Warfare, terrain, and political expansion

Abstract

Very little explicit attention has been paid to the determinants of political borders and why they form at one location rather than another. With a statistically significant frequency, the political borders on the island of Tahiti at contact coincided with ridge formations that radiated from the island's interior and crossed the coastal plain to meet the sea in steep cliffs or bluffs. Since warfare had become the primary means of political expansion by contact, the determinants of this striking correlation appear to have been the strategic problems these features posed to the extension of armed might. These same processes were at work on many other Polynesian islands with the result that contactera variations in the degree of political unification and even sociopolitical development can be traced in considerable part to variations in island topography.