Abundance and Resilience: Farming and Foraging in Ancient Kaua'i

Kua'aina Kahiko follows Kama'aina archaeologist Patrick Vinton Kirch on a seventeen-year-long research odyssey to rediscover the ancient patterns of life and land in Kahikinui. Through painstaking archaeological survey and detailed excavations, Kirch and his students uncovered thousands of previously undocumented ruins of houses, trails, agricultural fields, shrines, and temples. He describes how, beginning in the early fifteenth century, Hawaiians began to permanently inhabit the rocky lands along the vast southern slope of Haleakala, and eventually transformed Kahikinui into what has been called the greatest continuous zone of dryland planting in the islands.