Temples Indicate Swift Rise of Hawaiian Society
By Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writer
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-sci-
temple8jan08,1,7884216.story


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Researchers employed an unusual technique to test the age of eight
temples on the islands of Maui and Molokai and found that all were
apparently built from about 1565 to 1638.

Polynesians first came to Hawaii in double-hulled canoes from the
Marquesas Islands around A.D. 700, or possibly earlier. Agricultural
chiefdoms emerged as the population grew from a few hundred to
approximately 400,000 by the time Captain Cook arrived at the end of
the 18th century.

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The transformation of ancient Hawaii from a loose collection of
chiefdoms into the beginnings of a formal society may have happened
in as little as 30 years, according to new evidence from 400-year-
old temples.

Researchers employed an unusual technique to test the age of eight
temples on the islands of Maui and Molokai and found that all were
apparently built from about 1565 to 1638.

Anthropologists had previously believed the temples — which served
as religious and economic centers — were built over a period of 250
years.

"When all the results came back within a tight time span, that was
an unexpected finding," said Patrick V. Kirch, a professor of
anthropology at UC Berkeley and co-author of the study published in
the current issue of the journal Science.

Kirch and Warren D. Sharp of the Berkeley Geochronology Center used
a technique called thorium-uranium dating to measure the age of
branch corals tucked among the stones of the temple foundations.

Like other Polynesians, ancient Hawaiians plucked coral from shallow
ocean waters and offered it to their gods in shrines and temples.
Kirch and Sharp reasoned that if they could determine when the coral
from the temple foundations died, they would know the age of the
structures.

Temple construction on Maui was particularly rapid, occurring during
a 30-year period beginning in the early 1600s, the researchers said.
The time frame coincided with the rise of Chief Pi'ilani, who is
credited with unifying two Maui chiefdoms into an enduring
political, religious and economic system that went on to encompass
nearby islands, according to oral histories taken in the 1800s.

"This can occur within the lifetime of a single ruler," Kirch
said. "A single charismatic, dynamic leader can accomplish this."


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Hawaiian temples tell tale of social change
Corals provide clues about the rapid rise of an elite
By Daniel B. Kane
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/6792150/


WASHINGTON - "Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into
space," renowned architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said, and
the discovery of a sudden wave of temple building on Maui at the
turn of the 17th century provides new insights into the will of the
ruling class at a critical crossroads in ancient Hawaiian society.

Maui's temple system emerged over a surprisingly short period of
time — perhaps within one generation, around the year 1600,
according to a new study. The authors suggest that this surge in
temple building occurred along with an equally rapid shift to a more
class-conscious society, in which elites who claimed the gods as
their ancestors managed the temple rituals.

The scientists determined when the temples were built by measuring
the age of corals found inside.

These findings appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science,
published by AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

Hawaii, before European contact
Polynesians first came to Hawaii in double-hulled canoes from the
Marquesas Islands around A.D. 700, or possibly earlier. Agricultural
chiefdoms emerged as the population grew from a few hundred to
approximately 400,000 by the time Captain Cook arrived at the end of
the 18th century.

Religion touched nearly every aspect of Hawaiian life, including
birth, marriage, death, house construction, fishing, agriculture and
war. Hawaiians participated in ritualized worship in their homes,
agricultural temples and grand temples dedicated to the gods of war.
A multilevel hierarchy of classes emerged within Hawaii's religion-
dominated chiefdoms, with professional priests and chiefs at the top.

At some point before contact with Europe, ancient Hawaiian society
shifted away from chiefdoms where rulers and peasants were thought
to be of the same blood line and land was held in families. In
the "archaic states" that emerged next, class lines were drawn more
clearly, and the king and high-ranked chiefs controlled the land.
Rulers described themselves as descendants of gods, agriculture
intensified, forced labor emerged and rulers implemented a tax
system linked to temple rituals.

Hawaiian temples to the gods of agriculture and war — monumental
platforms and terraces made of boulders composed of cooled lava —
provide tangible archaeological evidence for this transition from
chiefdoms to archaic states, according to study author Patrick Kirch
from the University of California at Berkeley.

Clustered dates for temple construction
With no written historical record prior to European contact,
determining the timing and speed of this fundamental shift in
society has been difficult. Past attempts to calculate the rise of
the Hawaiian temple system relied on carbon-dating techniques that
yielded estimates with more than 200 years of uncertainty.

In their new study, Kirch and co-author Warren Sharp from the
Berkeley Geochronology Center used a uranium-decay dating technique
to generate high-precision age estimates of corals found in temple
walls and presented at dedication ceremonies. The scientists dated
corals from seven agricultural temples in a remote district on the
island of Maui and from a territorial boundary temple on the island
of Molokai.

The ages of the corals suggest that the temple system emerged
rapidly between 1580 and 1640.

"We didn't expect the dates to all come back in a tight range. The
temples are not being gradually constructed and dedicated over
several hundred years, but over 30 to 40 years — 60 years if you're
being cautious," Kirch said.

Temples emerge as chiefdoms merge
The temple-building boom coincides with oral traditions describing
the merger of two independent Maui chiefdoms under the control of a
single leader named Pi'ilani.

The fact that two chiefdoms merged around the time of the temple-
building boom strengthens the idea that the temples do, in fact,
provide physical evidence for important shifts in ancient Hawaiian
society.

Agricultural temples, for example, were the site of annual tribute-
collection rituals that are associated with archaic states. As a
part of religious ritual, high priests from the ruling class
collected surplus pigs, sweet potatoes, feathers and other
agricultural products and status objects from the commoners. This
tribute supported the bureaucracy and the households of the chiefly
classes.

`Cauliflower coral' clocks
The dates for the temple-building boom come from the ages of small
branching corals called "cauliflower corals," found in the temples.
The exact symbolic value of temple corals to the Hawaiians —
archived in the memories of oral historians — was probably lost when
European diseases decimated the population at the end of the 18th
century. The corals themselves were not objects of veneration,
according to Kirch; rather, they may have served as symbolic
offerings, like votive candles in a Catholic church.


Science
The base of this branch coral from a Kahikinui archaeological site
has been dated to the year 1601, plus or minus seven years. The tip
has been dated to 1608 with the same margin of error. The
preservation of the specimen indicates that living coral was
collected from the sea bottom.

The researchers are confident that coral ages provide temple ages.
Delicate surface structures on temple corals indicate that these
corals were collected live and brought almost immediately to the
temples. If the corals were collected dead from the beach, these
tiny surface structures would be damaged or absent.

The kinds of corals found in the temple pull uranium from the
seawater into their skeletons. Over time, the uranium inside coral
skeletons naturally decays to lead in several steps, and one of the
intermediate products is the element thorium.Sharp estimated the
ages of temple corals by measuring the concentrations of thorium
versus uranium present in the coral skeletons.

This temple-dating approach is an improvement over carbon-14 dating
techniques that have been used to estimate the age of charcoal
remains of pig bones and other organic materials found at the
temples. Dating these charcoals requires scientists to take
atmospheric carbon-14 fluctuations into account, which increases the
uncertainty of temple construction dates considerably. In contrast,
coral age estimates are not influenced by changes in the carbon-14
content of the atmosphere through time.

Sharp dated the outer tips of the corals to get as close as possible
to the "death date" — the date someone harvested the coral from the
ocean and brought it to a temple construction site or temple
dedication ceremony.

The surprising swiftness of the transition in ancient Hawaiian
society, revealed by the new temple construction dates, raises the
possibility that similar transitions elsewhere in the world may have
been equally abrupt, the authors say.

© 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science