The archaeological landscapes of Polynesia are an immense store of social and ecological knowledge, and this book is an opportunity to examine how that knowledge was linked to agricultural change.

Polynesia is often viewed as culturally and environmentally homogenous in the popular imagination. This popular image is far from the truth, and this book is an exploration of that diversity through the lens of agricultural change and development. Using an archaeological framework, this book tracks how people migrated across the region successfully, bringing the crops and animals on which they would rely, and how their agricultural economies developed once they arrived.

The communities that settled these islands not only adapted to diverse environments and ecosystems, but also engineered their landscapes to ensure long-term survival. This engineering was conditioned by the constraints and opportunities within environments recognized by generations of farmers, both physically and socially defined. Farmers made decisions about how best to ensure access to food and resources, both for themselves and to meet the demands of a growing population who was divorced from everyday food production. The success of this engineering and the systems of food distribution is visible through the expansive archaeological landscapes of everyday life visible across the region.

These archaeological landscapes, produced through centuries of applied ecological knowledge and influenced by the social relationships within which farmers and their families were embedded, persist across the islands in whole and as fragments.