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This chapter describes a re-engagement with Hawaiian archaeology through research efforts in Kahikinui, one of the twelve ancient districts (moku) of Maui. Some might have thought Kahikinui an odd choice in which to investigate the rise of archaic states in ancient Hawai‘i, as it is considered a kua‘āina, or “backwater” district (literally “back of the land”). Yet it proved to be the right place to investigate the rise of archaic states in ancient Hawai‘i. Being ecologically marginal Kahikinui had not suffered from the effects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century land development; the archaeological landscape of an entire moku, or district, was intact. More importantly, the radical shifts in economic production, land tenure, religious organization, and social structure that accompanied the transition to archaic states would likely be reflected more clearly in such outlying kua‘āina lands than in the “salubrious core regions” frequented by the chiefs.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the history of archaeology in Hawaii and its links to the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum. It then presents the author’s account of his fieldwork on Maui in the summer of 1966 while he was a sophomore at Punahou School. The Bishop Museum had received a three-year grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation for a program of archaeological research in Hawaii. One objective of this program was a settlement-pattern survey of Kahikinui. As part of the two-man surveying team for the project, the author was tasked with precisely mapping sites located by others, along with the topography. For short intervals during the mapping, his group also took time out to dig in a few sites which yielded several artifacts.

This chapter presents the author’s account of returning to Kahikinui nearly thirty years after he spent the summer of 1966 mapping archaeological sites. With thirty years of experience behind him, the author realized that the pioneering settlement-pattern data collected in 1966 would provide a good starting point. But to answer many of the questions swirling in his head required a new research effort, to build on that foundation. They needed to not just recheck the original data but to add substantially to it. There were big gaps in the 1966 survey—a large piece of the uplands of Kīpapa as well as most of the intermediate zone between the uplands and the coastal strip would need to be surveyed. To understand how the ancient Hawaiians had adapted to this lava landscape would require filling in these gaps.

This chapter describes the formation of the Kahikinui landscape. The land of Kahikinui was formed of endless lava outpourings that cascaded for tens of thousands of years from the craters and cinder cones that gash and dimple the slopes of Haleakalā. More than anything, Kahikinui is a land of lava, congealed after the fiery flows scorched everything in their path. Far from being monotonous, Kahikinui exhibits significant differences between its older eastern and younger western regions. These differences reflect a quarter of a million years of geological time over which Pele sent down countless lava flows. Meanwhile the inexorable forces of wind and water simultaneously transformed the ʻaʻā and pāhoehoe surfaces into landscapes that the Polynesian colonizers of Kahikinui were to inhabit and farm.

This chapter describes Hawaii’s stone architectural constructions. The ancient Hawaiians continually modified and rearranged their landscapes by clearing and leveling small patches of earth, building up stone retaining walls to hold the terraces in place, stacking cobbles and boulders to make walls of many sizes and configurations, and piling up rocks to form platforms and terraces as foundations for houses and temples. Stones stacked upon stones: in many ways that is the essence of Hawaiian archaeology. After centuries of such activity, the lower-elevation landscapes of all the Hawaiian Islands have been intensively modified. In valleys with ample streamflow, slopes were converted to ranks of stone-faced terraces for irrigating taro. On the drier leeward landscapes such as in Kohala and Kona on Hawaii Island, vast areas were covered in reticulate grids of low stone walls and embankments, defining farming plots. The chapter also discusses the stacked-stone architecture that make up the archaeological landscape of Kahikinui.

This chapter first considers the traditional Hawaiian methods of telling time and recounting the past. It then turns to the question of when people first settled in Kahikinui. The question can be answered in different ways. From the perspective provided by an extensive database of radiocarbon dates from sites throughout the moku, it can be said that the first permanent settlements began to appear over the landscape around A.D. 1400, although there is limited evidence for infrequent earlier visitations. In the broader context of Hawaiian cultural history, this also means that people began to permanently occupy Kahikinui in the Late Expansion Period (A.D. 1400–1650). The question about Kahikinui’s cultural chronology can also be answered from an indigenous Hawaiian perspective, in which time was reckoned by the generations of ruling chiefs. In this case, people would have begun establishing permanent settlements in the district by the time of the aliʻi nui (ruling chief) Kaʻulahea.

This chapter discusses dry-farming and sweet potato cultivation in Kahikinui. A combination of topography and climate make Kahikinui a dry, parched, and—during periods of drought—even desiccated landscape. Making a living in such circumstances was not impossible, but it required hard work and specialized dry-farming methods. The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) made it possible for Hawaiian farmers to settle the arid slopes of Kahikinui and Kaupō, along with those of Kohala on Hawaii Island and of Kahoʻolawe Island, and other arid regions. Originally domesticated thousands of years earlier by the ancient peoples of the Andes, in South America, sweet potato plants are adapted to dry conditions, making them ideal crops for Kahikinui.

This chapter discusses excavations of household sites across Kahikinui. Nineteen kauhale (which translates “group of houses”) clusters were studied, most of which date to the pre-contact period, before European arrival in the islands. These house sites have opened a window on the world of the makaʻāinana (common folk) who made that windy land their home. It has revealed something of how they went about their daily routines; how they structured their lives in their humble kauhale; the menfolk offering prayers to the ʻaumakua (ancestors); men and women cooking their sweet potatoes in separate imu (earth ovens), yet eating together in the hale noa (wife and children), even as they roasted fish and other foods in separate hearths.

This chapter addresses the question of how many people once lived in the vast moku of Kahikinui. The first Hawaiian farmers permanently settled the district around A.D. 1400. Initially, the population density was low, only about 12 persons per square kilometer in the lowlands. But the population grew steadily, until it reached a peak in the eighteenth century, when the population density averaged between 43 and 57 persons per square kilometer in the lowlands (below 900 meters elevation). At its peak, the total population of the moku was probably not less than 3,000 people but was unlikely to have been greater than 4,100 people. After European contact, there was a sickening population decline down to around 500 Hawaiians in the 1830s, and even fewer after that, until the land was completely abandoned around 1895.

This chapter discusses Kahikinui’s changing hydrology. It considers the possibility that Kahikinui might not always have been as waterless as it appears today. In historic times, many small drainages such as Kukui Gulch with shallow channels incised into the lava slopes flow only when winter, kona storms bring heavy rains. Had environmental conditions in pre-contact times been sufficiently different so that these gulches once carried seasonal or even permanent flow? How had the ancient occupants of Kahikinui obtained water for drinking, cooking, and bathing? A study of the “paleohydrology,” or ancient water regimes, of Kahikinui showed that fog-drip precipitation had formerly supplied numerous seeps and springs along the small Kahikinui watercourses. The discovery of clusters of petroglyphs, which frequently occur on vertical rock faces in or adjacent to intermittent stream channels, or above rockshelters next to such channels, also suggests that these figures had once served to visually mark and claim specific water sources in Kahikinui.

This chapter focuses on the places that were of particular significance in the spiritual and ritual lives of nā kuaʻāina (backwoods folks)—those places and sites collectively called heiau. The term heiau applies to all such places where sacrifices were offered and prayers made to the gods and ʻaumakua (ancestors), ranging from the largest temples down to humble shrines contained within the menʻs houses of the makaʻāinana (common folk). The author describes the heiau he has visited and studied in Kahikinui. Always silently asking permission to enter before he stepped onto the stone terraces or pavements, he has measured and mapped, photographed and described, these fascinating places of prayer, sacrifice, and power. In some heiau his team conducted test excavations to obtain materials with which to date their construction, learning more about the activities once carried out within their walls.

This chapter describes the author’s examination of the positions and locations of heiau in Kahikinui. He observed that temple sites fell into three clusters. Most common were heiau that faced east; many of these had spectacular viewsheds toward distant Kaupō. A second cluster faced northeast, between about 64 and 73 degrees on the compass. The third cluster faced north; in Kahikinui this is toward the summit ridgeline of Haleakalā. He theorized that each orientation cluster was associated with a particular deity. Temples with east orientations were associated with Kāne, who was strongly linked with the sun and the east. Two astronomical phenomena may have determined the orientation of the temples that faced the northeast: the acronical rising of the star cluster Pleiades just after sunset, which was crucial to the onset of the Makahiki season and the New Year, or the summer solstice, or both. North-facing temples were constructed so that their principal axes faced the mountain. As such these temples are believed to be dedicated to, or associated with, Kū, the deity linked to the high mountains, to the sky, and to forests.

This chapter describes an encounter between French explorers and the Kahikinui people. In May 1786, the French frigates La Boussole and L’Astrolabe, under the command of Jean-François de Galaup de la Pérouse, bore down on Maui from the northwest. As the ships sailed down the channel off Kahikinui, the people knew that these likely carried hao (iron). Several canoes then set out from the small coves and inlets along the Kahikinui shore to chase after the French with whom they traded precious pigs and tubers for the sought-after hao. Arriving home with their precious cargo, they hauled the canoes up from the rocky inlets to secure them safely away in the canoe sheds. Returning mauka to their homesteads, they regaled friends and family with tales of their adventure, showing off the hoops of hao, which they could now fashion into adz blades, knives, and other objects. Archaeological work at Kahikinui has provided a mere hint of this day’s first contact between the local people and the French explorers.

This chapter first discusses the tumultuous religious and cultural changes that swept through Hawaii in the early nineteenth century, reaching even into remote moku such as Kahikinui. It then turns to the excavation of site KIP-728, which revealed a Hawaiian temple or heiau that was converted into a commoner residence, occupied by someone during the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a first in Hawaiian archaeology. To perform such an act of desacralization would have been highly unusual. Who would have carried out such a bold act, and why? The answer lies in the history of the two Native Hawaiian catechists Helio Kaiwiloa (or Kaoeloa) and Simeon Kaoao. There can be little doubt that it was one of these fervent converts who carried out the purposeful desecration of this heiau and its conversion to a dwelling.

This chapter focuses on an individual known as Paiko. Manuel Pico came to the islands on a whaling ship, possibly in the 1840s. He hailed from the island of Pico in the Azores, and hence was called Manuel do Pico; this was later Hawaiianized as Paiko. He had obtained a lease to run cattle over the lands of Kahikinui from the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1876; had constructed windmills and water troughs; and had built some kind of ranch establishment at the site of Kahikinui House. Paiko and his cowboys eventually gained control of the ancestral lands of the people of Kahikinui, running several thousand head of cattle over the ridges and swales that once produced abundant crops of sweet potatoes and dryland taro. The freshwater springs running in lava tubes below Lualaʻilua and at Kahawaihapapa were tapped by windmill-driven pumps to water the thirsty herds. Families were forced to abandon their village and within a few years the land of Laʻamaikahiki, no longer reverberated with the sound of Hawaiian voice, chant, and song.

This chapter reflects on the future of Kahikinui. It argues that Kahikinui will remain a kuaʻāina, an out district, literally the “back of the land.” The lack of water is perhaps the most serious constraint, although long-term efforts to reestablish the dryland forests on Haleakalā’s slopes might, over time, bring back the old springs and water sources. But these will never be sufficient for more than a handful of families. This lack of water, combined with an absence of beaches, means that Kahikinui will never become an extension of the tourist ghettos of Kīhei and Wailea. Nor is commercial agriculture likely to be viable, for the same reasons. However, Kahikinui is already seeing rapid change. Wind—the one natural asset that the district has in abundance—has already been tapped to provide “green” energy to other parts of Maui. Kahikinui also possesses one resource that makes it of unique value—its potential to educate. It is one of the few places in the islands where an entire moku can still be viewed, explored, studied, more or less in the state that it has been in for centuries. Its slopes harbor some of the last remnants of the amazing biodiversity of Hawaiian dryland forests. The land itself offers lessons in volcanology, geology, and soil formation.

This chapter discusses the author’s reasons for choosing Kahikinui as the site of a major archaeological project. At first glance this arid, leeward southeastern slope of Haleakalā volcano is a classic kuaʻāina, a backcountry that was shunned by the ruling chiefs. There are no rich moʻolelo (oral traditions) about Kahikinui; indeed, it is barely mentioned in the main historical accounts. Yet there were a number of advantages to launching an archaeological project in this kuaʻāina. First and foremost, Kahikinui constituted an entire moku, an ancient political district, which had never suffered from the effects of Westernized “development.” For the archaeologist, this meant that the settlement pattern—the network of house sites, agricultural fields, shrines, heiau, and other structures built by the ancient Hawaiian occupants of the moku—would still be intact. From the perspective of anthropological theory, Kahikinui offered another advantage. It enabled the author to test the story that the hotbeds of historical dynamism in Polynesia were not the core regions, but the marginal lands like Kahikinui.