Garden Offerings in the Kona Field System, Hawai'i Island: A Fine-Grained Chronology and Its Implications

Abstract

Identifying and explaining the end of long-lived practices is a major challenge for anthropological archaeology. We present a high-precision uranium series dating (230Th/U) chronology of an undocumented aspect of Hawaiian religion: the use of corals as offerings in gardens. Our results from the upland gardens of Kealakekua (Kona District, Hawai`i Island) document the onset of religious offerings at the same time as farming in the area at around AD 1400, with no samples dating to after around AD 1635. There are similar conspicuous endings to coral offerings in temple sites on the small, isolated island of Nihoa and in the uplands of Maui. On Nihoa, the lack of coral offerings after AD 1606 can be reasonably linked to the abandonment of permanent settlement on the island. In upland Maui temple sites, as is the case in the upland gardens of Kealakekua, the end of coral offerings around AD 1600–1700 suggests a disruption to a long-lived ritual tradition at a time when other metrics point to the rise of state authority over religion.