Ancient Hawaiian astronomy

Abstract

The Hawaiian Islands provide a cultural setting where the prominent place of astronomy within religious, navigational, and calendrical traditions is evident from a rich ethnohistoric record. The many hundreds of temple platforms and enclosures and#x0028;heiauand#x0029; whose remains survive across the archipelago have provided a natural focus for archaeoastronomers not only to examine orientations and structural alignments but to explore a range of issues relating to field method and practice in a context where spatially patterned archaeological data and ethnohistorical evidence exist in relatively fine balance. As archaeoastronomy has developed within the islands, it has become better integrated into archaeological investigations tackling questions of broader anthropological significance, one of the most fascinating being when, how, and why Polynesian chiefdoms became transformed into archaic states, something that happened here but nowhere else in Polynesia.