[ STUFFS ]
Hawaiki Ancestral Polynesia
Isle Pages
New releases from Hawaii authors, reviewed
By Burl Burlingame
Star-BulletinHawaiki Ancestral Polynesia
by Patrick Vinton Kirch and Roger Green
(Cambridge University Press, $27.95 paper, $74.95 cloth)As might be guessed from the price, the many pages of bibliography and from chapter titles containing words like "methodologies" and "phylogenetic," this is a textbook, and not particularly smooth sailing. Green is an emeritus professor of Prehistory at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and Kirch is a professor of Anthropology and director of the Hearst Museum at the University of Californiua at Berkeley -- and a name bruited about as a possible Bishop Museum director. Despite all the sources and facts and careful reasoning and skull-sweat that clearly went into this volume, Kirch and Green are essentially mapping out a what-if: Their theory is that all Polynesian cultures have a common ethnographic and cultural background -- the Pacific homeland of Hawaiki, 2,500 years ago, from which all Pacific peoples sprang. Once this is grasped, the rest of the book is a fabulously well-documented argument in support of this theory, but an argument nonetheless.
Click for online
calendars and events.
Send WatDat? questions, stories
or any other story ideas or comments to:
Features, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, P.O. Box 3080,
Honolulu, HI 96802 or send a fax to 523-8509
or E-mail to features@starbulletin.com.
Please include your phone number.
