Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant: The Nature of Hinterland Communities

College Of William And Mary, Williamsburg VA

Investigators

Abstract

This award permits Mr. Nicholas Belluzzo to investigate a pre-contact hinterland community on the island of Hawai'i. Researchers in Polynesia have long studied chiefly society and processes of sociopolitical formation. Previous scholarship has often focused on archaeological records of core, chiefly centers, with models highlighting elite power strategies and authority. However, more recent scholarship increasingly focuses on understanding the common, non-elite role and agency in society. By virtue of their position beyond the margins of the royal centers, even less is known about how hinterland communities conceived of authority at both the local- and regional-scales or how this conception differed from the royal centers. Given that hinterland communities are less well represented in historical literature and ethnographic documentation, archaeological approaches are well situated to augment a more spatially comprehensive record of sociopolitical formation in Hawai'i. By deploying and re-defining the concept of hinterland, this project focuses specific attention on the agency, sources of authority, and social hierarchy of Hawaiian communities at multiple scales. The study re-frames depictions of hinterland communities from zones of resource extraction to intentional communities agentively negotiating local and regional interactions. As a multi-disciplinary effort, Mr. Belluzzo will collaborate with soil scientists, paleobotanists, authorities in traditional Hawaiian knowledge systems, and State land managers to develop a holistic research study while establishing cross-disciplinary research relationships. This research frames hinterlands as neither frontiers nor borderlands, but locations situated between multiple sources of power and authority. By moving beyond monolithic core-periphery interactions, the research will investigate non-elite Hawaiian hinterland communities in the southern Kau District of Hawai'i Island using a "bottom-up" approach. This will highlight how agency and local authority created interactive communities not wholly subordinate to elite centers or political cores. The research will employ a landscape-based approach to assess the traditional Hawaiian land division of Manuka, situated at the intersection of two larger political districts in an environmentally uncertain region. This region will be evaluated to identify variation in community, agency, and authority using ethnographic, environmental, ecological, and archaeological data. Nick Belluzzo and his research team will collect data through a combination of archaeological survey, archival research, and test excavations to generate archaeological and environmental datasets. Geostatistical analysis will elicit patterns of authority and regional relationships in the archaic Hawaiian State. Specifically, this research will compare records of change and regional diversity in settlement and agricultural practices against expectations from more agriculturally productive core regions under direct, centralized chiefly rule. Both the results and syntheses of multiple novel methods will be broadly applicable to modeling social complexity in complex societies world-wide. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.