Re: Adzes form the first hard evidence of two-way travel between Hawaii and Tahiti.

On Sep 29, 6:04 pm, Eric Stevens <eric.stev...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 13:34:15 -0700, Jack Linthicum



<jacklinthi...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Cite has a photo. Examination of 19 adzes recovered in Tuamotu in the
1930s came from the smallest of the Hawaiian island, Kaho'olawe.

news@nature.

Published online: 27 September 2007; | doi:10.1038/news070924-9
Stone tool reveals lengthy Polynesian voyage
Adzes form the first hard evidence of two-way travel between Hawaii
and Tahiti.

Brendan Borrell

An adze from the Cook Islands

Jane Will***, Anthropology Museum, The University of Queensland

The discovery of an adze fashioned from Hawaiian basalt on a Tuamotu
atoll in French Polynesia provides the first material evidence that
ancient voyagers made an 8,000-kilometre round trip from the South
Pacific to Hawaii and back again.

More than 2,000 years ago, seafarers from Samoa and Tonga ventured
eastward to settle on more remote archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean,
including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands,
colonizing most of these places by 900 AD. Eventually, the travellers
set foot on Hawaii.

Scientists have long thought that these journeys must have been
accidental or one-time events,

With respect Jack, the above is the reverse of the truth. Linguistics
had established the linkage within polynesia of Tahitian/Marquesan
groups with Hawaian and it was only a question of how the connections
were made.

It is correct that in the past deliberate voyaging vs accidental drift
voyaging had been a longstanding argument but it was resolved with
some finality by the publication in 1973 by Michael Levison, R. Gerard
Ward and John F Webb of the results of computer simulations of drift
voyages. In particular, they ran 16,000 simulations of drift voyages
from "starting points along the northern margins of central and
eastern polynesia" and "none reached the Hawaian Islands".

Even Andrew Sharp who was one of the stronger advocates of accidental
drift voyaging had conceded by 1963 "that the effective settlers of
Hawaii ... were Marquesan one-way voyagers who set out in the hope of
finding traditional islands".

[1. The Settlement of Polynesia, Levison, M. R. Ward, R.G. Webb J.W.;
The University of Minnesota Press 1973, ISBN 0-8166-0661-7]



but recent research has hinted that
these peoples were capable of greater feats of navigation than
previously suspected. Despite this, there has been debate about how
much travel and trade took place among these remote islands in eastern
Polynesia during the early years of their colonization; did those
settlers who made it to Hawaii ever travel back again?

Hawaiian oral histories point to voyages to and from Tahiti, but in
the absence of evidence these feats have remained the stuff of
legends.

Volcanic origins

Kenneth Collerson and Marshall Weisler at the University of
Queensland, Australia realized that one way to test this possibility
was to trace the origins of 19 adzes - axe-like tools made from stone
that were used for carving canoes and other wooden objects - that had
been recovered from coral atolls in the Tuamotus in the late 1930s.

Because the adzes are fashioned from basalt - an igneous rock - they
must have been transported from one of the many volcanic island chains
in the region, possibly even Hawaii. Because the Tuamotus rose from
the sea only after 1200 AD, the adzes provide a record of travel from
after that time.

Collerson, a geochemist who studies mantle processes, knew that
basalts from different types of islands have a distinctive signature
in their trace elements and isotope chemistries. So the team took
centimetre-wide chunks from the adzes and compared them to a database
they had compiled from sites throughout the Pacific.

Although the Society Islands would have been the nearest source for
basalt, the team identified adzes from the Marquesas, Pitcairn, and
the Austral islands, indicating extensive travel in the region. One
adze had been fashioned from hawaiite, specifically from the island of
Kaho'olawe. Collerson says that "the only other possible location on
the planet where it could have come from is one of the islands in the
middle of the Atlantic" - an extremely unlikely prospect. They checked
their result twice over two years before finally submitting their
paper to Science, where it appears this week1.

Lonely Journey

Collerson and Weisler's study adds to a growing consensus among
scientists about the impressive navigational capacities of ancient
Polynesians. "They've really shown how wide a spread or distribution
this trading network really had," says Patrick Kirch, an archaeologist
at the University of California at Berkeley. "The clincher, of course,
is the one from Hawaii."

Earlier this year, another group reported on the presence of
Polynesian chicken bones in Chile, confirming that these voyagers made
it as far as the New World sometime between 700 and 1390 AD.

The adze finding is also welcome evidence to Geoffrey Irwin, an
anthropologist at the University of Auckland, who became a major
proponent of the theory that Polynesians systematically colonized the
Pacific after following the settlement route himself in a sailboat. He
points out that a group of anthropologists have also made the 1-month
voyage from Tahiti to Hawaii navigating via celestial clues alone2.

The tip of Hawaii's Kaho'olawe Island is today known as Lae o
Kealaikahiki, which means 'cape or headland on the way to Tahiti'.
Collerson suggests that rock from this cape in particular may have
been taken as a memento by travellers commemorating their long and
arduous journey.

References

1. Collerson, K. D. & Weisler, M. I. Science 317, 1907-1911 (2007).
2. Finney, B. R. Science 196, 1277-1285 (1977). | ISI |

http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070924/full/070924-9.html;jsessionid=...

Eric Stevens

The active word was "hard" as in solid, as in not liquid or gaseous.

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