
Michael W GravesUniversity of New Mexico | UNM · Department of Anthropology
Michael W Graves
PhD
About
133
Publications
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Introduction
My research focus is the development of agriculture and other aspects of subsistence in Hawaii. I also contribute to the study of archaeological method and theory with respect to chronology building and the analysis of artifacts.
Additional affiliations
July 1985 - August 1986
August 1986 - December 2006
January 2007 - present
Education
August 1974 - May 1981
September 1970 - August 1974
Publications
Publications (133)
Of the new archaeologists who developed social models for prehistoric organization, William A. Longacre was a pioneer. Here, we review his contributions and the role he played in expanding archaeological method, theory, and practice. His innovative work in the American Southwest involving ceramic sociology was emulated, critiqued, and extended by s...
A reanalysis of the chronology of Pololu Valley, located in the district of Kohala on Hawai'i Island, is pre-sented using standard radiocarbon and accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dating. Using curated materials from the 1970s, Pololu is reassessed and found to have the earliest coastal occupations in this part of Hawai'i, beginning about AD 130...
Research in the leeward Kohala dryland agricultural field system on Hawai'i Island provides the opportunity to develop a fine-grained chronology for its development-both expansion and intensification-using a combination of chronometric and relative dating. Two pathways for agricultural development are identified for this field system, the first beg...
Archaeological monitoring was conducted for ground disturbing activity associated with improvements to Piers 12 and 15 in Honolulu Ahupuaʻa, Honolulu District, on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. The two piers are previously recorded archaeological sites; Pier 12 has been designated as SIHP 50-80-14-7575, while Pier 15 was designated as SIHP 50-80-14-...
An archaeological inventory survey was conducted for ground disturbing activity associated with construction of the Honolulu Bethel Hotel Project in Honolulu Ahupuaʻa, Honolulu District, on the island of O‘ahu, Hawai‘i. The project area covered TMK: (1) 2-1-002:001 and :007, two parcels with a collective area of .289 ha (.716 ac.). Subsurface testi...
The kua‘āina, or backcountry, in the Hawaiian Islands was the setting for a dynamic back-and-forth between the collective action of commoner class farmers and political elites. We examine how the long-term history of that dynamic left behind spatial patterns in the form and distribution of domestic, agricultural, and ritual architecture across the...
This report details our findings from both remote sensing and in-field archaeological survey and test excavations in the South Kohala Field System of mauka (uplands) Kawaihae 1 ahupua‘a, South Kohala, Hawai‘i Island. For in-field work we have focused on a study area bounded by two drainages, both of which flow into Honokoa Gulch at about 400 m abov...
An archaeological inventory survey was conducted for the Paumalū Girl Scout Camp at TMK: (1) 5-9-006:012 (por.) in Paumalū Ahupua‘a, Ko‘olauloa District, on the island of O‘ahu, in anticipation of improvements to the camp. The archaeological work included a pedestrian survey that covered 100% of the project area, as well as test excavations consist...
Studies in the leeward Kohala field system on Hawai‘i Island have considered the processes and timing of agricultural development associated with sociopolitical transformations and the production of agricultural surpluses. Using extensive soil sampling, we explore the use of relatively mobile and immobile soil parameters within the agricultural lan...
We show how by integrating historical, archaeological, and remote sensing it is possible to detect traditional Hawaiian agricultural features in former sugar cane lands. From this we are able to reconstruct the network of irrigation ditches (and a tunnel), pond field and other irrigated terraces across a portion of the landscape of windward Kohala,...
This book examines farming and foraging in the ancient settlement of Nuʻalolo Kai on Kauaʻi Island. Tucked beneath the cliffs of the Nā Pali Coast, Nuʻalolo Kai was home to a Hawaiian community of fishers, farmers, and craftsmen. Although it was relatively isolated from the rest of Kauaʻi, Nuʻalolo Kai supported a healthy population for more than 5...
This chapter examines modified and unmodified archaeological remains of sea turtles from Nuʻalolo Kai. The 1958–1964 and 1990 archaeological excavations at Nuʻalolo Kai yielded only a small number of sea turtle remains relative to the total bone assemblage, but the sample represents the largest collection of sea turtle bones recovered from an archa...
This concluding chapter presents an integrated picture of subsistence at Nuʻalolo Kai, with particular emphasis on trends and changes pertaining to local environment, foraging, settlement, animal husbandry, and material culture over the past 500 years. It provides a chronology of habitation and subsistence at Nuʻalolo Kai from AD 1300 to AD 1700 to...
At the base of a steep cliff towering some 500 feet above the coast of the remote Nā Pali district on the island of Kauaʻi, lies the spectacular historical and archaeological site at Nuʻalolo Kai. First excavated by Bishop Museum archaeologists between 1958 and 1964, the site contained the well-preserved remains of one of the largest and most diver...
At the base of a steep cliff towering some 500 feet above the coast of the remote Nā Pali district on the island of Kaua‘i, lies the spectacular historical and archaeological site at Nu‘alolo Kai. First excavated by Bishop Museum archaeologists between 1958 and 1964, the site contained the well-preserved remains of one of the largest and most diver...
The role of arboriculture is less well known or studied in Hawaiian archaeology than more traditional farming practices that emphasized root crops. This study attempts to identify relict stands of trees and other larger plants that were managed or cultivated by Hawaiians. These relict stands represent former areas where trees were managed for their...
Tunneling through landforms to provide irrigation to fields located on ridge lands has been reported for only one location in Hawaii, known as the Waiapuka Tunnel in windward Kohala, Hawaii Island. The research reported here describes the condition of this tunnel, how it was constructed, and how it operated to direct water from Waikama Stream throu...
We present new field surveys from one of Hawai'i Island's small valleys, Halawa Gulch, to highlight variability in irrigated taro agriculture management. In Halawa Gulch we found little evidence for the manipulation of irrigation water and garden plot size suggesting that top-down pressure on surplus may have been relaxed in comparison with large v...
Through intensive archaeological investigation of temples inHawai'i, the authors reveal a sequence of religious strategies for creating and maintaining authority that has application to prehistoric sequences everywhere. Expressed in the orientation and layout of the temples and their place in the landscape, these strategies develop in four stages o...
Through intensive archaeological investigation of temples in Hawai'i, the authors reveal a sequence of religious strategies for creating and maintaining authority that has application to prehistoric sequences everywhere. Expressed in the orientation and layout of the temples and their place in the landscape, these strategies develop in four stages...
Agriculture was essential in providing for food security, population growth and surplus social production on Pacific Islands. This paper discusses innovations first seen between ad 1400 and 1650 that opened up roughly 60 per cent of the available farm land in the Hawaiian Islands. These innovations include terraced fields in narrow gulches, some us...
Prior to European contact in 1778, Hawaiians developed intensive irrigated pondfield agricultural systems in windward Kohala, Hawai'i. We evaluated three potential sources of nutrients to windward systems that could have sustained intensive agriculture: (1) in situ weathering of primary and secondary minerals in upland soils; (2) rejuvenation of th...
Background/Question/Methods
A former fishering village of Nu‘alolo Kai, located on the Na Pali Coast on the north shore of Kaua‘i, was occupied for at least 500 years between AD 1300 and 1900. It preserves one of the richest assemblages of organic materials on the island of Kaua‘i. We examined fragments of wood charcoal, recovered from eleven stra...
Background/Question/Methods
The transformation of natural ecosystems to agricultural ecosystems, agricultural intensification, and the cessation of agriculture alter nutrient cycling dynamics. Unfortunately, in ecosystems experiencing rapid rates of erosion, the fingerprint of past land use change has been removed from the landscape. In dryland e...
Background/Question/Methods
Prehistoric agriculture and its relation to environment, population size, and social complexity is of longstanding interest in archaeology and allied disciplines. The research reported here takes up this issue in a dry land agricultural context from the northwestern portion of the
island of
Hawaii where there is bo...
Hawaiian territoriality evolved in response to the ecodynamics of changing populations set within shifting socio-political structures. Modeling agricultural surplus production and life expectancy of various prehistoric and protohistoric territorial configurations in the leeward Kohala dryland field system identifies the costs and benefits associate...
One of the recent discussions to emerge among archaeologists regarding Rapa Nui (Easter Island) prehistory contrasts "early" and "late" estimates for initial human colonization of the island. These differing estimates, in turn, offer significantly different messages for the timing and rate of cultural evolution on the island. A recent study of elev...
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Hawaiian Political and Social OrganizationSpatial Evidence Documenting Hawaiian Territorial Boundaries
Ballard et al. (2005) have recently reviewed the dispersal and impact of the sweet potato (lpomoea batatas (L.) Lam.) in the Pacific Islands. Contributors to the volume note the huge impact that this plant had on a number of islands in Near and Remote Oceania. With regard to Polynesia, Green (2005) reviewed the evidence for sweet potato before and...
or the past decade, researchers at the University of Hawai'i have examined the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum's collection of artifacts excavated from the site of Nu'alolo Kai on the Nā Pali coast of Kaua'i (Figure 1). This site complex, located adjacent to the cliff on the north side of the valley, was first identified by Bennett (1931:148-150) duri...
Before European contact, Hawai`i supported large human populations in complex societies that were based on multiple pathways
of intensive agriculture. We show that soils within a long-abandoned 60-square-kilometer dryland agricultural complex are
substantially richer in bases and phosphorus than are those just outside it, and that this enrichment p...
Measuring subsistence change, especially when it involves questions of resource intensification, requires special attention to issues of data quality and relevance. This is particularly so when, as in Remote Oceania, the archaeological record is of relatively short duration and the nature of subsistence change was mostly quantitative, not qualitati...
Judith A. Habicht‐Mauche. The Pottery from Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, New Mexico: Tribalization and Trade in the Northern Rio Grande. Arroyo Hondo Archaeological Series, Number 8. Santa Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1993. xviii + 254 pp. including appendices, additional reports, references and index. $30.00 paper.
Marion F. Smith, ed...
This GIS analysis of the dry-land agricultural field system in Kohala on the island of Hawai'i reveals patterning that is explained by evolutionary ecological principles set within a selectionist framework. The ca. 55 km 2fixed-field system was developed through establishment, expansion, and intensification from the sixteenth until the early ninete...
Prehistoric Long-Distance Interaction in Oceania: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Marshall I. Weisler. ed. Monograph 21. Auckland, New Zealand: New Zealand Archaeological Association, 1997. 238 pp.
The history of Americanist archaeology can be profitably approached through an examination of ceramic design studies in the
puebloan region of the American Southwest. An intellectual tradition is represented throughout these studies, grounded in
the assumption that ceramic design variation can be reflected, among other things, in prehistoric social...
The evolution of the Tongan maritime empire, involving both the development of social complexity and geographic expansion through conquest and trading, are examined by means of evolutionary ecology. This Darwinian evolutionary framework provides the mechanism and identifies the environmental structure, processes, and behavioral strategies by which...
Intensified dryland agriculture was a component of the late prehistoric Hawaiian subsistence base. Which environmental factors permitted, encouraged, restricted, blocked the spreading of intensive agriculture into new areas of fields? A GIS study of the great field system at Kohala on the leeward side of Hawai'i Island explores the controlling vari...
The question of when the Hawaiian Archipelago was first colonised by Polynesians is a perennial one. There are now two distinct proposals for the timing of this event, which for simplicity's sake might be labelled the long and short chronologies. We describe the two models, the methods by which they estimate colonisation for Hawai'i, and the proble...
Abstract Seriation, a relative dating method, can be employed to chronologically order traditional Hawaiian religious sites (known as heiau) in terms of their masonry architectural traits. This method is applied to 107 heiau identified and recorded on the island of Maui. By first separating the sites into four different geographic zones and then co...
Archaeological investigations of the prehistoric colonization of East Polynesia have focused on the question: when did this event occur? A relatively late date for the colonization of Hawai'i is held by some archaeologists; an alternative view suggests that there is considerably more antiquity to the settlement of Hawai'i. This paper separates the...
Using ceramic assemblages from the Guthe Collection that were studied by Solheim (1964), we employ the seriation method to arrange Philippine earthenware vessels by major artifact class, surface treatment, design, and morphology. While general artifact classes such as porcelain and iron produced successful seriations across all of the sites, we fou...
Editorial: The New Face of American Antiquity - Volume 60 Issue 1 - Michael W. Graves