Hawaii was settled centuries later than archaeologists once believed
For decades, researchers thought Polynesian voyagers reached Hawaii anywhere from the 2nd to the 9th century. Then a 2010 study, using more reliable radiocarbon samples, moved the arrival to around 1219 to 1266. That late, fast wave of migration helps explain why cultures across Eastern Polynesia look so alike.
Older estimates ranged widely. Early radiocarbon results suggested people might have arrived as early as 124 CE, and the archaeologist Patrick Kirch at first proposed about 300 CE, later 600. The 2010 reanalysis found that settlement of the Society Islands happened around 1025 to 1120, and that after a pause of 70 to 265 years a single rapid pulse carried people to the remaining islands, Hawaii among them. The first villages probably rose at the southern end of the Big Island before spreading north along coasts and valleys.
Settlers came prepared, carrying so-called canoe plants and animals: taro, banana, coconut and breadfruit, plus pigs, chickens and dogs. The Pacific rat hitched a ride too, and the paleoecologist David Burney argues that people and their animals drove many native birds, plants and large land snails to extinction. Sweet potato arrived later, with the earliest Hawaiian evidence of growing it around 1300. Meat was eaten less often than fruit, vegetables and seafood.
The Hawaiians became masters of aquaculture, turning estuaries and streams into fishponds walled with packed earth and cut stone. The Menehune Fishpond on Kauai is at least 1,000 years old, and when Captain James Cook arrived in 1778 there were at least 360 ponds yielding about 2,000,000 pounds of fish a year. Canal-fed pond fields watered taro on a large scale, and this abundance supported a dense population, estimated at 200,000 to 1,000,000 before diseases such as smallpox caused it to plunge after contact.
Society was strictly ranked, from chiefs who governed with divine power, through priests and skilled experts, to farming and fishing commoners and an outcast class. A village was laid out around temples built of lava rock, a chief's house on a raised platform, separate eating houses for men and women, canoe sheds, and a communal earth oven where only men cooked. This world lasted until Kamehameha the Great founded the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1795.
Source: Ancient Hawaii
