Abstract
Anecdotal theories about traditional uses of Polynesian woods in relation to social and religious practices were tested using comparative wood identification. The woods used to make 135 figure carvings from the Hawaiian archipelago were identified and compared with 23 figure carvings from elsewhere in Polynesia (especially Tahiti and the Marquesas). Prior to this study, the majority of Hawaiian images were believed to have been made from wood of Metrosideros polymorpha, the commonest forest tree on the archipelago. The results confirm that Metrosideros was relatively popular in Hawaii (13% of Hawaiian carvings, compared with 4% in central and south-eastern Polynesia). However, more unexpectedly, over 18 different genera were utilized for figure carvings in Hawaii. The genus Cordia accounted for 20% of Hawaiian figure carvings identified here, compared with 26% elsewhere in Polynesia, and Thespesia for 4%, compared with 30% in Marquesas. Use of some woods, such as species of Acacia, was not previously recorded for this purpose, including the first record of Artocarpus wood for large Hawaiian temple images. Many species—especially those that were less popular for ritual figure carving—were also used for various other purposes, including food, canoe building and medicines. This study demonstrates that the early Polynesian settlers brought with them traditions of using certain trees, but also took advantage of elements of the extensive indigenous flora.
Highlights
Hawaiian figure sculpture represents perhaps the pinnacle of a tradition of woodcarving that spread throughout the Pacific with the early Polynesian colonists, and later died out after European contact
Comparison of the Hawaiian woods with our sampling from central and south-eastern Polynesia shows that Cordia alone maintained its relatively high level of usage (20% of Hawaiian carvings were of Cordia, compared with 26% from elsewhere)
The early Polynesian settlers imported traditions of particular woods used for carving ritual images, but they took advantage of the extensive indigenous flora
Summary
Hawaiian figure sculpture represents perhaps the pinnacle of a tradition of woodcarving that spread throughout the Pacific with the early Polynesian colonists, and later died out after European contact. There are about 150 existing examples of Hawaiian wood carvings with human figures, dispersed in museums and private collections throughout the world, some of them. Previous laboratory wood identifications of Hawaiian figure carvings were primarily concerned with testing for possible non-authentic images (Claerhout 1981). The wood of a 1000-year-old canoe from the Society Islands was identified as Terminalia (Donaldson and Singh 1990), and many figure carvings from Easter island were carved from wood of Sophora toromiro, a tree endemic to this remote Polynesian island, including the iconic wooden hand that is in the British Museum collection (Attenborough 1990; Orliac 1990a; Orliac and Orliac 2017)
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