Astronomy, Oral Literature and Landscape in Ancient Hawai¹i

Clive Ruggles 
School of Archaeology and Ancient History 
University of Leicester, U.K.

The nature of ancient and traditional peoples¹ interest in the skies, 
and how this was reflected in the design of some of the most famous 
monuments in the world, is something that continues to engender a 
remarkable degree of popular interest. Over the years, debates on 
this topic have also attracted leading archaeologists, astronomers, 
anthropologists, engineers, historians of science, statisticians, 
and many others, yet have all too often finished up generating far 
more heat than light. Only in recent years has archaeoastronomy 
matured from being a rather inconsequent pursuit hovering on the 
fringes of established academic disciplines into an identifiable 
"interdiscipline" working to develop secure theoretical and 
methodological foundations in its own right. By studying how 
spatial patterning in the archaeological record relates to the 
motions of the heavenly bodies, together with other forms of 
archaeological and cultural evidence, we can gain valuable 
insights into how groups of people in the past interpreted what 
they saw in the skies and framed their own actions in harmony 
with that understanding. This is of central importance in trying 
to address a variety of broader questions concerning people¹s 
perceptions of the world and the ways in which they manipulated 
their "cosmological" knowledge for various purposes.

Ancient Hawaiians, like many indigenous communities the world over, 
had a powerful and detailed understanding of their relationship 
with the natural world, which they encapsulated in myth and 
constantly reinforced through sacred activities located in space 
and time in relation to important places in the landscape and the 
motions of the celestial bodies. This seminar will examine two 
recent claims in the light of new fieldwork carried out, mainly 
on the island of KauaŒi, in the last three years. The first is 
that astronomical alignments involving distant topographic 
foresights, viewed from heiau, formed an important component of 
Hawaiian sacred geography. The second is that certain sacred 
ceremonies, performed at particular heiau, were scheduled in 
relation to observable astronomical events. 

Studying the specifics of Hawaiian cosmological and astronomical 
knowledge occupies an important place in the wider study and 
understanding of Hawaiian culture, but it also occupies an 
important place in the methodological development of the 
discipline of archaeoastronomy as a whole. This is because 
it forms a methodological "halfway house" between two 
much-studied areas: prehistoric Europe, where the evidence 
is exclusively from the material record, consisting of 
human-made architecture such as conspicuous monuments and 
their spatial relationships with features in the landscape 
and sky; and Mesoamerica, where the historical and written 
records dominate over the archaeological and landscape 
evidence. In Hawaii we have access to a rich oral history, 
including some very specific references to places in the 
landscape and, apparently, to astronomical alignments. Yet 
archaeologists are generally wary of basing reconstructions 
on such evidence because oral histories are notoriously fluid, 
and the provenance of particular traditions is often highly 
uncertain. The seminar will address the key issue of how we 
find the best balance between these two very different types 
of evidence.