Agricultural development is intimately tied to the environment and cultural practices, specifically socio-political change. Nowhere are these relationships more clear than on Polynesian islands. Many sequences of agricultural change have now been documented in the region, and their relationships with the environment and cultural change assessed. Most, if not all, of these identified sequences have...

The study of human demographic history in the Pacific is currently entering a new era. New sequencing technologies, improved techniques to retrieve DNA from subfossil remains and new data analysis approaches will most likely revolutionize our understanding of this complex human achievement. Enabled by these new technical advances, researchers can now draw information from genetic...

Polynesian settlers transformed the native forests of the central Pacific islands into productive economic landscapes. Root crops came to dominate agronomic systems in many areas but arboriculture was the dominant mode of food production in some, and it is not well understood how these different endpoints evolved. In the Marquesas Islands, an economy dominated by...

This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the experience of several western Polynesian states during the 1918-1920 influenza pandemic, and in particular an inquiry into how the response to the second wave of this pandemic determined the mortality for each island group. Historically, Pacific island states have faced challenges in controlling infectious disease. Distance, isolation...

Previous osteological studies of East Polynesian populations have primarily focused on the identification of ancestral homelands and have ignored issues relating to regional and local populations. This thesis examines East Polynesian population history and addresses questions concerning East Polynesian prehistory from a bioanthropological perspective. The results are considered in conjunction with previous studies drawing from...