tag:theconversation.com,2011:/uk/topics/pacific-history-76019/articlesPacific history – The Conversation2020-07-12T19:58:38Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1423832020-07-12T19:58:38Z2020-07-12T19:58:38ZDid ancient Americans settle in Polynesia? The evidence doesn’t stack up<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346781/original/file-20200710-38-1fcsnhh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C3%2C2051%2C1335&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andres Moreno-Estrada</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>How did the Polynesian peoples come to live on the far-flung islands of the Pacific? The question has intrigued researchers for centuries.</p>
<p>Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl brought the topic to public attention when he sailed a balsa-wood raft called the Kon-Tiki from Peru to Polynesia in 1947. His goal was to <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=TRepvgEACAAJ">demonstrate</a> such voyages were possible, supporting theories linking Polynesian origins to the Americas. </p>
<p>Decades of research in archaeology, linguistics and genetics now show that Polynesian origins lie to the west, ultimately in the islands of southeast Asia. However, the myth of migrations from America has lingered in folk science and on conspiracy websites.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=290&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=290&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=290&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346969/original/file-20200712-58-pj05pt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pacific migrations: red arrows show expansion from island southeast Asia, blue arrows show Polynesian expansion, yellow arrows show proposed contact with the Americas.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pnas.org/content/108/5/1815">Anna Gosling / Wilmshurst et al. (2011)</a>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
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<h2>New evidence for American interlopers?</h2>
<p>A new study <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2">published in Nature</a> reports genetic evidence of Native American ancestry in several Polynesian populations. The work, by Alexander Ioannidis and colleagues, is based on a genetic analysis of 807 individuals from 17 island populations and 15 indigenous communities from South and Central America.</p>
<p>Other <a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(14)01220-2">researchers</a> have <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1399-0039.2006.00717.x">previously</a> found <a href="https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2011.0319">evidence</a> of indigenous American DNA in the genomes of the modern inhabitants of Rapa Nui. (Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island, is the part of Polynesia closest to South America.) </p>
<p>The estimated timing of these interactions, however, raised concerns. Analyses of DNA from ancient Rapa Nui skeletal remains found <a href="https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(17)31194-6">no evidence</a> of such mingling, or admixture. This suggests the “Amerindian” genetic component was likely introduced later via Chilean colonists. </p>
<p>Ioannidis and colleagues found southern South American Indigenous DNA in the genomes – the genetic material – of modern Rapa Nui, but they claim it represents a <em>second</em> pulse of contact. They also found signs of earlier contact, coming from as far north as Colombia or even Mexico. </p>
<p>More novel was the fact that this earlier signal was also found in modern DNA samples collected in the 1980s from the Marquesas and the Tuamotu archipelagos. The researchers argue this likely traces to a single “contact event” around 1200 AD, and possibly as early as 1082 AD. </p>
<p>Both suggested dates for this first event are earlier than those generally accepted for the settlement of Rapa Nui (1200-1250 AD). The earlier date predates <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/108/5/1815">any archaeological evidence</a> for human settlement of the Marquesas or any of the other islands on which it was identified. </p>
<p>Ioannidis and colleagues make sense of this by suggesting that perhaps “upon their arrival, Polynesian settlers encountered a small, already established, Native American population”. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-wind-currents-and-geography-tell-us-about-how-people-first-settled-oceania-67410">What wind, currents and geography tell us about how people first settled Oceania</a>
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<h2>Follow the kūmara</h2>
<p>The 1200 AD date and the more northerly location of the presumed contact on the South American continent are not unreasonable. They are consistent with the <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=TxHbAAAAMAAJ">presence and distribution of the sweet potato</a>, or kūmara. </p>
<p>This plant from the Americas is found throughout Eastern Polynesia. It gives us the strongest and most widely accepted archaeological and linguistic evidence of contact between Polynesia and South America.</p>
<p>Kūmara remains <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/prehistoric-sweet-potato-ipomoea-batatas-from-mangaia-island-central-polynesia/4EE1E443CBCBFE19645D63C1E0FFD468">about 1,000 years old</a> have been found in the Cook Islands in central Polynesia. When Polynesian colonists settled the extremes of the Polynesian triangle – Hawai’i, Rapa Nui, and Aotearoa New Zealand – between 1200 and 1300 AD, they brought kūmara in their canoes. </p>
<p>So contact with the Americas by that time fits with archaeological data. The suggestion that it was Native Americans who made the voyage, however, is where we think this argument goes off the rails. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/346967/original/file-20200712-46-55tte8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Polynesian voyagers travelled in double-hulled canoes much like the Hokule'a, a reconstruction of a traditional vessel built in the 1970s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hokule%27a.jpg">Phil Uhl / Wikimedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<h2>A great feat of sailing</h2>
<p>Polynesians are among the greatest navigators and sailors in the world. Their ancestors had been undertaking voyages on the open ocean for at least 3,000 years. </p>
<p>Double hulled Polynesian voyaging canoes were <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/117/16/8813">rapidly and systematically sailing</a> eastwards across the Pacific. They would not have stopped until they hit the coast of the Americas. Then, they would have returned home, using their <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00223344.2018.1512369">well proven skills</a> in <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/voyaging-by-canoe-and-computer-experiments-in-the-settlement-of-the-pacific-ocean/BE1704DEF4803D0453E9D8E0B6329B00">navigation and sailing</a>. </p>
<p>While Heyerdahl showed American-made rafts could make it out to the Pacific, Indigenous Americans have no history of open ocean voyaging. Similarly, there is no archaeological evidence of pre-Polynesian occupation on any of the islands of Polynesia.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/chickens-tell-tale-of-human-migration-across-pacific-24461">Chickens tell tale of human migration across Pacific</a>
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</em>
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<h2>The limitations of genetic analysis</h2>
<p>Genetic analyses attempting to reconstruct historical events based on data from modern populations are fraught with potential sources of error. Addressing questions where only a few hundred years make a major difference is particularly difficult. </p>
<p>Modelling population history needs to consider demographic impacts such as the massive depopulation caused by disease and other factors associated with European colonisation. </p>
<p>Ioannidis and colleagues took this into account for Rapa Nui, but not for the Marquesas. <a href="https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/114682">Estimates of population decline</a> in the Marquesas from 20,000 in 1840 to around 3,600 by 1902 indicate a significant bottleneck. </p>
<p>The choice of comparative populations was also interesting. The only non-East Polynesian Pacific population used in analyses was from Vanuatu. Taiwanese Aboriginal populations were used as representatives of the “pure” Austronesian ancestral population for Polynesians. </p>
<p>This is wrong and overly simplistic. Polynesian genomes themselves are inherently admixed. They result from intermarriages between people probably from a homeland in island southeast Asia (<a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-20026-8">not necessarily Taiwan</a>) and other populations encountered en route through the Pacific. </p>
<p>Polynesian Y chromosomes and other markers show clear evidence of admixture with western Pacific populations. Excluding other Oceanic and Asian populations from the analyses may have skewed the results. Interestingly, the amount of Native American admixture identified in the Polynesian samples correlates with the amount of European admixture found in those populations.</p>
<p>Finally, like many recent population genetic studies, Ioannidis and colleagues did not look at sequences of the whole genome. Instead, they used what are called single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays. </p>
<p>SNP arrays are designed based on genetic variation identified through studies of primarily Asian, African and European genomes. Very few Pacific or other indigenous genomes were included in the databases used to design SNP arrays. This means variation in these populations may be misinterpreted or underestimated.</p>
<h2>Summing up</h2>
<p>While the results presented by Ioannidis and colleagues are very interesting, to fully understand them will require a level of scholarly engagement that may take some time. </p>
<p>Did contact between Polynesians and indigenous Americans happen? Significant evidence indicates that it did. Do these new data prove this? Perhaps, though there are a number of factors that need further investigation. Ideally, we would like to see evidence in ancient genetic samples. Engagement with the Pacific communities involved is also critical.</p>
<p>However, if the data and analyses are correct, did the process likely occur via the arrival of indigenous Americans, on their own, on an island in eastern Polynesia? This, we argue, is highly questionable.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/142383/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Lisa Matisoo-Smith receives research funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand and has received funding from National Geographic as part of the Genographic project. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Gosling receives research funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand. </span></em></p>New research claiming indigenous Americans traveled to Polynesia is sensational, but the science is flawed and ignores other evidence.Lisa Matisoo-Smith, Professor of Biological Anthropology, University of OtagoAnna Gosling, Research Fellow, University of OtagoLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1211032019-09-30T19:45:05Z2019-09-30T19:45:05ZForgotten citadels: Fiji’s ancient hill forts and what we can learn from them<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289400/original/file-20190826-8864-eqelje.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=44%2C25%2C4236%2C2381&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">While most Fijian settlement is coastal, new research into mountain settlements can teach us about this country pre-colonisation. Pictured is the Seseleka hill fort, 420 metres above sea level.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Patrick Nunn</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Far away from Fiji’s golden beaches and turquoise seas lies what might appear to many people – visitors and Fijian alike - another reality. One that is hidden, almost forgotten, yet one that recent research is helping bring out from the shadows.</p>
<p>Fiji is not known for its hill forts, but it was not so long ago that they were almost ubiquitous. Consider the <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BesPaMa-t1-body-d7-d1-d8.html">comment of colonial official Basil Thomson</a> in 1908 who noted that “almost every important hilltop in western Viti Levu [the largest island in Fiji] is crowned with an entrenchment of some kind”.</p>
<p>The evidence for people having once occupied mountain tops in Fiji is plentiful yet today barely known and hardly studied. This evidence hits you the first time you see it. You are on a perspiring, muscle-aching uphill walk along one of the steep-sided volcanic ridge lines when suddenly the ground in front of you unexpectedly drops away. </p>
<p>There is a deep ditch artificially cut across the ridge, an impediment to your progress today but doubly so 400 years ago when its base would have been lined with sharpened sticks to impale unwanted visitors. On the upslope side of the ditch you find a stone platform – on which a guard house would have been built – and above, a series of cross-ridge stone walls.</p>
<p>In the case of the hill fort of Vatutaqiri on the Vatia Peninsula (northern Viti Levu), we mapped a series of five concentric stone walls built from hundreds of rocks that must have been rolled uphill from the base of the mountain. Like many such hill forts, the Vatutaqiri summit comprises an artificial mound, in this case some 12 metres high, with a flat top, likely to have been a symbolic refuge and/or a lookout post.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289397/original/file-20190826-8841-127xtey.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">One of the five concentric stone walls on the flanks of Vatutaqiri hill fort, Vatia Peninsula, Fiji.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Patrick Nunn</span></span>
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<h2>Researching and dating the hill forts</h2>
<p>A <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15564894.2019.1582119">three-year research project</a>, just concluded, in collaboration with the Fiji Museum sought to understand the hill forts of Bua (northern Fiji). At the outset, we knew only that such places existed here because written accounts described them. </p>
<p>These include that of Commodore Wilkes of the US Navy who described in 1845 “a high and insulated peak […] which has a town perched on its very top.” We identified this peak as Seseleka, 420 metres above sea level, and mapped and excavated it as part of this project. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=717&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=717&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=717&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289398/original/file-20190826-8874-1m90sxl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=901&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Maps of Seseleka hill fort, Bua, Fiji. Map A shows the approach to the summit of Seseleka along steep-sided ridge lines cut by artificial ditches and stone walls. Map B shows the summit of Seseleka with the main residential area to the west (with yavu or stone house platforms) and lookout mounds along its axis.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Patrick Nunn</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>As shown in our map, the flat-topped summit of Seseleka comprises an ocean-facing terrace with the remains of residence platforms (yavu) slightly below a series of three artificial mounds used as lookouts. </p>
<p>Pot shards and edible shellfish remains are scattered around, the latter well suited to radiocarbon dating. There is also an artificial pool (toevu) on top of Seseleka from the mud in the bottom of which we extracted carbon samples for dating.</p>
<p>The results show that people were living on top of Seseleka as early as AD 1670, probably earlier, utilising earthenware for cooking and storage, periodically going down to the coast to collect shellfish that were brought back for less-mobile inhabitants to consume.</p>
<p>In total, we re-discovered 16 hill forts in Bua and, through a range of techniques from radiocarbon dating to the collection and analysis of oral traditions, have helped fill in some details of this poorly-known period of Fiji history.</p>
<p>A plausible explanation is that some 700 years ago, when sea levels in Fiji fell slightly, a food crisis resulted, which led to warfare and the abandonment of coastal sites for mountain-top ones.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/rise-and-fall-social-collapse-linked-to-sea-level-in-the-pacific-56268">Rise and fall: social collapse linked to sea level in the Pacific</a>
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<p>A few weeks ago, we returned from a reconnaissance trip looking for hill forts in the high volcanic islands of the Kadavu group (southern Fiji). On the pristine stellate island of Ono, we visited and mapped five hill forts, including ones on the summits of Qilai and Uluisolo, the latter reputed to be the place where the god Tanovu who battled the recalcitrant god of distant Nabukelevu island once lived. </p>
<p>But the least expected find was on top of the mountain named Madre where numerous large rocks have been rolled up onto its summit and arranged, it seems, in ways consistent with megalithic structures elsewhere in the world. </p>
<p>In a first for Fiji, there seems to be the remains of a <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/pm/944">dolmen</a> (a stone tomb) on the summit of Madre.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/289399/original/file-20190826-8851-1ibg04o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The dolmen on the hill fort at the summit of Madre, Ono Island, Fiji.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Patrick Nunn</span></span>
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<p>The Fijian word for village is “koro”, used today to refer to any nucleated settlement, mostly along the islands’ coasts. But up until about the 1830s, the word koro was used only to refer to a mountain-top village, thus the name Korolevu means “big village”, Korovatu means “rocky village” and Koronivalu means “war town”. The study of place names can help illuminate history in countries like Fiji where written history is incomplete.</p>
<p>On Ono Island in Kadavu, the researchers stayed in the villages of Vabea and Waisomo and made several ascents of the formidable mountain behind them. This mountain – and the impressive hill fort that sprawls across it – is named Korovou, meaning “new village”, in this sense a new hill fort built, presumably, after another was abandoned. Where its predecessor was, no one is sure … yet.</p>
<p><em>The author would like to acknowledge his co-researchers in the three-year study of Buan hill forts – Elia Nakoro and Niko Tokainavatu (Fiji Museum), Michelle McKeown (Landcare New Zealand), Paul Geraghty and Frank Thomas (University of the South Pacific), and Piérick Martin, Brandon Hourigan and Roselyn Kumar (University of the Sunshine Coast).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121103/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Patrick D. Nunn receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Natural Environment Research Council (UK).</span></em></p>New research casts light on the pre-colonial mountain settlements in Fiji.Patrick D. Nunn, Professor of Geography, School of Social Sciences, University of the Sunshine CoastLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1225392019-09-11T20:06:41Z2019-09-11T20:06:41ZHidden women of history: Marau Ta'aroa, the Sydney-schooled ‘last Queen of Tahiti’<p><em>In <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/hidden-women-of-history-64072">this series</a>, we look at under-acknowledged women through the ages.</em></p>
<p>From <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/obituary-prince-fatafehi-tuipelehake-1087278.html">Tongan Princes</a> to the <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-masiofo-noue-tamasese-1533503.html">daughters of Sāmoan political leaders</a>, elite Australian schools have long been considered desirable locations for the children of high-ranking Pacific families. One such student was a young Tahitian named Joanna Marau Ta‘aroa who attended <a href="https://archivesonline.uow.edu.au/nodes/view/2269#idx13735">Sydney Ladies’ College</a> from 1869 to 1873.</p>
<p>While easily <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/29536822">“mistaken for a Spaniard”</a> on the streets of downtown Sydney, the young Marau was in fact the second youngest daughter of an aristocratic Tahitian mother, Ari‘i Taimai, and a wealthy Englishman of Jewish descent, Alexander Salmon. (The pair, who had married in 1842, had nine children, all of whom enjoyed a cosmopolitan upbringing, speaking English and being educated overseas.)</p>
<p>Although little is known about her time in Sydney, other than an abiding memory of ice-cold baths and unpleasant Australian mutton, Marau’s Australian education was cut short at the age of 14 when she was summoned home to marry Prince Ari‘i-aue. Her marriage to the alcoholic future king, who was some 22 years her senior, saw her written into the history books as “the last Queen of Tahiti”.</p>
<h2>An unhappy match</h2>
<p>By all accounts, Marau’s royal wedding was a spectacular affair, with a fusion of Polynesian and European style festivities continuing across Papeete, the Tahitian capital, for two days. However, unlike that of her parents, her marriage was far from a love match.</p>
<p>It was a strategic alliance between the Pōmare family – who had always struggled to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the Tahitian public – and her mother’s Teva dynasty, who were more readily recognised as the true holders of chiefly power and prestige.</p>
<p>But in Marau’s words, her husband’s behaviour “quickly became impossible to tolerate”. Allegedly suffering from syphilis, tuberculosis and occasionally pneumonia, the prince’s predilection for rum before noon was legendary. </p>
<p>Despite the kindness shown to her by his mother Queen Pōmare IV, palace life was far from happy for Marau. She found herself spending more and more time at her mother’s home in Papara, where she occupied herself reading, learning Tahitian embroidery and unravelling the secrets of her family’s land. </p>
<p>After the death of the Queen, she was briefly encouraged to return to her prince’s side to ascend the throne in September 1877. However, less than two years later, the now-Queen Marau accepted a royal pension of 300 francs per month and moved out permanently. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1140&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1433&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1433&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291381/original/file-20190908-175700-2tmwqn.JPEG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1433&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Queen Marau, 1879, photographer unknown.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Collection du Musée de Tahiti et des îles – Te Fare Manaha</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Children shut out</h2>
<p>While the pair did not officially divorce until January 1888, from 1879 onward they would appear together only at official ceremonies where neither would talk to the other. However, Marau would not let these personal circumstances get in the way of living a life befitting of royalty. </p>
<p>In 1884 she took to Europe – without the King’s blessing – where she was “received and celebrated all over”, often finding herself in homes and palaces of elite Parisian families. Wearing old-style Tahitian dresses, Marau would attend the theatre most nights, where she revelled in the limelight as any 25-year-old guest of honour would do. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, back in Tahiti, her husband felt that press reports of his wife’s reception by the French political class “offended our dignity and insulted us as people”. This was perhaps a little rich coming from somebody who just four years earlier had ceded sovereignty over Tahiti and its dependencies to the French for a sizeable pension in return. (Famed American historian Henry Adams would write that he “now gets drunk on the proceeds, $12,000 a year”.)</p>
<p>For Queen Marau, the tip of the iceberg was the King’s refusal to recognise her two daughters, Teri‘i (born in 1879) and Takau (born in 1887), as his own.</p>
<p>Though they eventually took the Pōmare name – the third, Ernest, who arrived several months after the divorce proceedings, was never officially recognised – all three children were shut out of the royal inheritance. After Pōmare V’s refusal to recognise the third child, Marau famously snapped back that none of them belonged to him anyway. </p>
<h2>‘True old-goldishness’</h2>
<p>In the months preceding the death of Pomare V in June 1891, Queen Marau played host to Henry Adams and his artist-friend John La Farge. Bored and growing increasingly critical of colonial Papeete, the pair’s fortunes changed upon meeting Marau and her brother Tati Salmon at Papara. Of Marau, Adams wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If she was once handsome, certainly her beauty is not what attracts men now. What she has is a face strongly marked and decidedly intelligent, with a sub-expression of recklessness, or true old-goldishness … One feels the hundred generations of chiefs who are in her, without one commoner except the late Salmon, her deceased parent. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Finding her “still showy, very intelligent, musical, deep in native legends and history, and quite energetic”, Marau became the perfect conduit between Adams and her ageing mother. In turn, this enabled the pair to work on the production of the <a href="http://southseas.nla.gov.au/journals/marua/title.html">Memoirs of Arii Tamai (1901)</a>. A history of pre-colonial Tahiti from the perspective of the Teva family, it is now regarded as a canonical text in Tahitian ethnography.</p>
<h2>A dominant public figure</h2>
<p>With most scholars tending to lose interest in Marau’s life at this point, it would be tempting to end our story here with the Queen living out the rest of her years “hard-up” on a measly government pension. </p>
<p>But the reality was that she remained a dominant public figure until her death in February 1935.</p>
<p>When massive phosphate deposits were discovered on the nearby island of Makatea in 1907, Marau frustrated the progress of an Anglo-French consortium by using her influence to sign contracts with local landowners, despite knowing she lacked the means to exploit the mineral herself.</p>
<p>While the intervention netted her a tidy payment of 75,000 francs and an ongoing royalty of 37 and a half centimes per ton of phosphate extracted, victory was even sweeter as the man behind the phosphate operation was her ex-husband’s lawyer, Auguste Goupil, chief architect of the plan to write her children out of their royal inheritance. </p>
<p>Finally, just as the stories of Ari‘i Taimai were collected and written down by a younger, energetic Marau, her own daughter Takau did the same for her mother in her dotage (eventually published in 1971 as <a href="https://books.openedition.org/sdo/227?lang=en">Memoires de Marau Taaroa</a>). As modern and tumultuous as her life may have been, the <em>Memoires</em> also portrays someone who never lost her grounding in ancient Tahitian culture. </p>
<p>Nothing reflects this better than Marau’s grand tomb at Uranie cemetery just outside of Papeete. Her tomb, taking the form of the grand Teva-family <em>marae</em>, <a href="https://www.tahitiheritage.pf/marae-mahaiatea-papara/">Mahaiatea</a>, it is a tribute to one of Tahiti’s greatest cultural and spiritual monuments.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/291378/original/file-20190908-175710-1p49iua.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tomb of Queen Marau, Uranie Cemetery, Tahiti.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Nicholas Hoare, 2018</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This monument to the Tahitian god ‘Oro, consecrated by the famous <a href="https://www.bl.uk/people/tupaia">Tupaia</a> between 1766-8, had been destroyed in 1865 by a European planter in order to construct a bridge. The bridge itself was soon washed away by flood.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/122539/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas Hoare receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship . </span></em></p>She left Sydney Ladies’ College at 14 to marry an alcoholic future king. But the life of Queen Marau deserves to be written outside the shadow of her royal husband.Nicholas Hoare, PhD Candidate in Pacific History, Australian National UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.