Ritual Activity and Chiefly Economy at an Upland Religious Site on Maui, Hawai'i

Abstract

This report describes Molohai heiau, a Hawaiian upland religious site, within the context of human ritual activity and chiefly productive economy. Molohai represents a series of occupational episodes that date between A.C. 1057 and 1920. The site contains an unusual sequence of faunal material, where domestic pig replaced wild birds and fish as a chiefly commodity, sacrificial offering, or feasting food. The ritual connotation of these offerings is also linked to the upland productive economy and chiefly surplus of foodstuffs. Molohai is also notable because it definitively links the role of human predation in the extirpation of terrestrial avifauna. Most interesting is that certain forest-adapted bird species were hunted, perhaps for their feathers or meat, and became extinct between A.C. 1057 and 1440. This suggests that status differentiation was occurring relatively early in the scope of Hawaiian culture, and that deforestation and upland agricultural intensification occurred relatively late in the human occupational sequence of Hawai'i. Unfortunately, such cumulative environmental effects precipitated serious and irreversible changes in terrestrial bird life.