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“The sea is a very easy place to disappear
To drift away, to fall in love or make your peace…”

-Porno for Pyros – “Tahitian Moon”

It’s pretty amazing to think that humans had colonized most of the far flung islands of the [tag]Pacific[/tag] by 900 AD without the aid of modern navigation tools. I have been fascinated by the history of human migration throughout the south Pacific since reading [tag]Jared Diamond[/tag]’s book “Collapse” a couple of years ago. It focuses on the causes behind the decline of ancient and not-so-ancient civilizations – typically due to overuse of resources and/or climate change. Part of the book centers around Easter Island which was colonized by [tag]Polynesians[/tag] roughly 1,000 years ago. They built up a civilization, characterized by the mysterious [tag]moai[/tag] sculptures, before disappearing about 200-300 years ago. Diamond’s hypothesis is that the islanders destroyed themselves by completely deforesting the island and thus their means for transport, fishing, hunting and housing.

The most fascinating thing about this story to me, however, was how colonists got to Easter Island. It is nearly 1,300 miles (see an interactive map of the south Pacific) from the nearest Polynesian colony, Pitcairn Island. These folks, at their height, were navigating the Pacific without compasses in wooden canoes. Yet in a couple of thousand years they established colonies across the Pacific on tiny coral atolls. There has been a fair amount of debate as to how this occurred. Was it accidental discovery? In other words did a couple of Polynesians (of both sexes, presumably) set out for a three hour cruise, run into a wind storm and end up on the next island to the east? Bear in mind that this would have to happen over and over as we’re talking about hundreds of islands. Alternatively, did Polynesians make an active decisions – exploring and then colonizing nearby islands when their existing home got a bit crowded?

A second question is whether once established, these new colonies were isolated from other established colonies. The accidental discovery hypothesis would support this idea, particularly in the cases of very distant islands in eastern Polynesia like Easter and [tag]Hawaii[/tag]. Once a canoe went missing, the accidental colonists would be unlikely to return to other islands. The other possibility is that the Polynesians had intentionally established a network of colonies and trade was maintained between them. For example, after the establishment of colonies on places like Hawaii, there were round trip journeys between Polynesian islands.

Hawaii is an interesting case. It is even further from the heart of Polynesia than Easter Island, roughly 2,400 miles from [tag]Tahiti[/tag]. It was settled around the same time as Easter Island and while oral tradition recounts travel between Tahiti and Hawaii, there has never been any evidence that such travel existed. In this week’s [tag]Science[/tag], two Australian researchers provide the facts needed to make reality out of legend.

[tag]Kenneth Collerson[/tag] and [tag]Marshall Weisler[/tag] of the University of Queensland in Brisbane looked at Polynesian adzes (kind of like hatchets) collected from the [tag]Tuamotus[/tag], a group of coral atolls that likely would have played a role as a way station in travel between Tahiti and other western Polynesian Islands and Hawaii. Nineteen of the basalt tools were collected between 1929 and 1934 and the Australian pair analyzed the mineral content of each and compared the materials used to make the adzes with the mineral content of various Pacific islands. They found that the basalt from three of the adzes could be localized to Hawaii, Pitcairn Island and Rurutu. Because Pitcairn and Hawaii are relatively distant from the heart of Polynesia, these results indicate that goods and/or raw materials were transported back from outlying colonies to more central islands.

The implications of this study in terms of the pattern of human migration in the Pacific are huge. The fact that tools made of Hawaiian basalt are found in more central Polynesian islands unequivocally prove that these distant colonies were not completely isolated. There is at least some return travel from Hawaii. This communication implies that the steady expansion of Polynesian colonies eastward through the Pacific may have been intentional and precedent to European discovery 400 – 700 years later. Results from a different group earlier this year provided evidence that Polynesians had landed on the Pacific coast of South America by 1390 – more than 100 years before Columbus landed in the West Indies. Results like these are shedding light on a civilization that turns out not to be as primitive as we in the Western world had been led to believe. The Polynesians were easily navigating the biggest ocean on the planet while Europeans were still struggling with their little piece of the north Atlantic.

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