Recent work to extend the instrumental record of Hawaiian rainfall (available since the early 1900s ) back several centuries indicates the presence of large and significant variations in rainfall on decadal time scales (see time series graphic above). Parallel efforts to understand agricultural changes in the Hawaiian Islands prior to European influences suggests that after about 1650 CE there was a shift in emphasis to productive maximizing strategies, with implications for the region’s economic and socio-political stability.
The above is one of the motivating ideas for conducting this workshop. Previous work by several of the participants argued that an increased reliance on risky product maximization strategies made the population more susceptible to variable environments. Variation in the environment (e.g., prolonged drought conditions) increases unpredictability in yields, thereby increasing variation in yields from year-to-year. Notably, drought years may result in production shortfalls. While this might not have resulted in demographic collapse, since a significant proportion of production would have been channeled to fund political ambition (e.g., feasting and monumental construction), such shortfalls may have initiated increased violence toward other political entities to gain additional resource. In fact, violence toward the end of the pre-contact sequence in Hawai‘i is well documented and drought has already been linked to this activity.
The availability of a 500-year precipitation sequence provided a means to objectively evaluate the role that climate variation played in cultural processes. The one-and-a-half day workshop brought together representatives from the climate and paleoclimate research and archaeology communities to further inform our present understanding of the interconnections between climatic influences and societal responses in Hawai‘i prior to and possibly just after European contact, as well as explore connections to other regions in the Pacific similarly affected by large scale climatic modes operating on different time scales, such as ENSO on seasonal to interannual scales, and the PDO/IPO at longer time scales.
