Culture
Culture / Topic
Polynesian navigation or Polynesian wayfinding was used for thousands of years to enable long voyages across thousands of kilometres of the open Pacific Ocean. Polynesians made contact with nearly every island within the vast Polynesian Triangle, using outrigger canoes or double-hulled canoes. The double-hulled canoes were two large hulls, equal in length, and lashed side by side. The space between the paralleled canoes allowed for storage of food, hunting materials, and nets when embarking on long voyages. Polynesian navigators used wayfinding techniques such as the navigation by the stars, and observations of birds, ocean swells, and wind patterns, and relied on a large body of knowledge from oral tradition. This island hopping was a solution to the scarcity of useful resources, such as food, wood, water, and available land, on the small islands in the Pacific Ocean. When an island’s required resources for human survival began to run low, the island's inhabitants used their maritime navigation skills and set sail for new islands. However, as an increasing number of islands in the South Pacific became occupied, and citizenship and national borders became of international importance, this was no longer possible. People thus became trapped on islands with the inability to support them.
Navigators travelled to small inhabited islands using wayfinding techniques and knowledge passed by oral tradition from master to apprentice, often in the form of song. Generally, each island maintained a guild of navigators who had very high status; in times of famine or difficulty, they could trade for aid or evacuate people to neighbouring islands. As of 2014, these traditional navigation methods are still taught in the Polynesian outlier of Taumako in the Solomons and by voyaging societies throughout the Pacific.
Both wayfinding techniques and outrigger canoe construction methods have been kept as guild secrets, but in the modern revival of these skills, they are being recorded and published.
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History See also: Ancient Hawaii , Discovery and settlement of Hawaii , and Micronesian navigation The Polynesian triangle Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through the islands of Southeast Asia – most likely starting out from Taiwan , [ 1 ] as tribes whose natives were thought to have previously arrived from mainland South China about 8000 years ago – into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia , through the Philippines and Indonesia . In the archeogenetic record, there are well-defined traces of this expansion that allow the path it took to be followed and dated with a degree of certainty. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] In the mid-2nd millennium BC, a distinctive culture appeared suddenly in north-west Melanesia, in the Bismarck Archipelago , the chain of islands forming a great arch from New Britain to the Admiralty Islands . This culture, known as Lapita , stands out in the Melanesian archeological record, with its large permanent villages on beach terraces along the coasts. Particularly characteristic of the Lapita culture is the making of pottery, including a great many vessels of varied shapes, some distinguished by fine patterns and motifs pressed into the clay. Between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita culture spread 6,000 km (3,700 mi) farther to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Tonga and Samoa . [ 4 ] Lapita pottery persisted in places such as Samoa , Tonga , and Fiji for many years after its introduction to Western Polynesia but eventually died out in most of Polynesia due to the scarcity of clay. [ 5 ] Although the production of ceramics did not travel beyond Western Polynesia, some ceramic materials have been recovered through archeological excavations in the Central Polynesia but have been attributed to trade. [ 6 ] In accordance with Polynesian oral tradition, the geography of Polynesian navigation pathways is said to resemble the geometric qualities of an octopus with head centred on Ra'iātea (French Polynesia) and tentacles spread out across the Pacific. [ 7 ] In oral tradition the octopus is known by various names such as Taumata-Fe'e-Fa'atupu-Hau (Grand Octopus of Prosperity), Tumu-Ra'i-Fenua (Beginning-of-Heaven-and-Earth) and Te Wheke-a-Muturangi (The Octopus of Muturangi ). Specific chronology of the discovery and settlement of specific island groups within Eastern and Central Polynesia is hotly debated among archeologists, but a generally accepted timeline puts the initial settlement of the Cook Islands before 1000 AD. [ 8 ] From this point, navigation branched out in all directions with Eastern Polynesia (including the Society Islands and the Marquesas Islands ) settled first followed by more remote regions such as Hawaii , Easter Island , and New Zealand peopled later. [ 9 ] The pattern of settlement also extended to the north of Samoa to the Tuvaluan atolls, with Tuvalu providing a stepping stone to the founding of Polynesian Outlier communities in Melanesia and Micronesia . [ 10 ] [ 11 ] [ 12 ] The natives of Easter Island likely originated from Mangareva. They discovered the island by using the flight path of the sooty tern. When the first European to visit the island, Jacob Roggeveen, landed on Easter Island, he found no evidence of navigation. Instead, he noticed that there were not enough trees to build seaworthy canoes and the rafts the natives were using were not seaworthy either. [ 13 ] The archeological record supports oral histories of the first peopling of region including both the timing and geographical origins of Polynesian society. [ 14 ] [ 15 ] ^ Howe, K. R (2006), Vaka Moana: Voyages of the Ancestors – the discovery and settlement of the Pacific , Albany, Auckland: David Bateman, pp.  92– 98 ^ Kayser, M.; Brauer, S.; Weiss, G.; Underhill, P.A.; Roewer, L.; Schiefenhövel, W.; Stoneking, M. (2000), "Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes", Current Biology , 10 (20): 1237– 1246, Bibcode : 2000CBio...10.1237K , doi : 10.1016/S0960-9822(00)00734-X , PMID   11069104 ^ Kayser, M.; Brauer, S.; Weiss, G.; Underhill, P.A.; Roewer, L.; Schiefenhövel, W.; Stoneking, M. (2001), "Correction: Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes", Current Biology , 11 (2): I– II, doi : 10.1016/S0960-9822(01)00029-X ^ Bellwood 1987 , pp. 45–65. ^ "Lapita culture: ancestors of Polynesians, Micronesians, and some coastal areas of Melanesia" . Originalpeople.org . Retrieved 11 April 2018 . ^ Walter, Richard; Dickenson, W. R. (1989). "A Ceramic Sherd from Ma'uke in the Southern Cook Islands". The Journal of the Polynesian Society . 98 (4): 465– 470. JSTOR   20706311 . ^ E. Tetahiotupa, Au gré des vents et des courants ( Éditions des Mers Australes  [ fr ] ) 2009. ^ Niespolo, Elizabeth M. ; Sharp, Warren D.; Kirch, Patrick V. (2019). "230TH dating of coral abraders from stratified deposits at Tangatatau Rockshelter, Mangaia, Cook Islands: Implications for building precise chronologies in Polynesia" . Journal of Archaeological Science . 101 : 21– 33. Bibcode : 2019JArSc.101...21N . doi : 10.1016/j.jas.2018.11.001 . S2CID   134955488 – via Elsevier Science Direct. ^ Howe, K.R., ed. (2006). Vaka Moana . Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. ISBN   0-8248-3213-2 . ^ Bellwood 1987 , pp. 29, 54. ^ Bayard, D. T. (1976). The Cultural Relationships of the Polynesian Outliers . Otago University, Studies in Prehistoric Anthropology, Vol. 9. ^ Kirch, P. V. (1984). "The Polynesian Outliers: Continuity, change, and replacement". Journal of Pacific History . 19 (4): 224– 238. doi : 10.1080/00223348408572496 . ^ Crowe, Andrew (2018). Pathway of the birds: the voyaging achievements of Māori and their Polynesian ancestors . Auckland: bateman. ISBN   978-1-86953-961-0 . OCLC   1044553799 . ^ Gill, William W. (1977) [1876]. Myths and Songs from the South Pacific (PDF) . London: H.S. King. ISBN   0-524-00838-8 . ^ Kamakau, S.M. (1992) [1961]. Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii . Honolulu, HI: Kamehameha Publishing. ISBN   0-87336-014-1 .
Post-colonial research history Navigator Mau Piailug (1932–2010) of Satawal island, Micronesia Knowledge of the traditional Polynesian methods of navigation was widely lost after contact with and colonization by Europeans. This caused debates over the reasons for the presence of the Polynesians in such isolated and scattered parts of the Pacific. According to Andrew Sharp , the explorer Captain James Cook , already familiar with Charles de Brosses 's accounts of large groups of Pacific islanders who were driven off course in storms and ended up hundreds of miles away with no idea where they were, encountered in the course of one of his own voyages a castaway group of Tahitians who had become lost at sea in a gale and blown 1000 miles away to the island of Atiu . Cook wrote that this incident "will serve to explain, better than the thousand conjectures of speculative reasoners, how the detached parts of the earth, and, in particular, how the South Seas, may have been peopled". [ 1 ] By the late 19th century to the early 20th century, a more generous view of Polynesian navigation had come into favor, creating a much romanticized view of their seamanship, canoes, and navigational expertise. Late 19th- and early 20th-century writers such as Abraham Fornander and Percy Smith told of heroic Polynesians migrating in great coordinated fleets from Asia far and wide into present-day Polynesia. [ 2 ] Another view was presented by Andrew Sharp, who challenged the "heroic vision" hypothesis, asserting instead that Polynesian maritime expertise was severely limited in the field of exploration, and that as a result, the settlement of Polynesia had been the result of luck, random island sightings, and drifting, rather than as organized voyages of colonization. Thereafter, the oral knowledge passed down for generations allowed for eventual mastery of traveling between known locations. [ 3 ] Sharp's reassessment caused a huge amount of controversy and led to a stalemate between the romantic and the skeptical views. [ 2 ] ^ Sharp 1963 , p. 16. ^ a b Finney 1963 , p. 5. ^ Sharp 1963 .
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