Books by Patrick Vinton Kirch
Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Volume 1: Historical Ethnography
by Patrick Vinton Kirch, Marshall Sahlins
From the late 1700s, Hawaiian society began to change rapidly as it responded to the growing world system of capital whose trade routes and markets crisscrossed the islands. Reflecting many years of collaboration between Marshall Sahlins, a prominent social anthropologist, and Patrick V. Kirch, a leading archaeologist of Oceania, Anahulu seeks out the traces of this transformation in a typical local center of the kingdom founded by Kamehameha: the Anahulu river valley of northwestern Oahu.
Volume I shows the surprising effects of the encounter with the imperial forces of commerce and Christianity—the distinctive ways the Hawaiian people culturally organized the experience, from the structure of the kingdom to the daily life of ordinary people. Volume II examines the material record of changes in local social organization, economy and production, population, and domestic settlement arrangements.
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A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai'i
Tracing the origins of the Hawaiians and other Polynesians back to the shores of the South China Sea, archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch follows their voyages of discovery across the Pacific in this fascinating history of Hawaiian culture from about one thousand years ago. Combining more than four decades of his own research with Native Hawaiian oral traditions and the evidence of archaeology, Kirch puts a human face on the gradual rise to power of the Hawaiian god-kings, who by the late eighteenth century were locked in a series of wars for ultimate control of the entire archipelago.
This lively, accessible chronicle works back from Captain James Cook’s encounter with the pristine kingdom in 1778, when the British explorers encountered an island civilization governed by rulers who could not be gazed upon by common people. Interweaving anecdotes from his own widespread travel and extensive archaeological investigations into the broader historical narrative, Kirch shows how the early Polynesian settlers of Hawai'i adapted to this new island landscape and created highly productive agricultural systems.
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Kua‘āina Kahiko: Life and Land in Ancient Kahikinui, Maui (Choice Outstanding Academic Books)
In early Hawai‘i, kua‘āina were the hinterlands inhabited by nā kua‘āina, or country folk. Often these were dry, less desirable areas where much skill and hard work were required to wrest a living from the lava landscapes. The ancient district of Kahikinui in southeast Maui is such a kua‘āina and remains one of the largest tracts of undeveloped land in the islands. Named after Tahiti Nui in the Polynesian homeland, its thousands of pristine acres house a treasure trove of archaeological ruins―witnesses to the generations of Hawaiians who made this land their home before it was abandoned in the late nineteenth century.
Kua‘āina Kahiko follows kama‘āina archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch on a seventeen-year-long research odyssey to rediscover the ancient patterns of life and land in Kahikinui. Through painstaking archaeological survey and detailed excavations, Kirch and his students uncovered thousands of previously undocumented ruins of houses, trails, agricultural fields, shrines, and temples. Kirch describes how, beginning in the early fifteenth century, Native Hawaiians began to permanently inhabit the rocky lands along the vast southern slope of Haleakalā. Eventually these planters transformed Kahikinui into what has been called the greatest continuous zone of dryland planting in the Hawaiian Islands. He relates other fascinating aspects of life in ancient Kahikinui, such as the capture and use of winter rains to create small wet-farming zones, and decodes the complex system of heiau, showing how the orientations of different temple sites provide clues to the gods to whom they were dedicated.
Kirch examines the sweeping changes that transformed Kahikinui after European contact, including how some maka'āinana families fell victim to unscrupulous land agents. But also woven throughout the book is the saga of Ka ‘Ohana o Kahikinui, a grass-roots group of Native Hawaiians who successfully struggled to regain access to these Hawaiian lands. Rich with anecdotes of Kirch’s personal experiences over years of field research, Kua'āina Kahiko takes the reader into the little-known world of the ancient kua‘āina.
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