Across the Pacific, agricultural systems have used two main complementary cultivation regimes: irrigated farming of wet environments and rain-fed cropping of drylands. These strategies have different productive potential and labour needs, which has structured their temporal and spatial distributions. Although these approaches have been studied a great deal at a general level, there has been less work on the local use and significance of these strategies. Here, the authors evaluate ideal distribution models of agricultural activities in the Punalu‘u valley on O‘ahu, Hawai‘i, to assess how habitat suitability changed as a result of infrastructural investment and dynamic environmental, social and demographic change. The results are of relevance for contemporary initiatives to revive Indigenous agricultural systems in Hawai‘i and beyond.

From 2016 to 2019, the University of Hawai‘i West O‘ahu conducted archaeological field schools at Honouliuli National Historic Site to teach our students basic archaeological skills. Because the site was the largest Japanese and Japanese American concentration camp on O‘ahu, the field school initiated a program related to social justice and democratic principles for the imprisonment of US citizens and legal residents based on racial and national profiling. The demography of O‘ahu created a special bond to the incarcerees’ stories and the students of Asian and Hawaiian descent. Through field trips, student discussion, and curriculum development, we focused on the pedagogical benefit of experiential learning. Field trips to the National Park Service's World War II Valor in the Pacific Park System on O‘ahu, King Kamehameha V Judiciary History Center, and the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i allowed the students to see and understand the historical context of the Japanese internment from the mid-nineteenth century, with the development of plantations and early colonialism, to the beginning of World War II and the internment of the more than 300 Japanese and Japanese American—as well as European and Okinawan—civilians and the imprisonment of over 4,000 prisoners of war.

British Anglo-Catholic and high church Anglicans promoted a new set of foreign missionary initiatives in the Pacific and South and East Africa in the 1860s. Theorizing new indigenizing models for mission inspired by Tractarian medievalism, the initiatives envisioned a different and better engagement with ‘native’ cultures. Despite setbacks, the continued use of Anglican sisters in Hawai‘i and brothers in Melanesia, Africa and India created a potent new imaginative space for missionary endeavour, but one problematized by the uneven reach of empire: from contested, as in the Pacific, to normal and pervasive, as in India. Of particular relevance was the Sandwich Islands mission, invited by the Hawaiian crown, where Bishop T. N. Staley arrived in 1862, followed by Anglican missionary sisters in 1864. Immensely controversial in Britain and America, where among evangelicals in particular suspicion of ‘popish’ religious practice ran high, Anglo-Catholic methods and religious communities mobilized discussion, denunciation and reaction. Particularly in the contested imperial space of an independent indigenous monarchy, Anglo-Catholics criticized what they styled the cruel austerities of evangelical American ‘puritanism’ and the ambitions of American imperialists; in the process they catalyzed a reconceptualized imperial reformism with important implications for the shape of the late Victorian British empire.

A pollen record from Ka‘au Crater, O‘ahu, Hawai‘i contains evidence for changes in vegetation and climate since about 28,000 14C yr B.P. Zone 1 (ca. 28,100–ca. 22,800 14C yr B.P.) has pollen of dry to mesic forest species, including Pipturus-type, Dodonaea viscosa, Acacia koa, Chenopodium oahuense, Claoxylon sandwicense, Myrsine, and Metrosideros-type. In zone 2 (ca. 22,800–ca. 16,200 14C yr B.P.) Myrsine and Coprosma increase, with herbs, fern allies, and Grammitidaceae suggesting open canopies. Zone 3 (ca. 16,200–ca. 9700 14C yr B.P.) has pollen of wet forest species, including Freycinetia arborea, abundant Pritchardia, and Metrosideros-type. Zone 4 (ca. 9700–ca. 7000 14C yr B.P.) is similar, with less Pritchardia and more Metrosideros-type.

Climate reconstruction was based on modern climatic ranges of flowering plants and an index derived from abundance of pollen in surface samples. Both methods agree on a qualitative reconstruction, although the ages are poorly constrained: 28,000–25,000 14C yr B.P. cool and dry; 25,000–23,000 14C yr B.P. dry and warmer; 23,000–20,000 14C yr B.P. moderately dry with declining temperature; 20,000–16,000 14C yr B.P. moderately dry and cool; 16,000–9000 14C yr B.P. warm and wet; 9000–7000 14C yr B.P. warm and possibly drier. Lower precipitation at Ka‘au Crater during the late glacial period and last glacial maximum is consistent with the interpretation that the North Pacific subtropical anticyclone was south of its present position. The pollen-derived temperature index yields an estimate of 3°–5°C temperature depression during the last glacial maximum.

This article uses the history of Japanese emigrants to Hawai‘i as a lens through which to examine Japan’s engagement with the outside world in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on a single journey from Yokohama to Honolulu in 1885, it reconstructs the transit of two migrant labourers as they entered an ‘in-between’ state – between regimes of labour, between freedom and coercion, and between local and national identities. These migrant experiences challenge the teleological discourse of Japanese ‘progress’ that was so popular among political elites across the world in the 1880s, and that was embodied by the very materiality of the ship in which the labourers travelled. But the ‘in-between’ also speaks to the historiographical need to fill the silences that exist between archives across the Pacific Ocean, and thus to the wider challenges of writing global history.

This important discussion about the use of radiocarbon to set up a narrative of temple construction on Hawai‘i arises from a recent paper published in Antiquity (2011: 927–41). It compares Bayesian and non-Bayesian solutions, and has implications that reach far beyond the Pacific.

The authors show how sites in upland Hawai‘i may be dated using uranium series radiogenic measurements on coral. The sites lie in a quarry, inland and at high altitude, with little carboniferous material around, and radiocarbon dating is anyway problematic here for the first millennium. Freshly broken coral had been transported to these sites, remote from the sea – no doubt for ritual purposes. Giving a date in the fifteenth century with an error range of only five years, the method promises to be valuable for the early history of the Pacific.

Since the 1970s, it has been assumed that the diverse languages of plantation laborers in Hawai‘i had little effect on the development of Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE); this view supported theories that emphasize the role of innate linguistic universals in creolization. But recent research has revealed (a) widespread bilingualism among locally born children of laborers before HCE emerged, and (b) the dominance of two ethnic groups at the time – the Chinese and Portuguese. This article re-examines the issue of substrate influence in HCE by concentrating on these two groups. Socio-historical and linguistic evidence is presented to show the likelihood that the Cantonese and Portuguese substrates reinforced and expanded various features of existing pidgins that had diffused to Hawai‘i. Portuguese also appears to be the origin of several key features of HCE which differ from those of other creoles. The implications of these findings for universalist theories of creole genesis are discussed.