 |
||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
In Kohala, our research objectives focus on the changing relations among the environment, subsistence, and social forms. The two basic questions we have asked are: 1) how did selection affect or change agricultural practices in different portions of Kohala; and 2) what role did selection play in changes in the social environment of Kohala?
|
||||||||||||||||||
The evolution of social and material forms is the guiding theoretical framework for archaeologists associated with HARP. By this we mean, the systematic study and explanation of the historical development and diversification of human culture, that which is acquired and transmitted by learning. Here, we are most concerned with the role of selection and drift as mechanisms for producing changing frequencies or occurrences of artifacts and behaviors. Natural and social environments are the external factors which influence selection's impact on humans. Interaction among humans and the transmission of traits are important internal components of evolutionary change.
In the case of the archaeology of Kohala, our research objectives focus on the changing relations among the environment, subsistence (particularly, agriculture but including animal husbandry and marine procurement), and social forms (including the scale and organization of social units and their relative redundancy). This kind of research, now labeled landscape archaeology, is an outgrowth of studies of subsistence-settlement systems and social complexity both of which have a long history of accomplishments in Hawai'i and Polynesia (see Green 1967, 1970; Kirch 1984; Newman 1970) upon which we build.
In order to pursue this research within the context of North Kohala and the KFS, we have attempted to integrate large scale analyses of its archaeological manifestations (e.g., walls, trails, residential architecture), relevant environmental structure, and social variables. This has also required that we develop historical or chronological information about each of these domains that is applicable at this large geographic scale. We are also at work on developing measures that scale agricultural investment and efficiency, the geographic extent of agricultural production and distribution, levels of social group size, social group differentiation, and environmental productivity and predictability.
The two basic questions we have asked are: 1) how did selection affect or change agricultural practices in different portions of Kohala; and 2) what role did selection play in changes in the social environment of Kohala?
Within any unit of time, we hope to explain how variation in environmental structure -- social as well as natural -- affected the adaptive relations of people, agriculture, and the land.