Kahikinui Survey Yields Insights to Cultural Landscape of Maui Island Chiefdom

Patrick Kirch

When the British navigator Captain James Cook arrived off the coasts of Maui and Hawai'i Islands in the winter of 1779, he found the two lands each under the control of powerful and fiercely competitive chiefs: Kahekili on Maui, and Kalaniopu'u on Hawai'i. The late prehistoric landscape of the Hawai'i Island chiefdom controlled by Kalaniopu'u has for many years been intensively studied by archaeologists, who have often generalized from their results to the archipelago at large. Maui Island, on the other hand, has been relatively neglected from an archaeological perspective.

Prof. Patrick Kirch and a team of Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students are now engaged in a project focused on the little-known archaeological landscape of east Maui, in the district of Kahikinui. Building upon the results of a settlement-pattern survey initiated in 1966 but never completed (due to the tragic death of its director, Peter Chapman), Kirch's team has recorded more than 600 sites within an 8 square kilometer survey area. The survey area lies on the arid, leeward side of Maui, a landscape of slightly weathered lava fields that rises from the rocky coast (sorry, no palm fringed beaches!) up to the summit of majestic Haleakalä volcano at 10,000 feet above sea level. The sites include coastal fishing settlements and an intensively settled upland agricultural zone with hundreds of individual domestic household features (habitation enclosures, shelters, platforms, and so forth). Of particular interest is a system of regularly spaced stone temple platforms (heiau) in the upland zone, which exhibit significant differences from the better-studied Hawai'i Island temple system.

Data on the more than 600 sites have been entered into a computerized database using the Paradox software, which will be interfaced with a GIS database for the survey area containing digitized information on topography, soils, vegetation, and other environmental parameters. Field-checking of sites and additional survey work was carried out during the January semester break by Kirch and his students, with support from the Class of 1954 Endowed Chair Fund. (Kirch was appointed in July 1994 to the Class of 1954 Distinguished Teaching Professorship.) The team hopes to continue its survey work during the coming summer, and graduate student Cindy VanGilder expects to base her dissertation on Hawaiian household archaeology on the Kahikinui materials.