Risk Minimization and the Traditional Ahupua'a in Kahikinui, Island of Maui, Hawai'i

Abstract

Rather than viewing the culture history of Kahikinui, Maui, as a process of gradual population growth and ecological adaptation, this article proposes that the settlement and subsistence system found in the district at European contact was implemented virtually intact in the mid-fifteenth century as a deliberate and conscious chiefly strategy-both to avoid the social risks inherent in increasingly factionalized windward polities and to minimize the environmental risks involved in settling this dry leeward district. By approximately A.D. 1650, the spatial distribution of settlement and the formalization of agricultural field systems suggest the implementation of the ahupua 'a, or traditional Hawaiian community land unit. Kahikinui, located at the fringes of the pre-Contact sociopolitical structure, may have been among the first areas to suffer from the breakdown of the traditional ahupua'a system after European contact in A.D. 1778. KEYWORDS: Hawaiian archaeology, leeward environments, Maui, risk.