Polynesia

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Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the triangle

Polynesia (from the Greek words meaning "many islands") is a large grouping of over 1000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The term "Polynesia" was coined by Charles de Brosses in 1756, and originally applied to all the islands of the Pacific. Jules Dumont d'Urville in an 1831 lecture to the Geographical Society of Paris proposed a restriction on its use, and also introduced the terms Micronesia and Melanesia. This division into three distinct Pacific sub-regions remains in widespread use today.

Geography

Polynesia may be described as a triangle with its corners at Hawai'i, New Zealand and Easter Island. The other main island groups located within the Polynesian triangle are Samoa, Tonga, the various island chains that form the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. A Polynesian island group outside of this great triangle is Tuvalu. There are small Polynesian enclaves in the Solomons and in Vanuatu.

It is also an anthropological term referring to one of the three parts of Oceania (the others being Micronesia and Melanesia) whose pre-colonial population generally belongs to one ethno-cultural family as a result of centuries of maritime migrations. Then westerners came (more maritime migrations) and alternately abused, enslaved and intermingled with the population.

Cook Bay on Moorea, French Polynesia

The following are the islands and island groups, either nations or sub-national territories, that are of native Polynesian culture. Some islands of Polynesian origin are outside the general triangle that geographically defines the region.

American Samoa (overseas United States territory), Anuta (in the Solomon Islands), Cook Islands and Niue (both self-governing states in association with New Zealand), Easter Island (part of Chile, also called Rapa Nui, Emae (in Vanuatu), French Polynesia (a territory of France), Hawai‘i (a state of the United States), Kapingamarangi (in the Federated States of Micronesia), Loyalty Islands (a dependency of the French territory of New Caledonia), Mele (in Vanuatu), New Zealand (also called Aotearoa), Nuguria (in Papua New Guinea), Nukumanu and Takuu (both in Papua New Guinea), Nukuoro (in the Federated States of Micronesia), Ontong Java, Pileni, Sikaiana, Rennell, and Tikopia (all in the Solomon Islands), Samoa (an independent nation), Swains Island (politically a part of American Samoa), Tokelau (an overseas dependency of New Zealand), Tonga (an independent nation), Tuvalu (an independent nation), and Wallis and Futuna (overseas territory of France)

History

Map of American Polynesia, 1851

One theory is that the spread of pottery and domesticates in Polynesia is connected with the Lapita-culture that, around 1600–1200 B.C.E., started expanding from New Guinea as far east as Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. During this time the aspects of the Polynesian culture developed, especially on the islands of Samoa and Tonga. Around 300 B.C.E. this new Polynesian people spread from Samoa and Tonga to the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas Islands. X-ray fluorescence sourcing of basalt artifacts found on both islands supports this theory.

Around AD 300, or earlier, the Polynesians discovered and settled Easter Island. Polynesians settled Hawai'i Around AD 400 and settled New Zealand around AD 1000.

Migration

Polynesians settled the vast Polynesian triangle by 700C.E.

The migration of the Polynesians is impressive considering that the islands settled by them are spread out over great distances — the Pacific Ocean covers nearly a half of the Earth's surface area. Most contemporary cultures, by comparison, never voyaged beyond out of sight of land.

Knowledge of the traditional Polynesian methods of navigation was largely lost after contact with and colonization by Europeans. Explorer Captain James Cook, already familiar with Charles de Brousse’s accounts of large groups of Pacific islanders who were driven off course in storms and ended up hundreds of miles away with no idea where they were, encountered in the course of one of his own voyages a castaway group of Tahitians who had become lost at sea in a gale and blown 100 miles away to the island of Atiu. Cook wrote that the Atiu incident ‘will serve to explain, better than the thousand conjectures of speculative reasoners, how the detached parts of the earth, and, in particular, how the South Seas, may have been peopled’ (Sharp 1963:16).

By the late 19th century to the early 20th century a more generous view of Polynesian navigation had come into favour, perhaps creating too romantic a picture of their canoes, seamanship and navigational expertise. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers such as Abraham Fornander and Stephenson Percy Smith told of heroic Polynesians migrating in great coordinated fleets from Asia to the islands now known as Polynesia (Finney 1976:5). In the mid-twentieth century, Thor Heyerdahl proposed another romanticised theory of Polynesian origins, arguing that the Polynesians had migrated from South America on balsa-log boats (Sharp 1963:122-128, Finney in Finney 1976:5).

Research and practice: A more sober and analytical view was presented by Andrew Sharp, who amassed a wealth of evidence to challenge the ‘heroic vision’ hypothesis, asserting instead that Polynesian maritime expertise was severely limited and that as a result the settlement of Polynesia had been the result of luck, random searching, and drifting, rather than as organised voyages of colonisation (Sharp 1963). Sharp’s reassessment caused a huge amount of controversy and led to a stalemate between the romantic and the sceptical views (Finney in Finney 1976:5).

By the mid to late 1960s it was time for a new hands-on approach. Dr David Lewis sailed his catamaran from Tahiti to New Zealand using stellar navigation without instruments (Lewis 1976). Ben Finney built a 40-foot replica of a Hawaiian double canoe and tested it in a series of sailing and paddling experiments in Hawaiian waters. At the same time, ethnographic research in the Caroline Islands in Micronesia brought to light the fact that traditional stellar navigational methods were still very much in everyday use there. This was also the case in the Sulu Archipelago in the Philippines. The building and testing of canoes inspired by traditional designs, the harnessing of knowledge from skilled Micronesian and Philippine navigators, as well as voyages using stellar navigation, allowed practical conclusions about the sea-worthiness and handling capabilities of traditional Polynesian canoes and allowed a better understanding of the navigational methods that were likely to have been used by the Polynesians and of how they, as people, were adapted to seafaring (Finney in Finney 1976:6-9).

Recent re-creations of Polynesian voyaging have used methods based largely on Micronesian methods and the teachings of a Micronesian navigator, Mau Piailug. See also Polynesian Voyaging Society, Hokulea.

Techniques: It is probable that the Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather (Gatty 1999). See Polynesian navigation.

Scientists think that long-distance Polynesian voyaging followed the seasonal paths of birds. There are some references in their oral traditions to the flight of birds and some say that there were range marks onshore pointing to distant islands in line with these flyways. A voyage from Tahiti, the Tuamotus or the Cook Islands to New Zealand might have followed the migration of the Long-tailed cuckoo (Eudynamys taitensis) just as the voyage from Tahiti to Hawaii would coincide with the track of the Pacific Golden Plover and the Bristle-thighed Curlew. It is also believed that Polynesians employed shore-sighting birds as did many seafaring peoples. One theory is that they would have taken a frigatebird with them. These birds refuse to land on the water as their feathers will become waterlogged making it impossible to fly. When the voyagers thought they were close to land they may have released the bird, which would either fly towards land or else return to the canoe (Gatty 1999).

The peoples of the Pacific, including Micronesians and Polynesians, developed navigating by the stars into a fine art. It is surmised that the Polynesians imagined the heavens as the interior of a dome where a star proceeded along a path which passed over certain islands. They had names for over a hundred and fifty stars. A navigator would have known where and when a given star rose and set, as well as which islands it passed directly over. Thus Polynesian navigators would have then been able to sail toward the star they knew to be over their destination, and as it moved westward with time they would then set their course by the succeeding star which would have then moved over the target island (Gatty 1999).

It is likely that the Polynesians also used wave and swell formations to navigate. Many of the habitable areas of the Pacific Ocean are groups, or chains, of islands (or atolls) in long chains—hundreds of kilometers long. Island chains have predictable effects on waves and on currents. Navigators who lived within a group of islands would learn the effect various islands had on their shape, direction, and motion and would have been able to correct their path in accordance with the changes they perceived. When they arrived in the vicinity of a chain of islands they were unfamiliar with, they may have been able to transfer their experience and deduct that they were nearing a group of islands. Once they had arrived fairly close to a destination island, they would have been able to pinpoint its location by sightings of land-based birds, certain cloud formations, as well as the reflections shallow water made on the undersides of clouds. It is thought that the Polynesian navigators may have measured the time it took to sail between islands in "canoe-days’’ or a similar type of expression (Gatty 1999).

For information about colonisation and independence, follow the links for each nation.

Politics

Economy

With the exception of New Zealand, the majority of independent Polynesian islands derive much of their income from foreign aid and remittances from those who live in other countries. Some encourage their young people to go where they can earn good money to remit to their stay-at-home relatives. Many Polynesian locations, such as Easter Island, supplement this with tourism income. Some have more unusual sources of income, such as Tuvalu which marketed its '.tv' internet top-level domain name, or the Cooks that relied on stamp sales. A very few others still live as they did before Western Civilization encountered them.

Demographics

Polynesia divides into two distinct cultural groups, East Polynesia and West Polynesia. The culture of West Polynesia is conditioned to high populations. It has strong institutions of marriage, and well-developed judicial, monetary and trading traditions. It comprises the groups of Tonga, Niue, Samoa and the Polynesian outliers.

Houses of natives in Tahiti, circa 1842

Eastern Polynesian cultures are highly adapted to smaller islands and atolls including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Hawaii and Easter Island. However, the large islands of New Zealand were first settled by Eastern Polynesians who adapted their culture to a non-tropical environment. Anthropologists term the Eastern Polynesian system of kinship the Hawaiian system.

Religion, farming, fishing, weather prediction, out-rigger canoe (similar to modern catamarans) construction and navigation were highly developed skills because the population of an entire island depended on them.

Trading consisted of both luxuries and mundane items. Many low-lying islands could suffer severe famine if their gardens were poisoned by the salt from the storm-surge of a hurricane. In these cases fishing, the primary source of protein, would not ease loss of food energy. Navigators, in particular, were highly respected and each island maintained a house of navigation, with a canoe-building area.

Settlements by the Polynesians were of two categories. The hamlet and the village. Size of the island inhabited determined whether or not a hamlet would be built. The larger volcanic islands usually had hamlets because of the many zones that could be divided across the island. Food and resources were more plentiful and so these settlements of four to five houses (usually with gardens) were established so that there would be no overlap between the zones. Villages, on the other hand, were built on the coasts of smaller islands and consisted of thirty or more houses. Usually these villages were fortified with walls and pallisades made of stone and wood [Encyclopedia Britannica, 1995]. However, New Zealand demonstrates the opposite; large volcanic islands with fortified villages.

Because of a strong readiness to accept new ideas and due to relatively large numbers of competitive sects of Christian missionaries in the islands, Polynesians readily adopted Christianity.

Polynesian languages are all members of the family of Oceanic languages, a sub-branch of the Austronesian language family.

Culture

See also

  • Polynesian mythology
  • List of Polynesians

Template:Polynesia

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