Abstract:
Across the Tongan archipelago, many people were drawn into the sphere of influence of the Tongan Maritime Chiefdom. The Tu'i Tonga dynasty extended its regime to many islands, including Niuatoputapu, reaching 'Uvea, and perhaps as far as Sāmoa. Together these diverse islands provide important insights into the development of socio-political complexity in late prehistory. While much archaeological study of Tongan society has examined monumental architecture, less attention has been paid to exploring the human-environment interactions across the range of the Tongan Maritime Chiefdom, from its genesis in Tongatapu early in the second millennium AD. Explanations of Tongan influence or political domination have tended to generalise rather than to explain these diverse relationships with specific cultural and environmental mechanisms. This research draws on traditional narratives and ethnohistory, together with palaeo-environmental and archaeological data, from across the islands where evidence of the Tongan hegemony is known. Potential explanations of the increasingly hierarchical organisation of polities are developed to provide insights into why and how, in variable island environments, different expressions of societal organisation emerged. It is proposed that human responses to social and environmental variables require different hypotheses to explain socio-political change in the Tongan archipelago and beyond. In the emergence of inequality and the development of hierarchical social organisation, these explanations propose that competitive and cooperative behavioural variation was an adaptive response to these differing social and environmental conditions.
