“Unearthing the Polynesian Past: Explorations and Adventures of an Island Archaeologist”

Patrick Vinton Kirch

University of Hawai‘i Press, $45

Not all scientists can write for a lay audience, but Patrick Vinton Kirch’s new memoir chronicling his lifelong passion — the archaeological study of Hawaii and other Pacific islands — is one of those rare books that entertains while it educates.

It helps that anyone can identify with Kirch’s all-out love of nature and outdoor adventure. A photograph of the author at age 4 in his family’s Manoa garden says it all: buzz-cut blond hair, Dennis the Menace smile, ’50s cuffed bluejeans and bare feet. This is a child in his element.

As a boy, Kirch explored the forests of upper Manoa Valley and visited Molokai’s Halawa Valley with his family. At 14 he met Sam Enos, the last taro farmer in Halawa, who inspired an enduring interest in ancient Hawaiian irrigation systems; a meditative snapshot he took of Enos is included in the book.

The inquisitive youngster became a protege of ‘Iolani Luahine, the renowned hula dancer who curated the throne room at ‘Iolani Palace, and Yoshio Kondo, a specialist in land snails at Bishop Museum. As a Punahou high school student, he assisted a University of Hawaii team on an excavation of a sand dune at Bellows Beach that uncovered “a pavement of water-worn pebbles, the floor of a house” and, beneath it, “the tightly flexed skeleton of an elderly woman.” It proved to be the site of the earliest known Polynesian settlement in Hawaii.

Kirch returned to Halawa many times and worked throughout the South Pacific as well as on every Hawaiian Island except Niihau. As a Bishop Museum scientist in the early 1980s, surveying the Molokai site of a proposed subdivision that proved rich with heiau, petroglyphs and terraces, he experienced the disconnect between pure science and contract archaeology. “No longer an ivory tower research endeavor, archaeology in the islands was increasingly intertwined with land development,” he writes.

For the reader, past as well as recent Hawaiian history takes coherent shape, just as archaeologists assemble, in their minds, whole settlements from fragments. Kirch visits Kahoolawe with the activists who are trying to stop the bombing; his 1982 ethnographic study of the impacts of the Great Mahele on farmers in Anahulu Valley in Waialua is wrenching.

We’re also guided through the field’s evolution from the New Archaeology of his grad school years to its current “key role in multidisciplinary research focused on human ‘ecodynamics.’”

Kirch’s excellent book is an eloquent reminder that by learning where we came from, we can better understand ourselves.

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Patrick Vinton Kirch is scheduled to appear at the Hawai‘i Book & Music Festival. See info box above.