Archaeoastronomy in Polynesia

Abstract

Polynesia represents a cultural context where astronomy is deeply embedded, both because of its importance in ocean voyaging and because of its role in the ritual-calendrical cycle that was carried from ancestral homelands in the central Pacific out to islands scattered over many thousands of kilometers. Cultural astronomy has a significant role to play in addressing some of the “big questions” of Polynesian cultural development, such as how and why Polynesian society developed in particular ways in each different island environment. Temple sites in the form of platforms and enclosures are ubiquitous throughout Polynesia, and have formed a natural focus for many archaeoastronomical investigations. The gradual contextualization of archaeoastronomy in Polynesia since the 1960s, but especially since the 1990s, has engendered a “paradigm shift” away from hunting for solstitial and equinoctial alignments toward investigations better attuned to the ethnohistory, which highlights the importance of the lunar calendar and regulation of the two main seasons using the Pleiades. On the other hand, recent work in Mangareva, integrating archaeological, archaeoastronomical, and ethnohistoric evidence, has served to highlight the importance of solstitial observations, at least in one corner of Polynesia. A key issue for the future is to distinguish between alignments upon the June solstice sun and the Pleiades, both of which represent important developmental strands.