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Review by Dave Tuggle
The Fifth International Conference on Easter Island was held at Kamuela, Hawai’i in August 2000. The Pacific 2000 Proceedings volume has appeared less than two years later. This is remarkable in its own right, but doubly so when considering that this duplicates the publication feat of the Fourth Conference (held in 1997, Proceedings printed in 1998). The editors and the Easter Island Foundation deserve some sort of reward for this record-breaking effort. As reviewer, I have no hesitation in suggesting that
RNJ readers who have not already purchased the volume can reward the Foundation and themselves by sending in their order for this wonderful collection that consists of 56 papers by 75 authors (including the Keynote Address by Peter Bellwood), and 29 abstracts of papers that were not submitted for publication. (The Easter Island Foundation should also consider making this, and their other publications, available on CD-ROM.)
It is of some interest to see that Easter Island researchers have been expanding the boundaries of their comparative universe in great leaps. The first three International Conferences focused exclusively on Easter Island. The Fourth was “Easter Island and East Polynesia.” The Fifth is “Easter Island and the Pacific.” If the Sixth is “Easter Island and the World,” that will be fine with me, because it still identifies Rapa Nui as the center of Everything. (In fact, Peter Bellwood may have presaged this in his Pacific 2000 Conference Keynote Address: “Polynesian Prehistory and the Rest of Mankind.”) This expansion is explained by Christopher Stevenson in his Introduction to the Proceedings of the 1997 Fourth Conference in which he notes that there was a concern that “inward focus will in the long run be academically fatal,” and thus there was a call for papers covering all of Polynesia. In the Pacific 2000 Conference, Easter Island and Polynesia remain the core, but the outward view now includes papers where geography or theme refer to the larger Pacific region.
Space constraints prohibit review comments on individual papers (shorthand for saying I do not want to expose my ignorance of some of the topics), and I control my normal tendency to rant about egregiously erroneous statements (shorthand referring to statements that do not reflect my own views). More importantly, there are too many interesting papers and valuable points to fret about selective offenses. By subject matter the 56 papers include: the archaeology of Rapa Nui (5); the cultural anthropology of Rapa Nui (5); the archaeology of Hawai’i (5), Samoa (4), Palau (3), the Society Islands (2), Kosrae (1), and the Marquesas (1); Polynesian arts (9); Polynesian physical anthropology (5); Polynesian language (4); thematic papers on regional chronology, voyaging, subsistence, agriculture, and ceramics (7); and conservation, from curation problems to petroglyph recording (5).
As he did for the 1997 Proceedings, Stevenson provides an
Introduction to the 2000 Proceedings, and makes the important observation that the “list of participants has a true international flair. Researchers from the Americas, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific Islands and Japan have all made important contributions.” He also defines some of the themes that emerge from the papers, including landscape studies, contemporary social issues, and fresh views on older subjects. For example, Anderson’s study of prehistoric voyaging canoes is a reminder that it is necessary to consider what the modern voyaging experiments are in fact measuring. Let’s pursue the themes of the Proceedings.
Several papers treat new or updated models dealing with cultural change and variation, including evolutionary theory (Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo), gender as an analytic category (Cynthia Van Gilder), and complexity theory (Robert Hommon).
Paleoenvironmental work (particularly pollen studies) has become a critical part of archaeological research in the Pacific, represented here in papers by Kevin Butler and John Flenley, Juan Grau, and Steve Athens and Jerome Ward.
Art, oral traditions, historical research, and linguistic analyses maintain places of importance for their cross-disciplinary contributions in Pacific research in an exemplary manner (as found in numerous papers).
A number of papers address the promises and problems of the conduct of archaeology in the modern world, a world in which archaeology is not the isolated academic discipline it was a generation ago. Such papers include Ross Cordy’s High School Hawaiian Studies Program (the paper focuses on the results of the archaeological research and training of students most of whom are of Hawaiian ancestry; another paper on the training program itself would be welcome), Susan Lebo and James Bayman’s archaeological and historical work involving cooperation with a Hawaiian community organization, Yosihiko Sinoto’s experiences with government-managed marae “restoration” on Ra’iatea, José Miguel Ramírez’ remarkable review of “utopia and reality” of CRM on Easter Island, and several that concern native values and cultural revivals in relation to archaeology and anthropology (for example, those by Riet Delsing, Lorella Pignet, and Alejandra Grifferos A.)
In
the same realm, the expanding
numbers of native islanders in
Pacific anthropological / archaeological research is well illustrated in the authorship of many papers (including abstracts of papers not submitted for publication); these individuals are not only anthropologists who happen to be from a native group, but indigenous people who are anthropologists / archaeologists, that is, who may bring a non-Western view to the practice of the discipline. (Representatives of local cultural groups, some trained as anthropologists and some not, are increasingly becoming the responsible authorities for cultural resource management in the Pacific. Conflicts are emerging between some of these new managers and older ones, conflicts based not only on variation in training, but also based in differences in world-view. This will certainly appear as a theme in some future conference.)
Finally, there is a theme that should not be overlooked, considering that it is in one way or another the point of it all: the decades of focused substantive and theoretical research in archaeology, physical anthropology, and linguistics are producing a relatively coherent and largely consistent general model of Pacific prehistory, as best illustrated in Bellwood’s keynote paper, but clearly expressed in many other reports. (Bellwood and others suggest that the chronology of Palauan colonization is one note that is off-key. However, the large multi-year archaeological research project conducted for the US Corps of Engineers Compact Road construction is still on going, and the papers in the Pacific 2000 Proceedings and the existing CRM reports on Palau should all be considered preliminary. As a project participant, albeit a marginal one, I know that the final report
— much of which will be written by field director Jolie Liston — will address this issue in great detail.)
Three closing points:
It is always a pleasure to read an unvetted volume — a collection that has not been subjected to the misnamed and generally pernicious peer review. The editors are to be congratulated for giving full voice to all those who participated in the conference.
Bellwood’s summary of Polynesian prehistory is an intellectual tour de force that concisely presents the current state of knowledge, theoretical issues and models, larger comparative issues, and on-going research problems.
And how could one not like a volume that dares to include comparative illustrations of “The Tahitian Chief Tu / Pomare I, and … Bob Zimmerman / Bob Dylan. Both living in a mythological reality…?” (the Paul Wallen paper).
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