If you’d like to show your artifacts to someone who may be interested in looking at them contact me and I’ll probably be able to find someone in your area.

(Remember, fish are wild foods, not domestic, so Pacific island fisherpeople are essentially hunter-gatherers.)

Most of the food on Pacific islands came/comes from tended plots. Gathering and foraging were (and are) extremely low on the agenda. Taking the example of Hawai’i, breadfuit, coconut, pandanus, cordyline, sweet potato, yam, paper mulberry, arrow root, tumeric, mountain apple, bamboo, Indian mulberry, banana, forty varieties of sugar cane, candlenut, kava, shampoo ginger, taro, and bottle gourd were all intensively grown on the islands before European contact. There was really no need to gather anything, and this selection is fairly typical. Even tiny islands like the Polynesian outliers of Anuta, Tikopia, and Taumako in the Solomon islands cover their land in crops. So “hunter-gatherer” isn’t really the best phrase – “fisherman-horticulturalist” might be better.

I’m a soc anth grad student at Oxford, and my particular focus in my reading for PhD prep has been Austronesia. Mostly western Austronesia, but also Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. Somebody above made the point that sea voyaging was basically abandoned by the Maori once they got to Aotearoa, and Greg also mentioned the loss of pottery use by Polynesians. A third example I’d like to throw into the ring is the use of the bow and arrow in Tonga and Hawai’i (and possibly the rest of Polynesia), where it was used in hunting (rat-hunting with a bow and flightless arrows was the Tongan royal sport) but not in warfare, and sport hunting at that.

So there are three examples of technologies in Polynesia, and they each have different reasons.

For the first – Maori ocean-going – the reasons are to do with geography, I think. New Zealand is big. It is the biggest landmass inhabited by Polynesians prior to European arrival in the Pacific, with the second biggest being Hawai’i. This means that land was abundant, and could be fought over. One of the main reasons for the Polynesian expansion, as P.V Kirch mentions in several of his works, was the desire for the youngest son to find land and wealth. Youngest sons in eastern Austronesian areas were not given an inheritance by their father, but were expected to find it or go poor. The rewards of sea-faring were balanced by the rewards of finding new lands.

On top of this, sea-faring wasn’t always about discovery. In order for Polynesian societies to avoid generational endogamy, wives had to come from other kingdoms or other islands. Samoa and Tonga were intimately connected along these lines, and the distances between them are not small. This encouraged sea voyages over long distances, and so the skills were retained, just as they were in the Polynesian outliers, which are hundreds of miles from anywhere else.

New Zealand could support many populations big enough to provide wives for each other and to negate the importance of voyaging for youngest sons. A youngest son could engage in war with another Maori group, and attain wealth that way. A similar thing happened in Hawai’i. By the time of European contact, Hawai’i and the Society Islands were no longer in contact. Hawai’i’s land mass was big enough to provide opportunities for war, wealth, and wives between the islands themselves.

Only the Polynesian outliers have retained their voyaging skills into the present day (and some Micronesian islands, too).
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The pottery issue is the most easily solved of the three. There is little or no clay in Polynesia east of Samoa, and there are plenty of organic alternatives. Coconuts, basalt, leaf baskets. So the Lapita pottery work that marks out the culture in the archaeological record is found to diminish in importance the further east it goes from the Bismarck archipelago, eventually becoming Polynesian plainware in Samoa – very simple, functional ware – before disappearing.

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As for the issue of bows and arrows in Polynesia, the reason that I pose it alongside these others is that its lack of use doesn’t appear to make much sense. It simply appears that bows were considered hunting weapons and slings were the weapons of war, and the categories seldom mixed. It’s unclear whether there was a specific taboo on bow-use in Hawai’i, but there appears to have been one in Tonga. So the question is, why?, and the answer is, we don’t know. Technology is simply stuff that humans use, and it follows the dictates of their cultures and their brains. If there had been trained ethnographers at the time, maybe we’d know the answer to the question of why Tongans used bows only for hunting, and why Tasmanians never fished.

I’d also like to point out that Tasmania is not the only place where the sea was shunned. Bali, which is only 80km across and entirely surrounded by the sea, also had a population that, prior to the tourist explosion, viewed the sea as the source of bad spirits. Fishing was seldom undertaken, except by foreigners (Javanese, Europeans, Sulawesians), who might then sell the fish to the Balinese. A very odd situation.

So I’m basically pointing out that people abandon or use technologies for a variety of different reasons, not all of them entirely pragmatic. That’s hardly surprising, but it appears that more people need to become anthro majors, based on this thread! (Seriously, it needs a better brand or something…)

Passerby said:

The Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania were never so numerous that they overpopulated the island and stripped the resources, forcing specialization, technological innovation and aggression.

And nor were the people of the north-west coast of North America, whom you used as an example above this. Salmon were extremely plentiful in the area, and the abundance meant that human populations could grow. They certainly didn’t overreached and overpopulate the area. Their existing methods could provide for their larger populations. And it certainly wasn’t scarcity that created the potlatch, north-western aggression, and innovation.

Simple naive-functionalist explanations like that don’t really hold up.

Exposure dating and glacial reconstruction at Mt. Field, Tasmania, Australia, identifies MIS 3 and MIS 2 glacial advances and climatic variability. J Quaternary Sci 21(4):363-376.

Reasonably good read:
Southern Hemisphere Climatic Similarities.
glaciology.suite101.com/article.cfm/southern_hemisphere_climatic_similarities

That is the next step – and major – development stage beyond hunter-gather paleoculture.

Please see comments above regarding specialization in foragers. Also see this: http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/05/primitive_cultures_are_simple_3.php

Regarding taboos: All cultures have taboos, but no culture has food they can’t or won’t eat. (That’s today’s riddle: How can it be?)

Prairie dogs, snakes, turkeys, and fish were said to be taboo to the Apache, Navaho, and Pueblo tribes; they were believed to be unclean. Prairie dogs fed snakes and revered raptors; snakes kept rodent populations in check. Turkeys may have provided feathers and were too lean to provide much meat; however, the prohibition might be related to species range and domestication of turkeys by paleoindian agriculturalists.

Fish species were not exactly in prime abundance in the desert rivers of the Southwest. The region has thirty percent of the landmass of the US, but only 18 percent of the total freshwater species. Probable driver for species diversity constraint are river temperature and the episodic (~300-400 years) severe multi-decadal droughts of Southwestern US.

Iain Davids mentions a taboo on fish-eating in Tasmania; there is probably a practical reason for this taboo