Patrick Vinton Kirch
Author of On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact
About the Author
Patrick Vinton Kirch is Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of twelve books including A Shark Going Inland Is My Chief: The Island Civilization of Ancient Hawai'i and Anabulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii.
Works by Patrick Vinton Kirch
On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact (2000) 74 copies
Feathered Gods and Fishhooks: An Introduction to Hawaiian Archaeology and Prehistory (1985) 34 copies
Anahulu: The Anthropology of History in the Kingdom of Hawaii, Volume 1: Historical Ethnography (1992) 30 copies
How Chiefs Became Kings: Divine Kingship and the Rise of Archaic States in Ancient Hawai'i (2010) 18 copies
The Lapita Peoples: Ancestors of the Oceanic World (The Peoples of South-East Asia and the Pacific) (1997) 13 copies
The Growth and Collapse of Pacific Island Societies: Archaeological and Demographic Perspectives (Anthropology) (2007) 11 copies
Kuaaina Kahiko: Life and Land in Ancient Kahikinui, Maui (Choice Outstanding Academic Books) (2014) 9 copies
Unearthing the Polynesian Past: Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist (2015) 9 copies
Historical Ecology in the Pacific Islands: Prehistoric Environmental and Landscape Change (1997) 5 copies
Roots of Conflict: Soils, Agriculture, and Sociopolitical Complexity in Ancient Hawai'i (School for Advanced Research… (2011) 3 copies
Associated Works
Feasts: Archaeological and Ethnographic Perspectives on Food, Politics, and Power (Smithsonian Series in Archaeological (2001) — Contributor — 14 copies
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- Works
- 23
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- Rating
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Thousands of islands, some inhabited by people since the Palaeolithic, makes for a practically infinite array of detail, but Kirch keeps mostly to the helicopter view here, zooming down to individual sites mostly to illustrate wider patterns. While sometimes frustrating, this was undoubtedly necessary to keep this a book and not a library.
A point he keeps stressing is that while Polynesia is a linguistic, cultural and genetic unit, Micronesia and Melanesia are mere geographic labels, the last in particular being extremely diverse in all three respects, with New Guinea alone being home to a substantial fraction of the world's language families.
Another is the interaction between humans and their environment. On many islands, especially those where malaria was not present to keep population growth down, human impact radically altered the biota, with forests replaced by grasslands and many endemic species being wiped out. Most dramatically, around one fifth of all bird species in the world may have become extinct during the peopling of Oceania, incl most famously the giant moa of New Zealand. On the other hand, human societies operated within environmental constraints, with e.g. tiny atolls unable to sustain the populations necessary to support the stratified societies that could develop on larger islands, and the Maori of New Zealand's South Island reverting to a hunter-gatherer existence because the climate was too cold to support Polynesian-style agriculture.
I'm very happy with the book, which taught me a lot about a part of the world about which I knew little.… (more)