From the late 1700s, Hawaiian society began to change rapidly as it responded to the growing world system of capital whose trade routes and markets crisscrossed the islands. Reflecting many years of collaboration between Marshall Sahlins, a prominent social anthropologist, and Patrick V. Kirch, a leading archaeologist of Oceania, Anahulu seeks out the traces of this transformation in a typical local center of the kingdom founded by Kamehameha: the Anahulu river valley of northwestern Oahu.

Volume I shows the surprising effects of the encounter with the imperial forces of commerce and Christianity—the distinctive ways the Hawaiian people culturally organized the experience, from the structure of the kingdom to the daily life of ordinary people. Volume II examines the material record of changes in local social organization, economy and production, population, and domestic settlement arrangements.

From the late 1700s, Hawaiian society began to change rapidly as it responded to the growing world system of capital whose trade routes and markets crisscrossed the islands. Reflecting many years of collaboration between Marshall Sahlins, a prominent social anthropologist, and Patrick V. Kirch, a leading archaeologist of Oceania, Anahulu seeks out the traces of this transformation in a typical local center of the kingdom founded by Kamehameha: the Anahulu river valley of northwestern Oahu.

Volume 2, by Patrick V. Kirch, examines the material record of changes in local social organization, economy and production, population, and domestic settlement arrangements.

Scholars and researchers have long believed that the ability to irrigate is crucial to the development of civilizations. In this book, archaeologist Patrick Kirch challenges this "hydraulic hypothesis" and provides a more accurate and detailed account of the role of "wet" and "dry" cultivation systems in the development of complex sociopolitical structures.

Examining research on cultural adaptation and ecology in Western Polynesia and utilizing extensive data from a variety of important South Pacific sites, Kirch not only reveals how particular systems of production developed within the constraints imposed by environmental conditions, but also explores the tension that arises between contrasting productive systems with differential abilities to produce surplus. He shows that the near total neglect of short-fallow dryland cultivation, as well as arboriculture, or tree-cropping, has seriously distorted the picture that archaeologists and anthropologists have of agricultural intensification and its relation to complex social structure.

This work, likely to become a classic, will be central to all future discussions of the ecology and politics of agricultural intensification.