seas. I'm Matt Lewis.

I'm Holly Mielsen, and we're the hosts of Echoes of History, the podcast that goes behind the scenes of the iconic game series Assassin's Creed. We're on a mission to uncover just how the game creators recreate all of the most nail-biting pivotal moments in history from the bloody aides of March... To the rise and fall of a pirate republic. So grab your hidden assassin. And join us every week on Echoes of History,

a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. We'll get more into those elites and those kings and that kind of status idea in a bit. But I also like to ask a bit more about fishing, because we talked about that. really interesting farming techniques. Do they also have some really striking fishing techniques, too? Yes, they had a diversity of fishing techniques using hooks, of course, for angling, trolling. They used spears.

They had traps. I mean, the diversity of techniques is amazing. And I can't help but mention the Hawaiians invented true aquaculture using fish ponds. Where the marine environment was suitable, this was not everywhere, but where you had protected coastlines, like on the southern coastline of Molokai Island, very protected. The reef flat extends out one or two kilometers, and they would construct these arc-shaped or it was like semi-circles of stone, piling up the stone to create a wall, an arc-shaped wall that goes out onto the reef, flat curves around, and comes back.

And these were usually built where there was a small stream or a spring or something on the coast where fresh water was coming out. So by impounding this area, they would create a brackish water mix between the salt water and the fresh water, right? And that's the environment that a couple of species of fish, the milkfish and the mullet, they thrive in those environments that have gateways with wooden slats that would allow the very small juvenile fish to come in. Once the fish, you know, they were feeding in this nice brackish water environment with algae and so on, and they get to certain size, they couldn't get back out into the ocean. ocean, you know, through the slatted gates. And then periodically, they would sweep through these ponds with same nets of a certain mesh size, so they didn't want to take the small ones, right? But the mesh would catch the larger and then harvest, you know, hundreds of these fish. There were

several hundred of these fish ponds constructed throughout the islands. And we've been able to date the construction of some of them by, again, carefully coring in the pond sediments and dating when the sediment shifts from being marine to brackish. So you can still see fish ponds if you visit Hawaii today. You can still see those archaeological sites. Absolutely. And there have been some efforts to try to restore some of them. Unfortunately, most of them were abandoned in the last century or so.

And then they got invaded by invasive mangrove that never existed here in Hawaii. But one of the very largest is here on Oahu. It's called Hayeo Fish Pond. And over the last few years, a community group has removed the mangrove, a difficult job, but they pull that out, they restored the wall, and they're operational again. So, yes, you come, you can see fish ponds in operation. I mean, Patrick, it's amazing. It sounds like the archaeology is revealing a lot about the lives of everyday people

of some of these earliest people to settle in Hawaii over those first few centuries. It's amazing. And what do we then know about the rise of these. royal centers, the rise of elites, and I'm presuming more monumental architecture if you say things like temples? Yes, monumental architecture definitely is here in Hawaii, right? And the Polynesians, all of them, have a kind of social organization or sociopolitical that we call chiefdom. So I'm sure all your listeners are familiar with that. So all the Polynesians are chiefly societies, a hereditary chiefship. But in Hawaii, as time went on, this hereditary

pattern of chiefship, got more and more elaborated, more stratified. So at the time that Europeans arrived about two centuries ago, what we see in Hawaii is a more highly stratified kind of chiefly society than anywhere else in Polynesia, to the extent that I no longer refer to that late Hawaiian society as a chiefdom, but rather as an archaic state, the kind of society that we know evolved very early on, say, in Mesopotamia or in Shang China, Mesoamerica, and so on. It clearly developed independently in Hawaii in isolation. It wasn't, you know, the idea of divine kings, which Hawaiians had, did not come from

somewhere else. They elaborated invented this concept themselves. But indeed, the Hawaiian ruling chiefs, the apex of the hierarchy, in that late period, they were known as Ali Akua, which literally translate God King. They were described by Native Hawaiian scholars in the 19th century as being, like, hot, raging, like fiery blazes. And so there were all kinds of protocols around this that these most highly ranked chiefs often traveled at night. So it's not to be seen by the commoners, because if the commoners looked upon them, it was a violation of we call the kapu or the taboo. They might have to be put to death.

So this whole kapu system was, yeah, very elaborate. There were nine named grades of chiefs in Hawaii at the time of content, nine, you know, ranked grades of chiefship. And do we have any archaeological evidence for this system, too, to go in hand with that? There's monumental architecture, in particular, of the temple. So the Hawaiian religious system had also evolved or transformed in parallel with this increasing social stratification. So Hawaiians, like other polytheistic, but they had four principal gods. And two of those were extremely important. Those were the god of war, Koo, and the god of dry land agriculture, Lono.

The god of wetland agriculture was also very important on some of these older islands. That's the god Kane. There's another god Kanooa who had to do more with the afterworld and fishing things. So there were temples constructed for the worship of each of these different kinds of gods. And the temples of the war god were extremely important. quite large. So the foundations of them were built in stone. Again, they had perishable superstructures that, you know, didn't persist. But there are hundreds of these foundations of temples, agricultural temples, well, it's the war temples that archaeologists have studied over

the years, you know, mapping them, but also excavating and dating them. I've done a lot of work on this, the island of Maui actually published a whole book on the temple system of Maui a few years ago. So these began to develop and we get elaborated again around the 1500 AD or so and become more and more elaborate as time goes on. You know, some of the, just give you an example, one of the largest temples in Maui War Temple has a base area of 9,000 square meters. Wow. Yeah. And five terraces that rise up, you know, to a height of 30 meters above the ground, something like that. I mean, and it's all in stack stone. The Hawaiian, You know, basalt rock that these islands are made of is very hard to work.

It's very hard stone. So they didn't get into cutting and dressing stone like the Maya did. Maya had it easy because they had soft limestone, right? It was easy to work. Hawaiian basalt is really tough stuff. But they would stack it up. They would take these rocks and stack them. They're very good at doing dry masonry like that.

It is dry masonry, is it? Okay. They don't have any mortar anything. Dry stacked masonry, exactly. And so these temples, foundations, they're either... terraces or some of them are walled or some combined walls and terraces. Again, they're very large. And if you were to see them when they were in use, and we do have some drawings like from Captain Cook's voyage, his artist, recorded some of these when they were still in use. So they had structures

on them that were, again, pole and thatch, as well as carved images, right? They had these quite impressive images of the God coup and so on. And the God coup demanded human sacrifices prior to prologation of war or after the conclusion of war. The human sacrifice was only offered to the war god, not to the other god. The other gods were offered sacrifices of pigs and dogs and vegetable, you know, produce and so on. But coup demanded human sacrifice. You know, that's another aspect of this archaic state kind of, you know, social evolution of human sacrifice. I call it ritual homicide.

It's homicide that's sanctioned by the state. I mean, homicide in most societies is, you know, we don't like to kill each other. As the Ten Commandments say, thou shalt not kill. But in certain societies, the king can kill, the priests can kill, right? Two gods that demand those. It's ritually sanctioned homicide. I guess it's interesting to theorize how many centuries half hour back, you know, practices like that could have gone. I mean, if I'm bringing us back to, you know, the earlier Hawaiians by this time.

And does it seem like there's almost a step change with the use of Basso, and the use of stone foundations, but could it be, for instance, let's say with these temple-like structures or these bigger buildings with these stone foundations, could there have been precedents from earlier centuries where they weren't using basalt and they were just made out of perishable material and they just haven't survived? Yes, I'm sure. There were very simple constructions. In the South Pacific, some of the islands there, the temples are just simple rows of upright stones representing the gods, for example. And we think probably the initial Hawaiian temples were something like that.

Yeah, quite simple. But, yeah, you get a bigger population. You get social stratification. Chiefs for kings can control large labor forces to call it. I mean, it took a lot of labor to build some of these temples, right? Yeah. So you get that in the later period. Do we know whether, do they have any metal working at all?

What types of materials they would have used for their tools? They did not have metal. And I don't think there, even, you know, iron ore is not prevalent here in the island. So they had no middle working. They were, you know, what we would classically call a Neolithic kind of society in that sense. Very elegant stone working. Their stone ads are beautifully, you know, produced. They found the finest grain basalt.

All the islands are made of basalt, but it varies in the quality. And there are just certain places where the basalt is extremely fine grain. So when you are napping it, striking it, it produces, you know, a beautiful conical, you know, if you're familiar with Flint napping. You know, it's not as good as Flint, but the fine grain basalt here can be worked very well. And one of those sources, this is incredible, is it 11,000 foot elevation on the Big Island of Hawaii, on the slope of Monacoa volcano. At 11,000 feet, I mean, if you're Hawaiian, you don't have, you know, your modern parkas, your polyethylene parkas, and your hiking. boots and all that, right? So these people were going barefoot up, you know, this volcanic mountain where it was freezing at night. They went and they found this flow, this particular

basalt flow, which had erupted during the last ice age, Mount Achaea was capped for the glacier during the last ice age. And this small flow erupted under the glacier, which then supercooled the lava. That's why this particular flow is so fine-grained. And they found this and they began to work it. And for centuries, they worked this quarry. The quarry is amazing. There are immense piles of flakes from the working of thousands and thousands of ounces. In recent years, we've developed a method of geochemically tracing, you know, the different quarry sources, right? You use x-ray diffraction to get a chemical signature. We can discriminate these different quarry sources. And we find this mona basalt moving off even the island of Hawaii to Maui and even up here to O'Wau.

So it was so desirable that they were trading these ads from the big island up the archipelago. So it's almost like with stone circles over here in Britain, how people nowadays can look at the rock type and trace where they were originally quarried from these big stones that ultimately made these stone circles. It seems similar over there in Hawaii. You can learn more about how these early Hawaiians, the quarries that they used and where those stones ultimately ended up. Yes, absolutely. We're doing a lot of work on that. I actually, my team just to about three years ago discovered a new quarry was unknown on the island of Molokai, where I do a lot of work on the east end of the island. The west end of the island has lots of known quarries, but we knew there was some quarry source on the east end because we'd found flakes that we knew come from the east end volcano, but we couldn't trace it. And eventually, we managed to find this thing way up a hidden little valley gulch.

It's an amazing quarry side. And on the wall, a cliff that they were working on this fine grand basalt, they're actually. petroglyphs, anthropomorphic petroglyphs, that I think maybe are marking, you know, ownership, this is my quarry. You know, I've got my sign here. Well, Patrick, you mentioned the petroglyph word, and I've been saving this topic till one of the last, so let's get to it now. I mean, the story of Hawaiian petroglyphs, which still seizes news headlines down to the present day, can you tell us about these because they are extraordinary? Yeah, the petroglysis, they occur across the islands in different, you know, places. I know you're aware of this. I think it's made

the press. There's a recent report on petroglyphs at sea level. They're actually on this island Oahu, but up at Pockeye Bay. And they get exposed periodically every few years. They get covered with sand. They're right in the tidal zone. And the sand will wash away. And then you see the petroglys every got very excited a few weeks ago when these appeared again. And they're anthropomorphic human like stick figures. Unfortunately, there's no way to date them directly. So We don't know their age. And those particular ones at Pockeye Bay, I would speculate they might be marking the arrival some people because they are at the coast marking an event.

Who knows, like maybe a canoe from the South Pacific? I don't know. I don't know, I'm just speculating. But I do know, you know, other petrogly. I've studied other petrocliffe sites, for example, on the island of Maui, where I did a lot of work, and the dryland side of the island area called Kahikinui, and we find there little clusters of petroglyss, adjacent to areas that we think were freshwater springs in the past. They're dry now because of deforestation. But these are areas geologically where we think water was

seeping out. And on the rock face over these seeps, we find clusters. Again, often anthropomorphs, human stick fear types, but also of dogs. You know, these little pictures of dogs and with the pointy ears and the up-curved tail, and we found about 18 different clusters like this of petroglyphs, each probably associated with a water source. And then down on the big island where they have the volcanic terrain, there are several well-known petroglyph sites, one at Pua Co, where you have a lava field, if you will, a smooth, probably smooth lava, called Pahoi Hoy. And there are several thousand petroglyphs there in a great big cluster. One of the most interesting one shows a line of, I think, is 20 or 30 stick figures, appearing to march, marching, you know, in a column, and then to the side, one very much larger stick figure.

And I think it's representing a chief and his warriors. And just as in, you know, some of the early European art, they would depict social status by showing bigger figures, you know, the clergy or the king would be depicted as much larger than the common. people. Same thing here. So this large stick figure is, I think, representing some kind of rank status. And then we probably have a line of, it could be warriors, because we know there were battles that took place in this area in the past. Battles between the islands, do we think, or between different groups of people on one island? Both. But in this case, in the late period before European arrival, so I'm talking of the 17th, 18th centuries, there were lots of wars, especially going on between Maui and Hawaii Islands, those two kingdoms, they were related

in that the elites were intermarrying, but they were also fighting for control. Again, it mirrors a lot of European history, right, intermarriage, and yet war between competing kingdoms. And we have some detail accounts. I mentioned earlier, the Molello, the Hawaiian oral traditions, you know, talk about these. So one, for example, was a king of Maui named Kamalala Valu, and he sailed over in his war canoes and, you know, made war against the Hawaii Islanders. Unfortunately, his reconnaissance scouts failed to recognize that a lot of the population on Hawaii Island lived in the uplands, and his scouts had come back and said, oh, they're not a lot of people there. We can easily defeat them. Well, they were wrong. And when the Maui warriors got there,

all of a sudden these big army came from the uplands and routed the Maui army. They fled. Well, I must admit, maybe the 17th and 18th centuries is a bit too far. ahead for the ancients. But we can bring it back, Patrick, by saying that, you know, that's the largest scale that you have later, but you can presume that there were smaller clashes that went stretched back centuries, almost a thousand years or so. And also, shall we clarify with the words Petrocliffe? So this is simply the kind of artistic patterns, as you said, of human stick figures, dogs as well, carved into stone, presumably bashed in with another type of rock with a hammerstone, do we think? Yeah, exactly. Pecked would be the way.

So you take a hard basalt chisel or hammerstone and then repeatedly peck into the softer lava, which has got little air holes in it, right? It's porous so you can break down that lava. And then you're basically creating grooves outlining neither of the stick figures, the dogs. There are others that are just geometric, concentric circles, that sort of thing. And I know it's always so hard to date rock art, but can we presume that some of that rock art does date to the very, very early centuries. when people first arrive in Hawaii and settle there. Some of it almost certainly does,

but the problem is we can't discriminate because we can't directly do it. That's a problem with rock art. It's really hard to date, as you say. Occasionally, well, there was one case that comes to mind on the big island where there's a lava tube cave. It has petroglyphs on the wall. And as people, they occupy this cave, they lived in it.

And so the earth, you know, straight on the debris of their occupation, began to build up and build up against covering the lower layer of petroglysis, and we were able to radio-carbon date charcoal in the occupation layer. So then we know that the pediglis predated that. We can at least say, okay, these were before. I don't remember what the date was. I'm sorry, but that's one case where we're able to date the petroglysis. And it seems like the art, depending on what they depicted, could mean a variety of different things, whether it's a territory boundary, or, you know,

as you mentioned earlier, maybe the ones by the sea is the welcoming of a new group of people to the island or another one with the larger stick figure and the smaller ones, maybe a chieftain and his followers. So I guess the meaning of the art could vary depending on where they made it. Absolutely. And I think there were multiple meanings, I'm sure. I mean, we can speculate as I have about petrogless water sources or quarries being ownership. You know, the ones at Pockeye Bay, I said they might memorialize a arrival of a group of people. But thinking about it, it might memorialize that they killed some people who were trying to come and take their territory, and then they memorialized it by saying, okay, we defeated these people who were trying to come and make more on us. Patrick, this has been such a fascinating chat, exploring what the archaeology is revealing about these earliest settlers in Hawaii. But it also sounds really, really exciting for the future. If we go back to what you mentioned at the beginning, the big interest there is in archaeology in Hawaii right now,

Does it feel almost inevitable that new archaeological discoveries will be made over the following years and decades, which will add more to our knowledge of these earliest settlers of Hawaii? Yes, I'm sure there will be, you know, new discoveries. And also, what I've learned over 50 years of doing this is, you know, new technologies, new methods of extracting data. That's one of the remarkable things. Things we can do today, like with the geochemical sourcing of stone tools or, you know, analyzing pollen grains out of swamp cores. isotopes from, you know, little rat bones to see what they were eating. We have so much more tools, so many more tools today than we did. And I'm sure we're going to invent, you know,

more tools in the future. I mean, my students are not using LIDAR. That's another one, you know, Lidar mapping. I have a native Hawaiian student who's working on the island of Molokai, and she's using LIDAR, and she showed me yesterday her photographs of an area where there are four of these big temple sites. We knew of the temple sites. And she's revealing this whole, whole agricultural field system surrounding them. I didn't know this thing was there because it's all in high grass and invasive species today. You can't see it walking on the ground. The LiDAR picked it up. I was blown away. I said, my God, Hewell, you know, this is fantastic stuff. So, yeah, new discoveries all the time. Well, when we hear more about those discoveries,

no doubt we'll get you and your colleagues back on the show to talk more about it. This has been absolutely brilliant. Last but not least, Patrick, you have written books all about this subject, too? Oh, yes, I have. And the latest was a revision of a book I did years ago. It's called Feathered Gods and Fishhooks, the archaeology of ancient Hawaii. It's the University of Hawaii Press. If anyone wants to delve deeply into what we know about Hawaiian archaeology, you might want to have a look at that book. Absolutely. Patrick, it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show today. Now, pleasure has been all mine. Thank you. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Patrick Kerch talking you through the story, the fascinating story, of the first settlers of Hawaii, the first Hawaiians. I hope you enjoyed the episode. It's about time we returned to the Pacific Ocean and these amazing Polynesians

who managed to settle all of these islands, isolated islands, in the center of the world's largest ocean. Would you like us to do Easter Islands next? Let us know. I'm quite key. Anyway, thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favor. If you'd also be kind enough to leave us a lovely rating as well, well we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hits Podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode. Thank you.