| AOR Archaeology Online Resources |
| Cultural Database |
| "Discover, Explore, and Learn from the Past!" |
| Polynesia/ Polynesians |
| In 1000 AD, the Polynesians were a widespread ethnic group stretching from New Zealand to Easter Island and out to the Hawaiian Islands. This area is approximately 20 million square kilometers, twice the size of the United States. They had to have been great navigators. Polynesian origins are most likely to people of centeral eastern Indonesia and the Philippines with contact with Melanesians in the western Pacific. New Guinea and large agricultural populations may have existed as far east as the Solomon Islands by the start of the Polynesian dispersal around 1500 BC. The biological, linquistic, and technological roots of later Polynesian culture lie in the eastern islands of Southeast Asia. Rice cultivation in southern China developed around 7500 years ago, and after 4000 BC led to expansion through Taiwan and the Philippines into the islands of Indonesia. Around 1500 BC the so called Lapita culture spread out into the Pacific, from the Admiralty Islands to Tonga and Samoa in the east. |
| Lapita colonists made decorated red-slip pottery, used obsidian tools from volcanic sources in Melanesia, and created a range of shell ornaments, tools, and fishing hooks. Sea fishing and shellfish were important sources of food. They cultivated yam and taro, coconut, breadfruit and bananas. Lapita kept pigs, fowl, and possibly dogs and were skilled navigators on the water. The Marquesas Islands were most likely settled from Samoa around 200 BC and from there, Easter Island, the Hawaiian Islands, Tahiti, and the Society Islands in the mid 1st millenium AD. New Zealand was probably the last region to be reached, around 900 AD. By 1000 AD, the Polynesians had introduced new crops and livestock, developed new systems of horticulture, and the rise of chiefdoms arose around 1200 AD. |
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| Price: $25.00 |
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| Price: $50.00 |
| The Wet and the Dry: Irrigation and Agricultural Intensification in Polynesia By: Patrick Vinton Kirch |
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| Price: $51.62 |
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| Price: $37.67 |
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| Price: $29.99 |
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