Map of Polynesia in the Pacific Ocean

Polynesia (from Greek: πολύς many, νῆσος island) is a large grouping of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean.

Definition

Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian triangle. The term "Polynesia", meaning many islands, was first used by Charles de Brosses in 1756, and originally applied to all the islands of the Pacific. Jules Dumont d'Urville in an 1831 lecture to the Geographical Society of Paris proposed a restriction on its use, and also introduced the terms Micronesia and Melanesia. This division into three distinct Pacific subregions remains in widespread use today.

Carving from the ridgepole of a Māori house, ca 1840

Geographically, and oversimply, Polynesia may be described as a triangle with its corners at Hawaii, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). The other main island groups located within the Polynesian triangle are Samoa, Tonga, the various island chains that form the Cook Islands and French Polynesia. Niue is a rare solitary island state near the centre of Polynesia. Island groups outside of this great triangle include Tuvalu and the French territory of Wallis and Futuna. There are also small outlier Polynesian enclaves in Papua New Guinea, the Solomons and in Vanuatu. However, in essence, it is an anthropological term referring to one of the three parts of Oceania (the others being Micronesia and Melanesia) whose pre-colonial population generally belongs to one ethno-cultural family as a result of centuries of maritime migrations.

History

One theory is that the spread of pottery and domesticates in Polynesia is connected with the Lapita-culture that, around 1600–1200 BC, started expanding from New Guinea as far east as Fiji, Samoa and Tonga. During this time the aspects of the Polynesian culture developed. Around 300 BC this new Polynesian people spread from Fiji, Samoa and Tonga to the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus and the Marquesas Islands. This was supported by Patrick Kirch and Marshall Weisler when they performed X-ray fluorescence sourcing of basalt artifacts found on both islands.^[1]

Around AD 300, or earlier, the Polynesians discovered and settled Easter Island. This is supported by archaeological evidence as well as the introduction of flora and fauna consistent with the Polynesian culture and characteristic of the tropics to this subtropical island. Around AD 400 Hawai'i was settled by the Polynesians and around AD 1000 New Zealand was settled as well. The migration of the Polynesians is impressive considering that the islands settled by them are spread out over great distances – the Pacific Ocean covers nearly a half of the Earth's surface area. Most contemporary cultures, by comparison, never voyaged beyond sight of land.

Cultures of Polynesia

Main article: Polynesian culture

Painting Tahitian Women on the Beach by Paul Gauguin - Musée d'Orsay

Polynesia divides into two distinct cultural groups, East Polynesia and West Polynesia. The culture of West Polynesia is conditioned to high populations. It has strong institutions of marriage, and well-developed judicial, monetary and trading traditions. It comprises the groups of Tonga, Niue, Samoa and the Polynesian outliers. Eastern Polynesian cultures are highly adapted to smaller islands and atolls including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, the Tuamotus, the Marquesas, Hawaii and Easter Island. However, the large islands of New Zealand were first settled by Eastern Polynesians who adapted their culture to a non-tropical environment. Religion, farming, fishing, weather prediction, out-rigger canoe (similar to modern catamarans) construction and navigation were highly developed skills because the population of an entire island depended on them. Trading consisted of both luxuries and mundane items. Many low-lying islands could suffer severe famine if their gardens were poisoned by the salt from the storm-surge of a hurricane. In these cases fishing, the primary source of protein, would not ease loss of food energy. Navigators, in particular, were highly respected and each island maintained a house of navigation, with a canoe-building area.

Settlements by the Polynesians were of two categories, the hamlet and the village. Size of the island inhabited determined whether or a not a hamlet would be built. The larger volcanic islands usually had hamlets because of the many zones that could be divided across the island. Food and resources were more plentiful and so these settlements of four to five houses (usually with gardens) were established so that there would be no overlap between the zones. Villages, on the other hand, were built on the coasts of smaller islands and consisted of thirty or more houses. Usually these villages were fortified with walls and palisades made of stone and wood.^[2] However, New Zealand demonstrates the opposite; large volcanic islands with fortified villages. Due to relatively large numbers of competitive sects of Christian missionaries in the islands, many Polynesian groups have adopted Christianity. Polynesian languages are all members of the family of Oceanic languages, a sub-branch of the Austronesian language family.

Economy of Polynesia

With the exception of New Zealand, the majority of independent Polynesian islands derive much of their income from foreign aid and remittances from those who live in other countries. Some encourage their young people to go where they can earn good money to remit to their stay-at-home relatives. Many Polynesian locations, such as Easter Island, supplement this with tourism income.^[3] Some have more unusual sources of income, such as Tuvalu which marketed its '.tv' internet top-level domain name^[4] or the Cooks that relied on stamp sales. A very few others still live as they did before Western Civilization encountered them.

Polynesian navigation

Polynesian (Hawaiian navigators) sailing multi-hulled canoe, ca 1781

Main article: Polynesian navigation

At a time when European sailors were navigating by keeping a watch for the shoreline in daylight, Polynesians were navigating a vast extent of the Pacific Ocean. Polynesia comprised islands diffused throughout a triangular area with sides of four thousand miles. The area from the Hawaiian Islands in the north, to Easter Island in the east and to New Zealand in the south was all settled by Polynesians. From a single chicken bone recovered from the archaeological site of El Arenal-1, on the Arauco Peninsula, Chile, recent research of a radiocarbon date and an ancient DNA sequence indicates that Polynesian navigators also reached the Americas at least 100 years before Europeans, introducing chickens to South America.^[5][6]

Knowledge of the traditional Polynesian methods of navigation was largely lost after contact with and colonization by Europeans. This left the problem of accounting for the presence of the Polynesians in such isolated and scattered parts of the Pacific. By the late 19th century to the early 20th century a more generous view of Polynesian navigation had come into favour, perhaps creating a very romantic picture of their canoes, seamanship and navigational expertise. In the mid-twentieth century, Thor Heyerdahl proposed another theory of Polynesian origins (one which did not win general acceptance), arguing that the Polynesians had migrated from South America on balsa-log boats. Recent maternal mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests that Polynesians, including Tongans, Samoans, Niueans, Cook Islanders, Tahitians, Hawaiians, Marquesans and Māori, are genetically linked to indigenous peoples of parts of Southeast Asia including those of Taiwan. This DNA evidence is supported by linguistic and archaeological evidence.

Polynesia is generally defined as the islands within the Polynesian triangle

Recent studies into paternal Y chromosome analysis shows that Polynesians are also genetically linked to peoples of Melanesia (see "Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes" and "Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes (correction)" cited in References). Therefore it is current belief that the Polynesian people are a hybrid race between indigenous peoples of parts of Southeast Asia and peoples of Melanesia.

Between about 3000 and 1000 BC speakers of Austronesian languages spread through island South-East Asia – almost certainly starting out from Taiwan, as tribes whose natives had thought to have previously arrived about from mainland South China about 8000 years ago– into the edges of western Micronesia and on into Melanesia. In the archaeological record there are well-defined traces of this expansion which allow the path it took to be followed and dated with a degree of certainty. In the mid 2nd millennium BC, the Lapita culture appeared suddenly in north-west Melanesia, in the Bismarck Archipelago. Within a mere three or four centuries between about 1300 and 900 BC, the Lapita culture spread 6000 km further to the east from the Bismarck Archipelago, until it reached as far as Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. In this region, the distinctive Polynesian culture developed.

In the mid to late 1960s, scholars began testing sailing and paddling experiments related to Polynesian navigation: David Lewis sailed his catamaran from Tahiti to New Zealand using stellar navigation without instruments and Ben Finney built a 40-foot replica of a Hawaiian double canoe "Nalehia" and tested it in Hawaii. Meanwhile, Micronsian ethnographic research in the Caroline Islands revealed that traditional stellar navigational methods were still in everyday use. Recent re-creations of Polynesian voyaging have used methods based largely on Micronesian methods and the teachings of a Micronesian navigator, Mau Piailug.

It is probable that the Polynesian navigators employed a whole range of techniques including use of the stars, the movement of ocean currents and wave patterns, the air and sea interference patterns caused by islands and atolls, the flight of birds, the winds and the weather. Scientists think that long-distance Polynesian voyaging followed the seasonal paths of birds. There are some references in their oral traditions to the flight of birds and some say that there were range marks onshore pointing to distant islands in line with these flyways. One theory is that they would have taken a frigatebird with them. These birds refuse to land on the water as their feathers will become waterlogged making it impossible to fly. When the voyagers thought they were close to land they may have released the bird, which would either fly towards land or else return to the canoe. It is likely that the Polynesians also used wave and swell formations to navigate. It is thought that the Polynesian navigators may have measured the time it took to sail between islands in "canoe-days’’ or a similar type of expression.

Island groups

Cook Bay on Moorea, French Polynesia

The following are the islands and island groups, either nations or subnational territories, that are of native Polynesian culture. Some islands of Polynesian origin are outside the general triangle that geographically defines the region.

• American Samoa (overseas United States territory)
• Anuta (in the Solomon Islands)
• Cook Islands (self-governing state in free association with New Zealand)
• Easter Island (part of Chile, called Rapa Nui in Rapa Nui)
• Emae (in Vanuatu)
• French Polynesia ("overseas country", a territory of France)
• Hawaii (a state of the United States)
• Kapingamarangi (in the Federated States of Micronesia)
• Mele (in Vanuatu)
• New Zealand (called Aotearoa in Māori, usually associated with Australasia)
• Niue (self-governing state in free association with New Zealand)
• Nuguria (in Papua New Guinea)
• Nukumanu (in Papua New Guinea)
• Nukuoro (in the Federated States of Micronesia)
• Ontong Java (in the Solomon Islands)
• Pileni (in the Solomon Islands)
• Rennell (in the Solomon Islands)
• Rotuma (in Fiji)
• Samoa (independent nation)
• Sikaiana (in the Solomon Islands)
• Swains Island (politically part of American Samoa)
• Takuu (in Papua New Guinea)
• Tikopia (in the Solomon Islands)
• Tokelau (overseas dependency of New Zealand)
• Tonga (independent nation)
• Tuvalu (independent nation)
• Wallis and Futuna (overseas territory of France)

See also

• Polynesian mythology
• Polynesian languages
• List of Polynesians
• French Polynesia
• Society Islands
• Polynesian Society
• Polynesian Voyaging Society

Notes

References

• Finney, Ben R (1976). New, Non-Armchair Research. In Ben R. Finney (1963), Pacific Navigation and Voyaging, The Polynesian Society Inc.
• Finney, Ben R (1976) (editor). Pacific Navigation and Voyaging, The Polynesian Society Inc.
• Gatty, Harold (1999). Finding Your Ways Without Map or Compass. Dover Publications, Inc. ISBN 0-486-40613-X. 
• Lewis, David (1976), A Return Voyage Between Puluwat and Saipan Using Micronesian Navigational Techniques. In Ben R. Finney (1963), Pacific Navigation and Voyaging, The Polynesian Society Inc.
• Sharp, Andrew (1963). Ancient Voyagers in Polynesia, Longman Paul Ltd.
• Kayser, M., Brauer, S., Weiss, G., Underhill, P. A., Roewer, L., Schiefenhšfel, W., and Stoneking, M. (2000). Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes Current Biology, 2000, volume 10, pages 1237-1246
• Kayser, M., Brauer, S., Weiss, G., Underhill, P. A., Roewer, L., Schiefenhšfel, W., and Stoneking, M. (2000). Melanesian Origin of Polynesian Y Chromosomes (correction Current Biology, 2000, volume 11, pages 1-2

External links

Look up Polynesia in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• South Pacific Organizer
• History of Easter Island illustrated by stamps
• Map South Pacific
• Useful introduction to Maori society, including canoe voyages
• Polynesia (Polynesian Cultural Center)
• Lewis commenting on Spirits of the Voyage
• Interview with David Lewis
• Obituary: David Henry Lewis—including how he came to rediscover Pacific Ocean navigation methods
• Photogallery - French Polynesia (Tahiti, Moorea, Motu Tiahura)