Polynesia

Geography

Geology

Polynesia is characterized by a small amount of land spread over a very large portion of the mid- and southern Pacific Ocean. It consists of approximately 300,000 to 310,000 square kilometres (117,000 to 118,000 sq mi) of land, of which more than 270,000 km2 (103,000 sq mi) are within New Zealand. The Hawaiian archipelago consists of about half the remainder.

Most Polynesian islands and archipelagos, including the Hawaiian Islands and Samoa, are composed of volcanic islands built by hotspots (volcanoes). The other land masses in Polynesia—New Zealand, Norfolk Island, and Ouvéa, the Polynesian outlier near New Caledonia—are the unsubmerged portions of the largely sunken continent of Zealandia.

Zealandia is believed to have mostly sunk below sea level 23 million years ago, and recently partially resurfaced due to a change in the movements of the Pacific Plate in relation to the Indo-Australian Plate. The Pacific plate had previously been subducted under the Australian Plate. When that changed, it had the effect of uplifting the portion of the continent that is modern-day New Zealand.

The convergent plate boundary that runs northwards from New Zealand's North Island is called the Kermadec-Tonga subduction zone. This subduction zone is associated with the volcanism that gave rise to the Kermadec and Tongan islands.

There is a transform fault that currently traverses New Zealand's South Island, known as the Alpine Fault.

Zealandia's continental shelf has a total area of approximately 3,600,000 km2 (1,400,000 sq mi).

The oldest rocks in Polynesia are found in New Zealand and are believed to be about 510 million years old. The oldest Polynesian rocks outside Zealandia are to be found in the Hawaiian Emperor Seamount Chain and are 80 million years old.

Geographical area

Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian Triangle, although some islands inhabited by Polynesians are situated outside that area. Geographically, the Polynesian Triangle is drawn by connecting the points of Hawaii, New Zealand, and Easter Island. The other main island groups located within the Polynesian Triangle are Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Niue, Wallis and Futuna, and French Polynesia.

Also, small Polynesian settlements are in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Caroline Islands, and Vanuatu. An island group with strong Polynesian cultural traits outside of this great triangle is Rotuma, situated north of Fiji. The people of Rotuma have many common Polynesian traits, but speak a non-Polynesian language. Some of the Lau Islands to the southeast of Fiji have strong historic and cultural links with Tonga. However, in essence, Polynesia remains a cultural term referring to one of the three parts of Oceania (the others being Melanesia and Micronesia).

Island groups

The following islands and island groups are either nations or overseas territories of former colonial powers. The residents are native Polynesians or contain archaeological evidence indicating Polynesian settlement in the past. Some islands of Polynesian origin are outside the general triangle that geographically defines the region.

The Line Islands and the Phoenix Islands, most of which are parts of Kiribati, had no permanent settlements until European colonization, but are often considered to be parts of the Polynesian Triangle.

Polynesians once inhabited the Auckland Islands, the Kermadec Islands, and Norfolk Island in pre-colonial times, but these islands were uninhabited by the time European explorers arrived.

The oceanic islands to the east of Easter Island, such as Clipperton Island, the Galápagos Islands, and the Juan Fernández Islands, were in the past formerly categorized on rare occasion as part of Polynesia. No evidence of prehistoric contact with either Polynesians or the indigenous peoples of the Americas has been found.

Kapingamarangi (in the Federated States of Micronesia)

Nukuoro (in the Federated States of Micronesia)

Wake Island (a part of the United States Minor Outlying Islands)

Auckland Islands (the most southerly known evidence of Polynesian settlement)

Anuta (in Solomon Islands)

Bellona Island (in Solomon Islands)

Emae (in Vanuatu)

Fiji (excluding Rotuma and the Lau Islands)

Mele (in Vanuatu)

History

Origins and expansion

The Polynesian people are considered, by linguistic, archaeological, and human genetic evidence, a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian people. Tracing Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in Island Melanesia, Maritime Southeast Asia, and ultimately, in Taiwan.

Between about 3000 and 1000 BC, speakers of Austronesian languages spread from Taiwan into Maritime Southeast Asia.

There are three theories regarding the spread of humans across the Pacific to Polynesia. These are outlined well by Kayser et al. (2000) and are as follows:

Express Train model: A recent (c. 3000–1000 BC) expansion out of Taiwan, via the Philippines and eastern Indonesia and from the northwest ("Bird's Head") of New Guinea, on to Island Melanesia by roughly 1400 BC, reaching western Polynesian islands around 900 BC followed by a roughly 1000 year "pause" before continued settlement in central and eastern Polynesia. This theory is supported by the majority of current genetic, linguistic, and archaeological data.

Entangled Bank model: Emphasizes the long history of Austronesian speakers' cultural and genetic interactions with indigenous Island Southeast Asians and Melanesians along the way to becoming the first Polynesians.

Slow Boat model: Similar to the express-train model but with a longer hiatus in Melanesia along with admixture — genetically, culturally and linguistically — with the local population. This is supported by the Y-chromosome data of Kayser et al. (2000), which shows that all three haplotypes of Polynesian Y chromosomes can be traced back to Melanesia.

In the archaeological record, there are well-defined traces of this expansion which allow the path it took to be followed and dated with some certainty. It is thought that by roughly 1400 BC, "Lapita peoples", so-named after their pottery tradition, appeared in the Bismarck Archipelago of northwest Melanesia. This culture is seen as having adapted and evolved through time and space since its emergence "Out of Taiwan". They had given up rice production, for instance, which required paddy field agriculture unsuitable for small islands. However, they still cultivated other ancestral Austronesian staple cultigens like Dioscorea yams and taro (the latter are still grown with smaller-scale paddy field technology), as well as adopting new ones like breadfruit and sweet potato.

Culture

The Polynesians were matrilineal and matrilocal Stone Age societies upon their arrival in Tonga, Samoa and the surrounding islands, after having spent at least some time in the Bismarck Archipelago. The modern Polynesians still show human genetic results of a Melanesian culture which allowed indigenous men, but not women, to "marry in" – useful evidence for matrilocality.

Although matrilocality and matrilineality receded at some early time, Polynesians and most other Austronesian speakers in the Pacific Islands were and are still highly "matricentric" in their traditional jurisprudence. The Lapita pottery for which the general archaeological complex of the earliest "Oceanic" Austronesian speakers in the Pacific Islands are named also lapsed in Western Polynesia. Language, social life and material culture were very distinctly "Polynesian" by 1000 BC.

Early European observers detected theocratic elements in traditional Polynesian government.

Linguistically, there are five sub-groups of the Polynesian language group. Each represents a region within Polynesia and the categorization of these language groups by Green in 1966 helped to confirm that Polynesian settlement generally took place from west to east. There is a very distinct "East Polynesian" subgroup with many shared innovations not seen in other Polynesian languages. The Marquesas dialects are perhaps the source of the oldest Hawaiian speech which is overlaid by Tahitian-variety speech, as Hawaiian oral histories would suggest. The earliest varieties of New Zealand Māori speech may have had multiple sources from around central Eastern Polynesia, as Māori oral histories would suggest.

Political history

The Cook Islands are made up of 15 islands comprising the Northern and Southern groups. The islands are spread out across many square kilometers of a vast ocean. The largest of these islands is called Rarotonga, which is also the political and economic capital of the nation.

The Cook Islands were formerly known as the Hervey Islands, but this name refers only to the Northern Groups. It is unknown when this name was changed to reflect the current name. It is thought that the Cook Islands were settled in two periods: the Tahitian Period, when the country was settled between 900 and 1300 AD, and the Maui Settlement, which occurred in 1600 AD, when a large contingent from Tahiti settled in Rarotonga, in the Takitumu district.

The first contact between Europeans and the native inhabitants of the Cook Islands took place in 1595 with the arrival of Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña in Pukapuka, who called it San Bernardo (Saint Bernard). A decade later, navigator Pedro Fernández de Quirós made the first European landing in the islands when he set foot on Rakahanga in 1606, calling it Gente Hermosa (Beautiful People).

Cook Islanders are ethnically Polynesians or Eastern Polynesia. They are culturally associated with Tahiti, Eastern Islands, New Zealand Māori and Hawaii.

The Lau Islands were subject to periods of Tongan rulership and then Fijian control until their eventual conquest by Seru Epenisa Cakobau of the Kingdom of Fiji by 1871. In around 1855 a Tongan prince, Enele Ma'afu, proclaimed the Lau islands as his kingdom, and took the title Tui Lau.

Fiji had been ruled by numerous divided chieftains until Cakobau unified the landmass. The Lapita culture, the ancestors of the Polynesians, existed in Fiji from about 1000 BC until they were displaced by the Melanesians about a thousand years later. (Both Samoans and subsequent Polynesian cultures adopted Melanesian painting and tattoo methods.)

In 1873, Cakobau ceded a Fiji heavily indebted to foreign creditors to the United Kingdom. It became independent on 10 October 1970 and a republic on 28 September 1987.

Links to the Americas

The sweet potato, called kūmara in Māori and kumar in Quechua, is native to the Americas and was widespread in Polynesia when Europeans first reached the Pacific. Remains of the plant in the Cook Islands have been radiocarbon-dated to before 1400, and the present scholarly consensus is that it was brought to central Polynesia c. 1300 by Polynesians who had traveled to South America and back, from where it spread across the region. Some genetic evidence suggests that sweet potatoes may have reached Polynesia via seeds at least 100,000 years ago, pre-dating human arrival; however, this hypothesis fails to account for the similarity of names.

There are also other possible material and cultural evidence of Pre-Columbian contact by Polynesia with the Americas with varying levels of plausibility. These include chickens, coconuts, and bottle gourds. The question of whether Polynesians reached the Americas and the extent of cultural and material influences resulting from such a contact remains highly contentious among anthropologists.

One of the most enduring misconceptions about Polynesians was that they originated from the Americas. This was due to Thor Heyerdahl's proposals in the mid-20th century that the Polynesians had migrated in two waves of migrations: one by Native Americans from the northwest coast of Canada by large whale-hunting dugouts; and the other from South America by "bearded white men" with "reddish to blond hair" and "blue-grey eyes" led by a high priest and sun-king named "Kon-Tiki" on balsa-log rafts. He claimed the "white men" then "civilized" the dark-skinned natives in Polynesia. He set out to prove this by embarking on a highly publicized Kon-Tiki expedition on a primitive raft with a Scandinavian crew. It captured the public's attention, making the Kon-Tiki a household name.

None of Heyerdahl's proposals have been accepted in the scientific community. The anthropologist Wade Davis in his book The Wayfinders, criticized Heyerdahl as having "ignored the overwhelming body of linguistic, ethnographic, and ethnobotanical evidence, augmented today by genetic and archaeological data, indicating that he was patently wrong." Anthropologist Robert Carl Suggs included a chapter titled "The Kon-Tiki Myth" in his 1960 book on Polynesia, concluding that "The Kon-Tiki theory is about as plausible as the tales of Atlantis, Mu, and 'Children of the Sun'. Like most such theories, it makes exciting light reading, but as an example of scientific method it fares quite poorly." Other authors have also criticized Heyerdahl's hypothesis for its implicit racism in attributing advances in Polynesian society to "white people", at the same time ignoring relatively advanced Austronesian maritime technology in favor of a primitive balsa raft.

Cultures

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. West Polynesia consists of the groups of Tonga, Samoa and surrounding islands. The pattern of settlement to East Polynesia began from Samoan Islands into the Tuvaluan atolls, with Tuvalu providing a stepping stone to migration into the Polynesian outlier communities in Melanesia and Micronesia.

Eastern Polynesian cultures are highly adapted to smaller islands and atolls, principally Niue, the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Hawaii, Rapa Nui, and smaller central-pacific groups. The large islands of New Zealand were first settled by Eastern Polynesians who adapted their culture to a non-tropical environment.

Unlike western Melanesia, leaders were chosen in Polynesia based on their hereditary bloodline. Samoa, however, had another system of government that combines elements of heredity and real-world skills to choose leaders. This system is called Fa'amatai. According to Ben R. Finney and Eric M. Jones, "On Tahiti, for example, the 35,000 Polynesians living there at the time of European discovery were divided between high-status persons with full access to food and other resources, and low-status persons with limited access."

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 of both luxuries and mundane items was important to all groups. Periodic droughts and subsequent famines often led to war. Many low-lying islands could suffer severe famine if their gardens were poisoned by the salt from the storm surge of a tropical cyclone. In these cases fishing, the primary source of protein, would not ease the 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. The 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. 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—in the case of atolls, on only one of the group so that food cultivation was on the others. Usually, these villages were fortified with walls and palisades made of stone and wood.

Demographics

The countries and territories in this table are categorised according to sources in cross-referenced articles; where sources differ, provisos have been clearly indicated. These territories and regions are subject to various additional categorisations, depending on the source and purpose of each description.

Languages

Polynesian languages are all members of the family of Oceanic languages, a sub-branch of the Austronesian language family. Polynesian languages show a considerable degree of similarity. The vowels are generally the same—/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/, pronounced as in Italian, Spanish, and German—and the consonants are always followed by a vowel. The languages of various island groups show changes in consonants. The glottal stop /ʔ/ is increasingly represented by an inverted comma or ʻokina. In the Society Islands, the original Proto-Polynesian *k and *ŋ (or the ng sound) have merged as /ʔ/, *s changed to /h/, and *w changed to /v/; so the name for the ancestral homeland, deriving from Proto-Nuclear Polynesian *sawaiki, becomes Havaiʻi. In New Zealand, where *s changed to /h/, the ancient home is Hawaiki. In the Cook Islands, where /ʔ/ replaces *s (with a likely intermediate stage of *h) and /v/ replaces *w, it is ʻAvaiki. In the Hawaiian islands, where /ʔ/ and /h/ replace *k and *s, respectively, the largest island of the group is named Hawaiʻi. In Samoa, where /v/ and /ʔ/ replace *w and *k, respectively, the largest island is called Savaiʻi.

Maritime Polynesian Pidgin based on Tahitian, Māori and Hawaiian was a common regional trade language used between European voyagers and local islanders between 18th to 19th centuries before supplanted by English.

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 postage stamp sales.

Aside from New Zealand, another focus area of economic dependence regarding tourism is Hawaii. Hawaii is one of the most visited areas within the Polynesian Triangle, entertaining more than ten million visitors annually, excluding 2020. The economy of Hawaii, like that of New Zealand, is steadily dependent on annual tourists and financial counseling or aid from other countries or states. "The rate of tourist growth has made the economy overly dependent on this one sector, leaving Hawaii extremely vulnerable to external economic forces." By keeping this in mind, island states and nations similar to Hawaii are paying closer attention to other avenues that can positively affect their economy by practicing more independence and less emphasis on tourist entertainment.

Inter-Polynesian cooperation

The first major attempt at uniting the Polynesian islands was by Imperial Japan in the 1930s, when various theorists (chiefly Hachirō Arita) began promulgating the idea of what would soon become known as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, all nations stretching from Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia to Oceania would be united under one, large, cultural and economic bloc which would be free from Western imperialism. The policy theorists who conceived it, along with the Japanese public, largely saw it as a pan-Asian movement driven by ideals of freedom and independence from Western colonial oppression. In practice, however, it was frequently corrupted by militarists who saw it as an effective policy vehicle through which to strengthen Japan's position and advance its dominance within Asia. At its greatest extent, it stretched from Japanese occupied Indochina in the west to the Gilbert Islands in the east, although it was originally planned to stretch as far east as Hawaii and Easter Island and as far west as India. This never came to fruition, however, as Japan was defeated during World War II and subsequently lost all power and influence it had.

After several years of discussing a potential regional grouping, three sovereign states (Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu) and five self-governing but non-sovereign territories formally launched, in November 2011, the Polynesian Leaders Group, intended to cooperate on a variety of issues including culture and language, education, responses to climate change, and trade and investment. It does not, however, constitute a political or monetary union.

Navigation

Polynesia consists of islands diffused throughout a triangular area with sides of four thousand miles. The area from the Hawaiian Islands in the north, to Easter Island in the east and to New Zealand in the south were all settled by Polynesians.

Navigators traveled to small inhabited islands using only their own senses and knowledge passed by oral tradition from navigator to apprentice. In order to locate directions at various times of day and year, navigators in Eastern Polynesia memorized important facts: the motion of specific stars, and where they would rise on the horizon of the ocean; weather; times of travel; wildlife species (which congregate at particular positions); directions of swells on the ocean, and how the crew would feel their motion; colors of the sea and sky, especially how clouds would cluster at the locations of some islands; and angles for approaching harbors.

These wayfinding techniques, along with outrigger canoe construction methods, were kept as guild secrets. Generally, each island maintained a guild of navigators who had very high status; in times of famine or difficulty these navigators could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighboring islands. On his first voyage of Pacific exploration Cook had the services of a Polynesian navigator, Tupaia, who drew a hand-drawn chart of the islands within 3,200 km (2,000 mi) radius (to the north and west) of his home island of Ra'iatea. Tupaia had knowledge of 130 islands and named 74 on his chart. Tupaia had navigated from Ra'iatea in short voyages to 13 islands. He had not visited western Polynesia, as since his grandfather's time the extent of voyaging by Raiateans has diminished to the islands of eastern Polynesia. His grandfather and father had passed to Tupaia the knowledge as to the location of the major islands of western Polynesia and the navigation information necessary to voyage to Samoa, Tonga and Melanesian island of Fiji. As the Admiralty orders directed Cook to search for the "Great Southern Continent", Cook ignored Tupaia's chart and his skills as a navigator. To this day, original traditional methods of Polynesian Navigation are still taught in the Polynesian outlier of Taumako Island in the Solomon Islands.

From a single chicken bone recovered from the archaeological site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula, Chile, a 2007 research report looking at radiocarbon dating and an ancient DNA sequence indicate that Polynesian navigators may have reached the Americas at least 100 years before Columbus (who arrived 1492 AD), introducing chickens to South America. A later report looking at the same specimens concluded: