Valley Agricultural Systems in Prehistoric Hawaii: An Archaeological Consideration

I NDIGENOUS Oceanic agricultural systems have concerned anthropologists for decades, an extension of an older botanical concern with Malayo-Oceanic flora, including cultigens. Only in the past few years, however, have hypotheses concerning the development of agriculture in Oceania moved beyond ethnobotanical speculation to attempts at direct archaeological testing. The earlier botanical and anthropological studies provided the basic characterization of Oceanic agriculture as based on an adventive crop plant inventory of indigenous Asiatic species (with the exception of certain New Guinea or Melanesian domesticates, and of the sweet potato), with successive reduction in total numbers of cultivable species from west to east. Barrau (1958, 1961, 1965) especially has drawn attention to the range of agronomic modifications of edaphic and hydrologic conditions by which cropping of otherwise unfavorable environments has been realized. The particular processes of transfer of both crop plant inventories and agricultural techniques (i.e., agricultural systems; d. Conklin 1954, 1957; Brookfield 1968: 414-415; Harris 1969), and the segregative effects of island environments, are matters of increasing concern to the Oceanic prehistorian (Yen 1973). This paper is an attempt at synthesis of recent archaeological investigation of indigenous Hawaiian agriculture, one of several East Polynesian endpoints in the sequence of transfer of Pacific agricultural systems. This study encompasses only valley systems, i.e., systems in areas where the natural landscape has been significantly modified or dissected by drainage; thus, we are eliminating from consideration both relatively undissected flow slopes and saddle or plateau regions (Rosendahl 1972 ; Soehren and Newman 1968). It is hoped