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		Our commitment to sharing our work has resulted in more than 15 papers or presentations at regional, national, and international meetings, 3 major research articles, one chapter in an edited volume, one technical article and 2 MA theses thus far. More work is in progress; virtually all of our Kohala research is collaborative and involves students from our respective institutions.

H. David Tuggle, another U.H. Manoa faculty member, extended this trajectory of research by selecting the windward valleys of North Kohala for field work in the early 1970s. While much of his work remains unpublished, Tuggle and Tomanari-Tuggle (1980) is a synthesis of agricultural change for all of Kohala--both dry land and pond field. Their article was the first to suggest that the extensive and intensive limits of traditional Hawaiian dry land farming had been reached in Kohala. Tuggle's graduate students Ross Cordy and M. Kashko (1982) have contributed to our understanding of social relations in Kohala through their analysis of trails which link coastal settlements and the upland agricultural zone. Cordy (1981) has also pursued the study of social complexity in leeward Hawai'i. Finally,  Patrick Kirch (1982, 1984, 1985, 1990, 1994) has employed the archaeological research in Kohala to reach new conclusions and generalize about the relations between population size, agricultural intensification, and social complexity or change in pre-European contact Hawai'i.

In the early 1990s when we reviewed the corpus of radiocarbon dates from the leeward (western) portion of Hawai'i Island, we concluded that the timing of dry land agriculture in Kohala was late, the total duration of dry land agriculture in the KFS was relatively short (300-400 years), and yet the changes that occurred over this interval were profound in terms of their impact on Hawaiian society. With the creation of the GIS database of the KFS in 1995, and publication of our first analysis of the relation between the environment and agricultural expansion and effort within KFS (Ladefoged et al. 1996), we demonstrated the efficacy of this type of research orientation. We were able to show empirically that while the KFS was developed near its geographic limit of expansion, there did not appear to be such a limit reached with respect to the intensity of agricultural effort. Rather, it varied across the more than 20 land units (i.e., ahupua'a ) for which we had data. This suggested that was time to start a program of field research in Kohala to generate new data on agricultural and social development.

We began that work during the summer of 1997 when we field tested new GPS units that Ladefoged had acquired through the University of Auckland and which allowed not only the location of sites to be recorded but made it possible to map architectural features within an acceptable range of precision (see Ladefoged et al. 1998). That summer we worked primarily in the southern ahupua'a of Pahinahina and Makiloa but visited the uplands and other locations along the coast of Kohala. A graduate student at the University of Auckland completed an M.A. thesis using information recorded on what we thought were residential architectural features (O'Connor 1998). She generated a seriation, that is, relative ordering of the residential features, from Pahinahina and Makiloa and also included comparable features from Kaloko in North Kona which had been previously mapped and dated by Cordy et al. (1991).

We also utilized the GIS database to model agricultural development over time in the Kohala Field System (see this link). This was premised on the notion that longer field border walls were built earlier than shorter ones; the latter often in-filled areas between existing walls and where new trails had been built.

Beginning in 1999 and extending through the summer of 2003, we moved the focus of field work in Kohala to the uplands and the KFS. We have worked on the ranch lands owned or leased by Kahua Ranch, Ponoholo Ranch, and Parker Ranch. These uplands overlap with the areas we had previously mapped along the coast of North Kohala and extended farther north. After the first year of work, another graduate student at the University of Auckland, wrote an MA thesis (McCoy 2000) on the development of dry land agricultural fields in three different sections of the KFS: two locations that we had mapped with the GPS units and a third section from the previous work of Rosendahl (1972) in Lapakahi and published in Kirch (1984). One of the goals of this thesis was to develop a method for creating a relative order for the construction of fields and trails. We have now accomplished this (Ladefoged et al. 2003); what is equivalent to horizontal stratigraphy, by documenting abutting and intersecting walls and trails. Furthermore and significantly, we can distinguish agricultural expansion from agricultural intensification in the KFS sections that we have mapped.