Polynesian Cultural Distributions in New Perspective

IT HAS been an orthodox view in Oceanian anthropology that the pre-European Polynesians were capable of maintaining regular contacts between islands separated by more than 300 miles of open ocean and that the peopling of Polynesia resulted either entirely or predominantly from voyages of exploration and discovery followed by return voyages to the home islands and then by deliberate large-scale migrations to newly discovered lands. These reconstructions have been challenged by Andrew Sharp's impressively documented recent study (1956), which reviews the achievements and deficiencies of preEuropean Polynesian voyaging and argues that Polynesia was peopled as a result of "accidental" landfalls of voyagers lost at sea. Although students, including myself (Vayda 1958), have proposed some modifications of Sharp's thesis, he may be said to have succeeded in shifting the burden of proof to adherents of the orthodox view to such an extent as to make it worthwhile to examine some of the new perspectives that his thesis provides for Polynesian anthropological research. That the thesis does have important implications has been recognized by a number of students (cf. Goodenough 1957; Luomala 1958; Oliver 1957). Some of its implications for the interpretation of Polynesian cultural distributions will be considered in this paper. An appendix to the paper reproduces the list of cultural traits which have been used by Burrows (1938) for indicating or suggesting degrees of historical relationship among the various Polynesian cultures. None of the listed traits represent complexes of behavior requiring large numbers of people, and therefore it may be said that the traits are likely to have been capable of being "conveyed" from previous homelands and perpetuated in new islands by parties of voyagers making accidental landfalls. Burrows' demonstration of two main Polynesian cultural groupings (a western and a "central-marginal" or eastern) may be made consistent with Sharp's thesis in the manner suggested by Sharp himself (1956:69, 106):