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The Hawai'i Archaeological Research Project (HARP) is a long term, collaborative program of field, archival, and computer based investigations on the historical development of traditional Hawaiian society, and the various forms that it expressed over time and in different localities. Our focus of field work since 1997 is in the Kohala area, located on the northern tip of Hawai'i Island.
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The Kohala Project is co-directed by Thegn N. Ladefoged (University of Auckland) and Michael W. Graves (University of Hawai'i at Manoa). We are now part of a collaborative effort involving researchers at several other universities, including University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, University of California at Santa Barbara, University of Washington, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Summer of 2003 marked the sixth year of funded field work in Kohala. Graduate and undergraduate students from U.H., Auckland, U.W., and other colleges in the United States have participated in this project over the years. In conjunction with the on-going research project, we have established an archaeological field training program in Kohala that began in June 2003 and will extend through 2005. More information on the 2004 summer program can be found in Opportunities to Participate.
The Kohala portion of this project grew out of a research review of dry land agriculture in Hawai'i by Graves and Ladefoged (1991) and then took its current form when a map of the dry land field system of North Kohala was discovered at U.H. Manoa. This map, based on a series of low level aerial photographs of Kohala, records the systematic identification of: 1) mixed dry land agricultural fields (walls or embankments); 2) trails extending from near the coast to the uplands (sometimes as much as 15-20 km in length); and 3) enclosing walls or pens.
Since then, we have developed a series of field, archival, and computer based projects that have resulted in several presentations, published articles, as well as research and theses by undergraduate and graduate students. Our current research documents and attempts to account for variation in and changes to prehistoric dry land agriculture in the Kohala Field System (KFS) by linking aspects of dry land farming to environmental and climatic variability, the development of social units of different geographic scale and organization, and changes to the distribution and expansion of the Hawaiian population (see Ladefoged and Graves 2000).