 This week we have Pat Kirch and Jillian Swift here to talk with us about their work on Native Hawaiian land use and agricultural practices in relation to questions of long-term sustainability and with implications for modern land planning. So I'm very excited to hear about this. I'll give a quick introduction to who these wonderful folks are. Patrick V. Kirch is the class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology Emeritus at UC Berkeley. Currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. The author of more than 20 books and several hundred articles and chapters. Kirch has carried out archaeological research throughout the Pacific Islands for more than 50 years. His current research focuses on the sustainability of traditional agricultural practices in Polynesia. Jillian A. Swift received her PhD from the Department of Anthropology at UC Berkeley in 2016. And is currently the curator of archaeology at Rene's Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. She is especially interested in re-analyzing previously excavated collections using cutting-edge archaeological science methods. Thank heavens. Her research focuses on deep time human land use and environmental management strategies in Hawaii and the Pacific with an eye towards applications to present day sustainability challenges. So if you have questions for our presenters, by the way, as we're going along here, please put them in the chat on the YouTube page. And I will relay those questions to them after the talk. And with that, we're looking forward to our talk today on archaeological investigations of long-term sustainability, a case study from the Lo'ikalo of Halewa Valley, Malaukai. Take it away. All right. Thank you, Jordan. I'm going to share my screen here. And I hope this works okay. And Jillian will begin. We're going to go back and forth here. Let's see. There we go. So Jillian, take it away. Okay. Thanks, Pat. And thank you everyone for being here today. I know there are a lot of exciting talks going on today. So thank you for making time for this one. What we're going to talk about today is a two-year NSF-funded collaborative research project that is just getting underway between UH Manoa and Bishop Museum. And what we're doing here is trying to test assumptions that are held about the long-term sustainability of traditional Hawaiian agricultural practices. So there are a lot of different traditional agricultural practices that were done in pre-contact Hawaii and also still today. The one we're especially interested in for this project is irrigated agriculture, particularly pond field cultivation of kalo. And we're especially interested in this for a couple of different reasons. First, because dry land, rain-fed agricultural systems have recently been the subject of pretty intensive study. And these irrigated systems have not received the same amount of attention. And that's interesting because this we know is a really significant and foundational type of agriculture in the Hawaiian islands. In the archaeological record, we see that early settlements are often focused in these areas where irrigated agriculture can be practiced. And we see that basically anywhere that people could be doing kalo agriculture, they are doing that. So there's a lot we can talk about with wet versus dry agriculture and all of the kind of building up social distinctions and daily life distinctions between those kinds of agricultural forms. But for the sake of time, I'll just highlight a couple key aspects of irrigated kalo agriculture. One of them, which you can see in this lower photo, is that it really requires a tremendous amount of labor and engineering right at the outset before agriculture can even occur. Directing stream flow in a way that makes this agricultural system work is really critical and that makes tremendous landscape modifications that we still see today. And then once that's done, this modification and this maintenance is an ongoing process. So really, there's a focus on maintaining these irrigated systems and stream flow. And it's a community practice and it really requires a joint effort because everyone's relying on the same stream. And if somebody's having issues up higher in the stream, everyone below that is also going to be facing the same kinds of issues. So it's a group maintenance, everybody coming together for this agricultural practice. Yeah, next, I think. So what we want to look at here is, you know, these systems have long been held as this idea that they're very sustainable systems, especially irrigated agriculture, but this hasn't really been tested very intensively. So the goal of our project is to really look at were these intensive forms of traditional Hawaiian agriculture sustainable on long time scales. And the issue with this is that sustainability is actually a pretty slippery term once you start thinking about it. So our first kind of challenge was actually to think about what does sustainability really mean, how can we define it and how can we look for it in the archaeological record. So the thing that we're really choosing to focus on here is thinking about nutrients and nutrient drawdown because that's something that we can actually track through time and archaeological sites. And as I mentioned the dry land, your rain fed systems have have been investigated pretty intensively already and there is evidence that there is nutrient drawdown. So these nutrients are disappearing over time. That's not to say that these systems were not very productive and very intensive. But that on longer time scales, if this continued, they may not be able to continue sustainably, at least in the aspect of nutrient cycling in if without some kind of intervention. Yeah, next. So this is a really critical problem here in Hawaii, especially because we are just overwhelmingly reliant on input imported food resources. There's been a really big initiative in the state to create more food self sufficiency but really to kind of limited success. So there is a pretty big push within communities here on individual and on organizational scales to increase food sovereignty food self sufficiency and especially with reviving traditional Hawaiian agricultural practices. Next. And so this is a map done by Natalie Christina at all and she was actually she started this work as an undergrad in Berkeley. So what she's looking at here is a GIS model based assessment of how much of Hawaii's landscapes are still available and could be used for productive traditional agriculture. The map on the left is all of the lands that are still available today and a pretty high number of this something like 70% is still zoned for agriculture and could be revived. The map on the left is a map of how much of these available lands are still viable under some really extreme climate change scenarios. So there is a lot of hope for a certain amount of resilience if we make this move towards reviving traditional agriculture. If you're a field archaeologist you might look at this and go we really need to ground test this and so that's part of what we're doing is building on these ideas that there's all of this land available for reviving traditional agriculture. But we want to go in with the archaeology into one region and really get a nice assessment of how much of this landscape was put into agricultural use and then get an idea of the long time scale. Can we see evidence for sustainability. Are we seeing nutrient drawdowns are we seeing other changes that might suggest that on a really long time frame, we need to kind of rethink how sustainable this is and in what dimensions. And then that brings us to our study area, which is Halawa Valley on Molokai Island. Really beautiful valley and I'm going to hand things over to Pat to talk about the previous research that he's done in this region. Right, thanks Julian. So this is a map of Molokai Island where we're working and Halawa is the eastern most valleys you see there there for great amphitheater valleys in the eastern Molokai mountains. All of them were major centers of wet taro cultivation. Here's the Halawa Valley itself our study site, not a bad place to work. And this, I'll give you a little background here the next few slides about previous work and why we chose Halawa I have a long history with this valley. And I did a project here when I was still a student back in 1969 and 7050 51 years ago was one of my earliest projects, conjunction with the Bishop Museum and the University of Hawaii. And so we're in part leveraging that work from 50 years ago with this renewed study when I moved back to the islands a couple of years ago. I went down and visited the valley and some old friends there and it occurred to me that the time was right to re initiate work here in Halawa. Halawa, as Jillian's mentioned was a real center for this wet calo or taro cultivation. This photograph was taken in about the 1890s by the first director of the Bishop Museum so glass plate negative here in the Bishop Museum archives, and you can see in the foreground a cursor can be visible there's an irrigation channel and you see all of these fields. And here's actually still a thatched, highly traditional Hawaiian house but also frame house. Halawa was a very wealthy area on it was the most the wealthiest valley on Molkai because they grew so much taro that they were exporting it. First to the whaling fleet in Lahaina Maui during the whaling trade and later supplied the leprosy settlement of Kalapapa with all of their column boy so very important center of wet valley agriculture more than 1000 irrigated fields have been mapped in the valley. So I said I'll go back there a long time actually first visited the valley even before the 6970 project in 1964 I was there camping out with my father and I walked across the stream and encountered this gentleman Sam Enos, who at the time was the last cultivator traditional cultivator call in the valley title wave hit halawa 1946 and salted a lot of the fields, most of the people left at that time so by 64 only old Sam Enos here, but there you see him standing by his collar fields and he explained to me how that system worked and showed me how he pounded poi and so on so a lot of memories there. In 1969 70 when we did the initial Fish and Museum University Hawaii project. We mapped the valley settlement pattern, but you see here from our report. And then you can make out all of the fields trying to get my cursor here we go again so we have two systems on each side of the valley with the stream meandering through each of these fed by two large irrigation ditches and then we have smaller systems up in the inner valley map actually goes farther here than shown in this version. So, it really is a great place to study traditional agriculture here's a map of a small irrigated system right up at the top of the valley near the waterfalls that again we made in 1969 and and 70. Now, while these valleys are very important for wet irrigated colo there's another aspect of this that's important in our project. And that's the area that is above the irrigated fields above the irrigation ditches, the slopes between the irrigated systems and the cliffs. That's a lot of land area. And these areas referred to as colluvial slopes they're made up of colluvium not alluvium which is stream transported but colluvium which is from mass wasting of rock landslides debris flow so on coming off down the cliffs. In 2011, Jillian mentioned Natalie Korshima who was a undergraduate student in natural resources at Berkeley. She worked with me on an honors thesis where she did a GIS modeling of how much area in these Molokai valleys would be in the colluvial slope zone and potentially, was usable for intensive dry land farming and her paper was so good we got it published in the journal archaeological science and it led to her further work that she's been doing here she now as her PhD from the University of Hawaii. But when we modeled as part of that paper we model Holoba Valley. And this is the GIS model for the valley that Natalie came up with and the blue area you see is the potential, you know, good land for wet taro and it pretty much corresponds with the archaeological evidence for where there are irrigated fields or where irrigated fields. But all the green area above that is colluvial slope that could also be potentially in very intensive cultivation. So one of the things we're trying to do in this project is test out the importance of the colluvial slopes, what contributions did those make and how were those integrated as a total system. Back 50 years ago we mapped some of these colluvial slope areas. This is a map of the Capana area, we'll talk more about that Jillian a little bit later because we've begun working there again. But you can see the complexity of features, some irrigated fields down here, a bit here, but all of this area, a mix of small agricultural terraces, not irrigated but perhaps utilizing intermittent flow at times of heavy rain and then integrated with house sites and agricultural temples etc. Just this is one bit of data I want to show you very briefly. Jillian's mentioned nutrients and nutrients are a key part of our project and the importance of the colluvial slopes is indicated here, some preliminary data that we have from Halaba Valley where we are comparing upland soils, those are the old leech soils on the ridges above the valley and we have the alluvial soils which are the irrigated pond fields and in between we have these colluvial soils and if you just look one data set here, base saturation which is a percentage of whole nutrient availability in the soil, so it's one to a hundred hundred being maximum and you see that the old eroded uplands are very low, 12, the alluvial soils are quite good at 43 but look at the colluvial soil 61, so they actually have higher nutrient status, potentially higher productivity even than the irrigated fields. So as Jillian mentioned what we've proposed in our National Science Foundation proposal is that a quantifiable test of sustainability is whether over the long term there's any decline or degradation in nutrient status or the resource base basically there, so if we in our work see continued high nutrient values in agricultural soils that we expose their excavation and so on then that test would say yes these systems were sustainable long term, if on the other hand we start to see declines in nutrients then that could suggest that over a long time periods we might have declining productivity, just very briefly just a few other background aspects of the valley just to get a sense of what's there, so we have not only these agricultural sites extensive terracing and so on but we do have residential sites as well, here's a this is all again from work done 50 years ago but we're you know going to be continuing some of this kind of mapping and testing and they're in our new work see house habitation terraces adjacent cooking areas and there are some 14 agricultural temples as well, these were recorded initially in 1909 by John Stokes Fish and Museums first archaeologists so fortunately we have data and he was led to these sites by informants who told him these were temples and the names of them and we'll get we'll mention these again a little later in the talk because we've been re-mapping and working on some of these, trying to date the temples would be very important in terms of when the agricultural system was being intensified in prehistory, there's one major temple site what in Hawaii is called a luakini or a temple of human sacrifice, these were structures where the ruling chiefs would officiate usually at times of war or after the successful conclusion of war, this is quite massive structure, a lot of rock, I'll look there on the northern side of the valley and in tradition it was supposedly dedicated by a high chief from Hawaii island Alapai Nui after he came to assist in a war of the corner chiefs against the Kolao chiefs of Halawa and then one other important aspect of the valley's archaeology is there is a sand dune midden site at the base of the valley which I discovered back in the day in 1969 and 70 we excavated fairly extensively to hear pictures of the excavation ongoing there were remains of round-ended house structures it's quite rich in shell and bone midden as well as a number of artifacts here's the plan of the excavation, stratigraphy, reconstruction of what some of these round-ended houses may have looked like the site needs to be redated the artifact styles there suggests it begins quite early in the sequence of Polynesian or Hawaiian occupation early styles of fish hooks, azes, etc. back 50 years ago radiocarbon dating was a lot more primitive, a lot larger error bars than we have today we've attempted to do summary dating this is an oxcal plot of dates from the site but the reason this site is important Billy is going to tell you that right now with this slide I turn it back to you Jillian sorry I got to unmute myself hardly the only reason this site is important but something that really excites me as an archaeologist is the tremendous quantity of faunal remains that they found in these excavations of the dune site and you're probably getting the sense that this was a Bishop Museum project for how many different Bishop Museum archaeologists we've met we've mentioned here so these collections are now at Bishop Museum and so it is an exciting opportunity for us to combine re-analysis of museum collections with new excavations so what you're seeing in this graph is over time this decline in fish remains and a steady increase in pig and dog and so it really is a shift in attention for what kind of of proteins they're procuring here at this site and it also much like colluvial agriculture is an overlooked component of these traditional agro ecosystems similarly pig and dog husbandry is often overlooked in these types of agricultural projects and really I think this is probably a key component that really needs to be examined if we're going to look at these systems holistically which is the ultimate goal so one of the things that I'm going to undertake is a kind of continuation of the work that I've started at Berkeley which is stable isotope analysis of commensal fauna so I'll get to talk about rats again as looking at those as proxies for nutrient flows so we can not so much quantify but at least characterize what types of nutrients are flowing into this system especially with regard to carbon and nitrogen and how that's changing over time and then with pig and dog we can also augment that kind of research but also look at what kind of husbandry practices are occurring how these animals are foddered and how they integrate into the larger agro ecosystem next and so that that kind of wraps up the the previous work and it's exciting to be able to go back and reanalyze these collections with new methods and we also are we've just wrapped up our first field season in Halava Valley where we concentrated on two uh ealy or small slices of uh of the valley um Pulalo and Capana and so I do just want to spend a moment to talk about this because uh you know ultimately what we want to do we want to be applicable to today and uh one of the impetus for doing this project in Halava Valley specifically is that there is already a really strong desire on Molokai and within Halava for uh reactivating these lolly for increasing traditional agriculture so we've been uh working with the community as closely as possible uh at at all phases next slide I'm not really going to go into this because I feel like I'm pretty much preaching to the choir here so I'm really just leaving this slide to kind of highlight some of the especially native Hawaiian archaeologists who are really driving this forward and some of the resources that have have guided our own integration of community oriented practices into this project um so you know for us what this has looked like is that you know even before we wrote the grant we started talking to to folks on Molokai and especially within Halava Valley on an individual and organizational level um trying to figure out what kind of outcomes they'd like to see from this kind of project we kind of focused it into three different things one is that you know that our worker is going to contribute to their long-term goals for cultural and ecological restoration and so we've taken that to heart and integrated it into various aspects of the proposal and making sure that all of our research objectives address this and they also wanted to be you know continued involvement in the project and especially get some of that lab and museum and collections based training so we started doing that in the field and that will continue on through the project they also would like all newly excavated materials to remain on Molokai to the extent possible uh this is really a growing kind of desire across the Hawaiian islands to return collections to their home island and develop facilities that can house these collections on islands so that communities can really reconnect with them because you know Bishop Museum is on Oahu which is it's expensive and difficult to come here and see these things so that's something that we're kind of working on more broadly uh with various community partners as well outside of this project uh next slide so yeah so part of this was was having visitors and volunteers we were working with a couple organizations on Molokai and some of their fellows came and visited and worked at the site including one one volunteer who had a very sweet puppy who was very eager to get in and help us excavate you can see Gambi on the left there okay I think it's back to me Jillian for a second for a couple of slides here so the work this summer an important part of it was mapping and some of you know it's my foretail of to map and uh I do that of course with this ancient but wonderful trusted technology called the plane table and alladade that's my W and E girly 1947 alladade there and the reason for that is other kinds of modern digital technology total stations and so on allow you to take points but they don't allow you to draw the architecture in the field and the plane table and alladade still allows me to accurately map and then draw all those rocks that are so carefully placed and piled up to form terraces and house lights and so on of course we also we're not totally in the dark ages and so you see my trimble there next to the alladade case and so yes we're using GPS and GIS and these maps will all be digitized and then everything is being integrated into a GIS database for our project including many historical maps there's some beautiful maps from the late 19th century and early 20th centuries that were georeferencing and bringing into our database as well but here's a scan of one of five map sheets that I made this summer in the Pulao area just to show you what some of this looks like so you see various walls there that are defining probably land section boundaries terraces of various kinds and sort of in the left center substantial platform which is one of these agricultural terraces excuse me agricultural temples this case Pulao I think Jillian this is back to you now to talk about the terrace system sure I don't think so but I can do that uh so um this is a you know one of our objectives is really within these two small regions that we selected was to get a understanding of how these ag systems developed over time so Pat's large scale mapping is really giving us an idea of the layout and this was an interesting spot um because a lot of this area we assumed was exclusively colluvial slope agriculture so these rain fed systems with retaining wall terraces and when Pat started mapping this area what he slowly realized while he was doing this was that it looked like there was a relic side stream that was actually feeding into this specific area so we think and this is just an early hypothesis that we want to test we think we actually have a small irrigated system right here that we previously thought was colluvial slope so we spent a lot of time actually focusing in on this region in Pulao I'll just add to that to say that what it looks like is going on here is that not only irrigating this little set of terraces which you can see was built into a boulder ridge but that they actually were doing a kind of hydraulic engineering because it looks like they're actually moving sediment off this little side stream into to fill and form these terraces so we're really quite amazed at the extent of of really engineering of this lands yeah so um like I said we spent a good amount of time in these terrace areas especially this little side stream area I think we ended up putting about six units in from top to bottom just to get a real understanding of its development and sedimentology um yeah you know these are agricultural terraces so primarily what we're trying to do broadly in these excavations is to just recover charcoal for radiocarbon dating and start to get a a sense of development across the region but we also want to investigate these streamflow and and architecture and agricultural ideas so within the grant we are also incorporating pollen starch and phytolith analysis to get some sense of what people were growing here our collaborator Noah Lincoln at UH is doing a lot of soil chemistry to see how this is changing over time in the photographs you can see Kylie Tuytavuki who some of you might have known was she because she did her undergrad at UC Berkeley she's now one of Pat's grad students she was with us all five weeks and is a complete champion just digging holes all five weeks with a big smile on her face so I'm excited that she's coming into this project as well and part of her master's thesis is going to be doing granulometry on this irrigated side stream especially but in in various areas so we can look at you know granulometry and get a sense of stream flow and deposition and then this is just a profile drawing of the unit that is kind of at the very bottom of this section so some of our units towards the top were pretty shallow once we got to this terrace at the bottom you can see on the left all of these stones that's like a stone facing of like I think it was like five courses maybe it was it was massive and it went very deep uh this is about a meter deep and what we're seeing is several layers of deposition here uh and this is seems to be an area where they are as Pat mentioned engineering this stream flow to keep rejuvenating this area for agriculture with with successive deposits right so we get areas of cultivation and then they're kind of sandwiched between areas of deposition and so this is really where we're focusing a lot of our lab work is on this deep trench to really get an understanding of that long-term development and then you know it's in addition to the agricultural systems we we really wanted to understand how this area was developing broadly so we did do a few little test excavations in some pre-contact house sites this is one with a little adjoining terrace on the left there and you know the as you might expect these soils are not super amenable to preservation so again here the objective was mostly to get charcoal for dating we did find a few additional artifacts some some bones some shell things that that speak to you know it could clearly identify these as house sites distinct from the agricultural regions but but not a lot more than than we're finding in the terraces I think this is back to me now yeah so we also have evidence in Pulaula of 19th century occupation overlaying the earlier pre-contact occupation and this is a I hope you're not I'm seeing some warning thing I hope it's not being shared there across the screen but there's a big terrace here house terrace that dates to based on historic period artifacts bottle glass and iron and so on sometime in the 19th century interestingly this site does not show in the land records from the 1850s although we have reason to believe it may have been the house site of the Konohiki or land manager of the valley I don't know what this anybody seeing this warning thing is that you're all seeing it I don't know what it zoom is doing its thing anyway we'll just move ahead so another innovation at least for us in this is the application of drone photography so it's very hard to photograph a lot of these sites when you're just down on the ground so this last spring I acquired a Mavic Pro drone and I see here Julie and I were testing it out in the spring and then we applied it doing our field work in the valley so it was interesting to learn to fly this drone between trees and a tree canopy let me tell you very easy when you're out in the open air but we actually had to do a lot of clearance of small trees but the drone worked really well once we figured this out and so here I am flying this drone and taking pictures of that 19th century house site there you can see the steps leading up to the house terrace and we're hoping that this well not only gives us you know beautiful oblique views as you can see here this is Puolau Lao Hale the agricultural temple a couple of views of it but also with vertical shots as you see here this is looking down on Puolau Lao so combined with the plane table mapping and GPS positioning then we hope to do photogrammetric mapping of some of these sites temple sites and ag terrace sites so really very highly accurate mapping sort of stone by stone and among other things just to provide a documentary record for future generations of what these temples are like at the present time should there be any further degradation of them so on I've never seen that kind of window before I have no idea how to make it go away folks but move this window away from the shared application yeah does it move no doesn't move anyway and then just mention here Kalani Pruitt as you see in this slide sort of the spokesperson for the local community in the valley he's a traditional landholder and as Julian mentioned you know we've been working closely with the community so Kalani came up one day when we were mapping and took a look at Puolau Lao Hale and he's very interested he's an artist just as a MFA in fine art he went back to his house and then came up another the next day or two with this painting that he'd made which is his kind of vision of what the area might look like a few hundred years ago with a thatched house there in the temple in the foreground so our work's even inspiring the local artistic community and I see sis I think it's on to you now Julian talk about Kappana excavations yeah so um we spent a lot of time in Puolau Lao maybe more than we should have but we we ended up wrapping up the season moving over to Kappana which is just a really incredible area what you can see from Path's map is is a lot of these upper slope kind of colluvial areas and then also again we have side stream terracing here that is even more apparent than you see in Puolau Lao and then at the bottom just tremendous massive lowy fields these on your bottom right are just really spectacular to see and hopefully we can convey a little of that with the pictures so this again is is an area where we did some drone photography and hopefully what you can see here is in contrast to Puolau Lao like this area is still very very intact and was really built up very carefully and elaborately so a series of terraces that are descending down into the valley they almost look like stair steps and so this is another side stream irrigation system but very obviously a side stream irrigation system so it's a very nice comparative to the one that we're looking at in Puolau Lao to look at these dynamics this is kind of just another another shot to give you another view of this there's an excavation over at the right you can see a couple people over there I think that's actually a historic house site that Path's going to talk a little bit more about because they did excavate that one previously so this is an area that they've already done some work in and we've been submitting some samples from the excavations in this area to try and redate from the collections that we have but it's a little bit intermittent in their areas where I think we could really benefit from going back in and re-excavating and and redating these sites so that's going to be a part of our explorations in Kapana I think we'll probably be back to this area in a subsequent field season I think this is you actually Pat is it? It was going to be used though that's okay this is one of my plain table sheets of this system that you've been looking at the drone photos of you can see in this case the fields are much more regular unlike the little system in Puolau Lao that was engineered between boulders this one is is more substantial more rectangular fields and this is the middle section coming down excuse me and then yeah Jillian you want to mention this this is you yep yeah so like I said you know we spent a lot of time in in Puolau Lao and really got fascinated by that sidestream irrigation area so we didn't have a ton of time in this Kapana section I think we ended up opening only four units but again following a similar kind of pattern to what we did in Puolau Lao we did one unit way at the top of these systems and one at the bottom and had a spirited debate about whether or not we should open a unit in one of these kind of more marginal looking areas which we kind of compromised and and did a small unit there and then I think you know one more in a in a house site just to try and get a sense for the for the timing and expanse of this area and hopefully you know do a similar comparative with that that really deep unit that we had in Puolau Lao this is kind of a similar unit that we can can contrast the the the engineering and sediment deposition and these soil nutrients which I think is going to be really critical to understanding long-term sustainability in both of these regions and an aerial view of our excavation here I think down at the lower part of the terrace and then below this are the massive expanses of low e-fields and this was kind of a cool site because it also went pretty deep at first we didn't think it was going to it was very rocky there were some massive rocks just a few levels down but with the help of our volunteers we actually were able to lift these giant boulders out and underneath it was a bunch of actually artifacts like lithic flakes and and volcanic glass and things like that that suggest maybe there was a house site here even earlier and then the ag system was built on top of that later on so that's kind of an exciting aspect that we might be able to explore and we've submitted radio well we're in the process of submitting radiocarbon dates and we'll see what that sequence looks like um yep here it is again from another angle uh same story here very exciting site uh Kylie again you'll just see Kylie in every single photo digging these holes thanks Kylie okay I think that's back to me now it's my cue uh as Jillian mentioned there was also a habitation terrace that's just above the irrigated fields here in Capon it looks down over them this was a site that had been excavated 50 years ago and we had the radiocarbon date on but with a very large error margin to it so we wanted to do a small re-excavation here which we did in front of the face and actually got a lot of lithic material quite a lot of actually some midden material a lot of good charcoal for dating so that will allow us to refine the chronology for this I'm going to just very briefly try to stop this share and reshare and see if that stops this outrageous uh thing that keeps coming into my screen I don't know if that will work or not maybe that worked I've never seen that before okay um maybe that stopped it now uh yeah and here's a drone photo also lovely with this drone now you can just kind of zoom in and get these nice oblique shots of sites and people working and and so on so that's testing that habitation terrace we also in Capana cleared off another one of these agricultural temple sites these uh fertility temples hail whole new eyes they're called in Hawaiian Capana hail here so see our drone photo of that and there's the side view of it nice stone face terrace there and we did an excavation at the base of that temple agricultural temples hidden process here again to try to date it primarily jillian uh was we not only got good charcoal in context below the basal stones of the temple but in this case both dog and big bone remains were preserved so that was a interesting finding here so we're just about to wrap up here I think we're on time and to mention of course this has been kind of a you know what we intend to do background talk and then sort of what we did in our summer vacation so to speak over there for five weeks in the valley and now comes of course the serious part of analyzing the remains uh that we uncovered and so we've actually jillian and I have selected 36 samples for radiocarbon dating those are about to go off to Gail Morkami who's an expert in charcoal identification will identify them to taxes so we select short lived taxa for dating and also give us information on plants that we're growing and and being burned as fuel we're going to submit other samples to Mark Horrocks the University of Auckland to do the pollen opal phytolith and starch analysis for us and of course we're working also with Noah Lincoln on the nutrient analysis of the sediments and Kylie will be working on the various aspects of sedimentology granulometry so this will all take place over the next two eight months or so and uh COVID permitting we plan to be back in the field some brief trip maybe in December if we can brief for a week spring break but then another five weeks next next summer another field season so just uh have all the shots to wrap up it was not all work a little summer um we did have one lovely uh sunday that we hiked up to the beautiful waterfall there Moula Falls everyone got to go swimming in the icy cold water and uh occasional barbecue the deer on Molokai are running all over the place and we were gifted with several bags of venison meat so there I am barbecuing some venison for us and the final shot here again so that's what's that more more venison you'd want to you never want to eat um so this final shot here is just of our team with uh some of our friends in the valley the gentleman in the middle there in the red is Belipo Solitario now in his early eighties he is the respected kupuna or elder of the valley born there in Halawa and has returned to uh live out his days there I knew him 50 years ago and he's been such a wonderful friend and that's his son Greg Solitario who's carrying on the traditions of the valley and who actually worked with us we're able to employ him as a research associate which he thought was fantastic and then on the right is Catherine Aki who's another landholder of the valley and she volunteered with us for four of the five weeks then of course you see Kylie there to Kylie's right is Noah Lincoln our collaborator at the University of Hawaii and his student Dolly from American sorry Western Samoa who was with us also for a couple of weeks sampling soil so I think that wraps it up yep I'll stop share and we have time for questions if people want to send them in by chat I believe is how you're doing this wonderful thank you for such a delightful talk um yeah folks who are watching on on YouTube please put your questions in the chat there and I will relay them to give folks some time for that I have a question of my own related to the colluvial soils in particular I I don't know what the the geological substrate is is out there I assume something I can't um but I know that nutrient recharge is a is a real issue for those soils often um but uh seem pretty neat that the colluvial soils have such high base saturation other content I'm wondering if that has to do with you know sort of recharge from overlying in a sense um uh bedrock um and curious if you guys have a sense of what sort of the time scale of those landslides or mass movements are if that's something you're looking at yeah they are um being recharged as you you call it basically by mass wasting so um you know this is uh you have a volcano that's been in size by stream valley and then the cliffs are continually you know producing fresh material so that uh in particular we're talking about phosphorus here which is the main rock derived nutrient that's that's so important but others as well the time scale is is geological in terms of you know these landslide events and so on you can see big landslide tongues debris flows of these boulders but it's obviously taking place over a time scale of thousands of years thank you very much um yeah that's fascinating stuff for us so I've got a couple of questions from our very own Christian Hastorf here um in the in the chat um one very practical question is did you eat tarot while working in the tarot fields? Not so much while we were in the tarot fields but uh yeah at the community meetings especially there are some people who are now moving back into the valley and reactivating the loy and doing traditional agriculture themselves and a few of those folks would bring in some callow to share at the community meetings and in gathering so I suppose a follow on question to that also from Christine is um is the hope to reinvigorate tarot farming particularly in these fields that you're that you're mapping and working on? Yeah one thing we kind of didn't talk about is that like most of this area is owned by a single landowner which is Puguahoku Ranch and then scattered about that are what we call Kuliana landowners which are people who have a long held genealogical claim to to these lands and of course other people who have been displaced from those claims which is is complicated in itself but the the ranch is actually also really interested in pushing forward reviving these landscapes for traditional agriculture and themselves are are involved in cultivating traditional plants and so um that they they actually even just applied for a big grant to try and get this project going there's a lot as you can imagine of logistical issues that they really need to work out and archaeology can only hope help so much with that kind of thing but uh there's definitely a huge drive in the area to to continue to revive and those folks who have land there already are really getting involved in in reactivating these loy Yes Jillian mentioned that you know the valley was largely abandoned after the tidal wave in 47 but over the last 20 years or so people have begun to come back so uh Pilipo and his son Greg for example they have active taro fields going Catherine's family does as well they're maintaining one of these awai or irrigation channels you know to feed their fields that it could be extended much farther uh many more fields that are still overgrown abandoned on the north side of the valley there's some cultivators there as well who have opened up fields and one of the ditches on that side of the of the valley but there's a lot of interest in potentially reactivating and expanding these traditional fields the infrastructure is there I mean that's the interesting thing is the stone-faced terraces and all that are there unfortunately there's been a huge growth of invasive trees over the last you know 50 years or so especially Java Plum and now African tulip has come in and albizia is coming in so it's a it's a big issue of having to clear out is this growth over these but the infrastructure is still there underneath everything we have a question from Tim Gill in the in the YouTube chat are there any first-person accounts of life and agriculture in the valley that you have found to be useful well there's a historic uh some written records there's a guy who visited Palawa around 1850 his name was Marston Bates but he published a book called Sandwich Island Notes by A Period Hauli with a capital H and those of you who know Hauli is what Hawaiians call foreigners so he was a student on him A Hauli but Bates has about five pages in his book describing Halawa in 1850 and it's a wonderful wonderful description there are a lot of other ethno-historic records and one of the objectives actually we said in our NSF proposal is to compile all of that that we can find Hawaiian language and newspaper accounts for example we expect there'll be quite a lot there are these maps that were made for the Bishop Estate which once owned the valley so that's another aspect we didn't go into that today but we'll Jillian do you want to add anything on that um yeah I mean just that you know one of the records that I'm excited about digging into are these Mehalay land claim records which is going to be really important for understanding how the land tenure system develops so the Mehalay is when this transformation occurs right when it it goes from this traditional Hawaiian system of land tenure to privatization and then you know what happened is people who had been living on and working these lands have to kind of go in and make a claim for themselves to become private owners of the land area so it's really revealing a lot about genealogy and history and understanding the dynamics of people inhabiting and working on the landscape that I think will be really fun to get into yeah just for those of you who know something about Hawaii just add to this the the valley was awarded in the Mehalay 1848 to the high chief as Victoria Kamamalu she was of the Kamehameha Kahumanu group and so it went into the hands of a Bernice Pauhi bishop and it actually was part of the Bishop Estate and was one of those unusual places mostly the estate kept its lands but they sold this to the owners of Puhoku Ranch in the early 20th century so that's when the land you know the the larger Aukuala as we call it was transferred over and became part of Puhoku Ranch but there were there are close to a hundred I think smaller Kuliana claims Mehalay claims that were made and many of those were awarded so we have all the documentation on that and it's going to be a rich rich archive in terms of how lands were you know ordered the kinship relations between people how the irrigation system was managed etc all right well we've got a couple a couple more questions first I want to go to what is perhaps our youngest viewer Olly age six he was writing from Lisa Maher's account here um posting youtube wants to know where the stream starts and if there are any big lakes nearby hi Olly good to hear from you the stream starts way up in the mountains Olly the high mountains and it rains a lot up there and so that's why this stream flows all the time and when you and your mom and dad can finally get free and come back to Hawaii next time I'm going to take you up there to the waterfall mola and you can swim in that beautiful waterfall all right um so one more question and I think we'll make this our last one it's coming from mega conky how will you evaluate what you mean by sustainable yeah I mean so you know that's something we've been thinking a lot about and had to really like go back to the drawing board several times when we were writing the proposal of like okay if we're gonna say we're assessing long-term sustainability what what does that mean um and so I like to say that we're really not you know we're not trying to check a box of yes or no that was sustainable it's really more how was it sustainable and which aspects of it can we see through archaeology and so that's why there's been such a strong focus on nutrients because that's something we can actually trace we can we can look at nutrient drawdown especially uh with our collaborator Noah Lincoln who's got all the soil science and then we can also characterize it so both kind of qualitative and quantitative measurements of just looking at these nutrient flows and that's really you know we'll be very explicit about the fact that this is not a holistic sustainability right it's just these aspects that we think we can measure on long time scales yeah let me just add to that that some of the work that the Hawaii biocomplexity project uh did on on dry land systems on the big island of Hawaii and on Maui which I was involved in that's a project that when I was at Berkeley Meg you'll remember we we had a joint NSF ground on with Stanford University and there we were able to show that um there was both in the Kohala field system in Maui uh excuse me in Hawaii and in Kaiki Nui of Maui there's some evidence for nutrient decline in these soils and I'm going to how we measure that a lot of time right now but it's been published uh and we're talking over a long period of centuries here right but so if there is nutrient decline and that's what plant production ultimately depends on then your yields may be lowered gradually over time and so that's what we're talking about in terms of sustainability here if your yields are going down gradually over time then the system over the long term of centuries is not really sustainable at least it's not the level of production is not sustainable and it's never been tested for the wetland systems and so that's why we wanted to propose this turning to the wetland values are very different because especially the irrigated fields you've got constant nutrient flow in and dissolved nutrients in water um and a different kind of soil dynamic going on and we also know these collimial systems are very rich with nutrients so um it would be very interesting to see and it may be that the story in Halaw is quite different from the dryland systems but this is what we're trying to do and we're trying to do it in a way that it where we are defining what we mean by sustainability in very explicit terms that hopefully are quantifiable thank you so much um it's been wonderful and uh we hope to have you all back again soon great thanks for inviting us yeah