Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of language abbreviations
- Prologue: on historical anthropology
- Part I The phylogenetic model: theory and method
- Part II Rediscovering Hawaiki
- Introductory remarks
- 4 The Ancestral Polynesian world
- 5 Subsistence
- 6 Food preparation and cuisine
- 7 Material culture
- 8 Social and political organization
- 9 Gods, ancestors, seasons and rituals
- Epilogue: on history, phylogeny, and evolution
- Notes
- Glossary of terms
- References
- Subject Index
- Index of Proto Polynesian Reconstructions
5 - Subsistence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of language abbreviations
- Prologue: on historical anthropology
- Part I The phylogenetic model: theory and method
- Part II Rediscovering Hawaiki
- Introductory remarks
- 4 The Ancestral Polynesian world
- 5 Subsistence
- 6 Food preparation and cuisine
- 7 Material culture
- 8 Social and political organization
- 9 Gods, ancestors, seasons and rituals
- Epilogue: on history, phylogeny, and evolution
- Notes
- Glossary of terms
- References
- Subject Index
- Index of Proto Polynesian Reconstructions
Summary
The immediate plant origins of the most important cultigens, the starch-producing staples … demonstrates three major characteristics of Oceanic agricultures: 1. Their derivative natures … 2. The importance of vegetative reproduction in the plant roster. 3. Arboriculture as a significant part of subsistence patterns.
yen 1973:70We have seen that the PPN speakers indexed their biotic world with a rich and complex terminology for plants, birds, shellfish, fish, and other life forms. On these ecologically varied low and high islands extending along the Tonga–Samoa lineament, they created distinctive modes of food production and extraction. How might one reconstruct the subsistence economy of Ancestral Polynesia, applying the triangulation method? In triangulation it is not necessary to always privilege linguistic evidence. A well-developed tradition of ethnobotanical research within Polynesia and Oceania – one thinks of Merrill (1954), Barrau (1965a, 1965b), and Yen (1971, 1973, 1991) – has long sought to reconstruct ancient forms of Oceanic cultivation and food production. More recently, historical linguists such as French-Wright (1983), Ross (1996a), and Osmond (1998) have concerned themselves with the reconstruction of Oceanic crop plant and horticultural terminologies, although this has been primarily at the POC rather than PPN level.
For fishing and marine exploitation, a similarly long tradition of comparative ethnography includes the works of Beasley (1928), Anell (1955), Reinman (1967), and others, supplemented by studies of fishing gear incorporated within many of the museum ethnographies of the 1920s–1940s (e.g., Hiroa 1930, 1944; Beaglehole and Beaglehole 1938).
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- Information
- Hawaiki, Ancestral PolynesiaAn Essay in Historical Anthropology, pp. 120 - 142Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001