Eyles’s find generated considerable local interest; moa eggs were a rarity, and the whale-tooth necklace was virtually unique. In order to keep the artifacts safe, the family packed them into a biscuit tin and deposited them at the National Bank. For a while they were exhibited in the window of a fish shop; Eyles recalled watching one woman stroke the egg as if it were a holy relic. Several museums expressed interest in the find, and when a deal was eventually struck with the director of the Dominion Museum, in Wellington, the egg and the ivory necklace were carried across Cook Strait in the family fishing boat.
Early in 1942, Eyles again took up his shovel, this time in an attempt to dig an air-raid shelter, and once again, like a diviner, he came upon a trove. About twelve inches below the surface, in an area not far from the site of the 1939 discovery, he found the crushed remnants of another egg and then a second skeleton—a young man, it would later prove to be, in the prime of life. The body had been interred with a spectacular array of grave goods: two “whale tooth” necklaces, one in moa bone and one in whale ivory; two necklaces made from hundreds of drilled porpoise teeth; one necklace of eleven large moa-bone beads, with a central whale-tooth pendant; and fourteen argillite adzes, including five that were between twelve and eighteen inches long and weighed between five and ten pounds.
This time the news was so exciting that Roger Duff, ethnologist at the Canterbury Museum, traveled up from Christchurch to see the objects. Duff, who had been one of Skinner’s students at the University of Otago, was aware of the earlier discovery but had considered it “a chance, isolate find.” Realizing now that he’d been wrong, he impressed upon the young man the very great significance of his discovery, saying that it “surpassed anything else in New Zealand.” Eyles, who had been out fishing when Duff arrived, later wrote that he wished he’d been there “to see Duff’s expression when he first saw the hoard of material confronting him on the kitchen table.”
Over the next two decades, Eyles and Duff together excavated a series of sites at Wairau Bar, uncovering more than two thousand objects, including drilled moa eggs, adzes, fishhooks, and a stunning array of bracelets, necklaces, pendants, and amulets in whale ivory, moa bone, and stone. Among the most intriguing were a number of massive ridged tubular beads, known as “reels,” made from sections of moa femur (the same bit of bone that Professor Owen had used to diagnose the bird). These “enigmatical” objects had been seen before only in stone, and their purpose had never been fully comprehended. Some Māori claimed that they were used as part of a cord drill, others that they were “connected with genealogical matters,” but no one within the historical period had ever seen them worn or strung on necklaces—as they were in the graves—with sperm whale teeth or large, tusklike pendants of highly polished stone.
There was something quite fantastical about these discoveries. Duff referred to a “tradition of gigantism” in both ornaments and tools; the adzes in particular were so large and heavy, it was hard to imagine using them. This, along with the fact that so many of the objects had never been seen in New Zealand before, seemed to lend credence to the still popular (though officially discredited) idea that the moa hunters represented some distinct, perhaps foreign population. Duff, however, suggested that there might be a different principle at work. “No culture,” he wrote, “at any one time manages to stand completely still.” Rather, it evolves spontaneously and continually in response to the environment and to outside stimuli, and because change is the nature of life. This perspective enabled Duff to think—pretty much for the first time—less in terms of a distinct moa-hunter culture and more in terms of a moa-hunting phase. Moa hunters and Māori were not two different peoples; they were two different stages in a sequence.
Looking back on it, this shift toward a more evolutionary way of thinking about human culture seems obvious, but at the time it was not. Nor was it immediately obvious what the implications of such a paradigm shift might be. One underappreciated aspect of early anthropological models of Polynesian history, which envisioned the settlement of the islands in terms of a series of migratory “waves,” is that they implicitly supported the idea of Polynesian voyaging. They were consistent with traditional accounts of navigators who set out to explore and colonize new islands, who packed up their families and emigrated and traveled back and forth with comparative ease. But the idea that Polynesian cultures might have evolved locally opened the door to quite a different story.
All of a sudden, it became possible to envision a much smaller number of settlement events and, therefore, a great deal less voyaging. As one archaeologist calculated it, even “a single canoe-load” of young men and women might have had “a reasonable chance of establishing a viable population” in New Zealand. Assuming an initial settlement date of A.D. 1000 and a “modest” growth rate of between 1 and 2 percent per year, a founding group of just twenty young people might have reached a population of 100,000 by the beginning of the historical period. It was not at all clear that this was what had happened, but it was now viewed as something that could have happened. A more evolutionary model made the chronology—indeed, the whole history—of Polynesian settlement much simpler. Instead of a confusing sequence of hypothetical migrations back and forth from Hawaiki and other places, there was now, conceivably, just an initial arrival, followed by a long, slow evolution in place. It was different from any of the stories that had been told so far, and it was especially different from the story that had been drawn from the oral traditions. Of course, none of this said anything about when any of this had happened, but the key to that particular puzzle was right on the horizon.
Radiocarbon Dating
The Question of When
Fish hooks from South Point, Hawai‘i, in Fishhooks by Kenneth P. Emory, William J. Bonk, and Yosihiko H. Sinoto (Honolulu, 1959).
BERNICE P. BISHOP MUSEUM, HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I.
THE FIRST EDITION of Duff’s book about the discoveries at Wairau Bar, The Moa-Hunter Period of Maori Culture, was published in 1950. In 1951, the first radiocarbon date from the Pacific was reported by Willard F. Libby’s lab at the University of Chicago. Based on a sample of charcoal from the lowest layer of an excavation of the Kuli‘ou‘ou rock-shelter, on the island of O‘ahu, it fixed the earliest occupation of this Hawaiian site at A.D. 1004, plus or minus 180 years.
The development of radiocarbon dating, for which Libby won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1960, was “a godsend” to archaeology, particularly in those parts of the world without a written history. For the first time, it was possible to know, given a few ounces of organic matter—some wood from a coffin, a handful of barley, a deer antler, an oyster shell, a sample of peat—when, in calendrical terms, something in the undocumented past had actually happened. One could know when a fire had been lit or an animal slaughtered, when a house or canoe had been built, when a settlement had been founded or abandoned. Of course, the numbers were only approximate, and there were tricks and difficulties to the method that would take years to sort out, but the fact that it was possible at all was a game changer.
The method of radiocarbon dating arose out of work in the rarefied field of atomic physics and was challenging to prove experimentally, but the principles behind it are fairly straightforward. Early in the twentieth century, it became apparent that the earth was being bombarded by cosmic rays, which set off atomic reactions when they came into contact with the earth’s atmosphere. One of these reactions produced small quantities of carbon-14, a radioactive isotope of carbon, also known as radiocarbon. Radiocarbon is rare—for every atom of carbon-14 in the earth’s atmosphere, there are a million million atoms of carbon-12, the ordinary form of carbon—but the chemical behavior of the two isotopes is identical. Both combine with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide, which (through the process of photosynthesis) is taken up by plants, which are eaten by animals, which are eaten by other animals, and so on. Thus, the different isotopes of carbon all enter the food chain in the same way, and the ratio of carbon-14 to carb
on-12 in plants and animals is the same as it is in the atmosphere that surrounds them.
There is one key difference between these isotopes, however. Radiocarbon (carbon-14) is not stable like ordinary carbon (carbon-12); it is radioactive, meaning that it slowly and steadily decays. The rate at which this happens is known, although it was one of the many early unknowns for Willard Libby, whose first guess was that the half-life of carbon-14 was three months. In fact, the half-life of carbon-14—the amount of time it would take for half of a given quantity to disappear—is around 5,700 years.
When a plant or animal dies, it no longer takes up carbon-14 and thus becomes a “closed system.” The existing carbon-14 in its structure continues to decay, and, since it is no longer being replaced, the ratio of carbon-14 to carbon-12 begins to change. This happens at a steady and predictable rate, and the “beautifully simple principle” of radiocarbon dating is that by measuring the proportion of the remaining carbon-14, one can tell how much time has elapsed. As the archaeologist Colin Renfrew explains,
We know the initial proportion when it was living, since this is a constant figure through time. When we know the proportion left in the sample now, we can calculate how long the radioactive decay process has been going on. This is the same thing as the age since death of the sample; when we know this, we have dated it.
The first radiocarbon date to be reported, known officially as C-1, was from a piece of cypress wood from the tomb of the Third Dynasty Egyptian king Djoser. It had been sent to Libby in early 1947 by a curator in the Department of Egyptian Art at the Metropolitan Museum, in New York. Djoser’s tomb, at the time considered one of the earliest monumental stone structures, was thought to be datable to about 2700 B.C. “I shall be very much interested to see what your finds turn out to be when compared with our own records,” the curator wrote. “If we could get scientific evidence for even an approximate date in the period before 2000 BC, it would be of considerable use to us.” The radiocarbon age of this sample, determined on a hot Chicago afternoon in July 1948, put the date of the tomb (or at least the wood fragment) at 2029 B.C., plus or minus 350 years.
Over the next eighteen months, a wide variety of materials were tested: charcoal from the famous Lascaux cave in France (more than fifteen thousand years old); a pair of rope sandals from a cave in Oregon (more than nine thousand years old); the dung of a giant sloth from a cave in Chile (more than ten thousand years old); charcoal from Stonehenge (roughly 3,700 years old); wood from the heart of a giant sequoia felled in 1874 (roughly 2,700 years old according to the radiocarbon dates and known from its rings to be more than 2,800 years old); and a piece of linen wrapping from the Dead Sea Scrolls (dated to within two hundred years on either side of A.D. 33).
THE HAWAIIAN SAMPLE submitted for radiocarbon dating (known in the literature as C-540) had been sent to Libby’s lab in Chicago by a Bishop Museum anthropologist named Kenneth P. Emory, who played a key role in Polynesian research in the mid-twentieth century. Emory had grown up in Hawai‘i and had joined the staff of the Bishop Museum in 1920, just as the Bayard Dominick Expedition was setting out. He spent the next three decades doing fieldwork in some of the remotest corners of Polynesia, and in 1925 he met and married a half-French, half-Tahitian woman named Marguerite Thuret. (Like Te Rangi Hiroa, Thuret was initially denied U.S. citizenship on the grounds that, as a Polynesian, she was “Asiatic.” This decision was later overturned, thanks to arguments made by an expert in physical anthropology who asserted that “the color of Marguerite’s skin, the shape of her nose, and the configuration of her head” showed her to be “more Caucasian than anything else.”)
In 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Emory was living with his family in Honolulu. At forty-four, he was too old to enlist, so he took it upon himself to protect the museum’s collections, including thousands of pages of typed chants and legends, field notebooks, journals, reports, and unpublished manuscripts, which he painstakingly microfilmed and sent for safekeeping to his alma mater, Dartmouth College, on the grounds that, whatever happened, Hanover, New Hampshire, would probably “be safe from bombs.”
Not long after America’s entry into the war, Emory was having dinner with a naval officer when the conversation turned to the question of what would happen to U.S. airmen if they were shot down over the Pacific. The officer argued that even if they managed to find “a desert island,” they would certainly perish from starvation or thirst. Emory pointed out that Polynesians had been managing just fine for hundreds, if not thousands, of years and that there was food and water to be had on even the smallest islands if you knew where to look. Coconuts alone provided food, water, containers, and fuel for a fire; the problem was that most American servicemen had no idea how to husk one. Asked if he could teach them, Emory replied, Of course—all that was needed was a pointed stick. And so began his stint as survival instructor to the U.S. military in the Pacific theater.
Emory compiled a little manual of the basics, entitled South Sea Lore (known in its first incarnation as the Castaway’s Baedeker to the South Seas). It was based on a combination of firsthand experience and ethnological research and contained information on which plants to eat (pigweed and pandanus kernels); which fish to avoid (stonefish and puffer fish); how to dig and line a well; how to make sandals from coconut husks and weave a coconut-leaf shelter; how to treat a coral cut (never use iodine); and what to drink for an emetic (salt water). He pointed out that a magnifying glass was more useful than a box of matches and suggested that the only piece of equipment anyone actually needed was a machete (though if you also had a pocketknife, you would be “well equipped”).
Enthusiasm for Emory’s little book was overwhelming. The Honolulu Advertiser ran a story under the headline “Invaluable Advice for Unfortunate Airmen, Coconuts Sufficient to Sustain Life,” and the Honolulu Academy of Arts mounted an exhibition featuring Emory as a modern-day Robinson Crusoe, making sandals and weaving coconut fronds. Soon he was giving four, then five, then as many as eight lectures a day, to “fliers, chaplains, nurses, infantrymen, gunners, sailors,” while articles about Emory’s “school for castaways” began appearing in the national press.
Anthropology had proven unexpectedly useful in war, but the war was also changing the Pacific in ways that were disheartening to anthropologists. Runways were being built on islands to supply and move American troops, and distances that had once taken weeks to cross by sampan or schooner could now be traversed by air in a matter of days. The swarms of GIs who flooded into the region—not unlike the whalers of old—brought quantities of money and manufactured goods, precipitating a second great wave of cultural change. For men like Emory and Te Rangi Hiroa (who, as director of the Bishop Museum from 1936 until his death, in 1951, was Emory’s boss), the feeling was of an era come to an end.
ONTO THIS RATHER gloomy prospect, the development of radiocarbon dating cast an unexpected ray of light. Te Rangi Hiroa, who lived just long enough to learn the news, read Libby’s letter containing the first dates for the Kuli‘ou‘ou rock-shelter aloud to Emory, who immediately understood that “a whole new vista of possibilities” had suddenly opened up. Emory quickly embarked on an ambitious program of excavations throughout the Hawaiian Islands, using students from the University of Hawai‘i as laborers and assistants.
One of his most promising helpers was a Japanese graduate student named Yosihiko Sinoto, who had worked on archaeological digs in Japan and whose first question for Emory was “Where is the pottery?” In early Japanese archaeological contexts, as in classical archaeology, pottery was a key indicator of relative age. It was the artifact of choice for a technique called seriation, which involved sorting objects by shape or style or some other formal feature and then ranging them in series, on the principle that things that are alike probably belong to the same period and that changes in style are often incremental. Like stratigraphy, seriation is a means of establishing relative chronologies; combined with the new technique of radiocarbon dating, it
could be used to nail down whole stretches of cultural time. There was, however, no pottery in Hawai‘i, and Sinoto wondered what else could be used as a “diagnostic” artifact. The answer was fishhooks.
Like Skinner with his adzes, Emory and Sinoto sorted thousands of fishhooks to establish typologies—one-piece, two-piece, barbed, unbarbed, notched, knobbed. Sinoto even devised something he later described as a “poor man’s IBM”: a card file containing 3,500 entries, with either holes or slots cut into the top of each card. A metal rod inserted into the file would lift out only those cards with holes, leaving behind those with slots, thereby selecting a particular subset of the entries.
The Hawaiian site that produced the most spectacular array of fishhooks was a parched corner of the Big Island known as South Point. The southernmost point in the Hawaiian Islands, South Point is famous for its clash of ocean currents and the fish this attracts, and excavations in the area produced thousands of fishhooks in a wide variety of styles. But when charcoal from the South Point sites was sent for radiocarbon dating, it returned a confusing set of results. One sample suggested that South Point had first been occupied in the tenth century A.D., while another put the date as early as the second century. A single sample from a nearby site that was sent to two different laboratories for analysis returned dates that differed by more than four hundred years. All of this confirmed what was rapidly becoming apparent: that radiocarbon dating was subtler and more complicated than it had first appeared.
Sea People Page 21