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Through intensive archaeological investigation of temples in Hawai'i, the authors reveal a sequence of religious strategies for creating and maintaining authority that has application to prehistoric sequences everywhere. Expressed in the orientation and layout of the temples and their place in the landscape, these strategies develop in four stages over the course of a few hundred years, from the fifteenth to nineteenth century AD, from local shrines associated with agriculture to the development of a centralising priesthood serving the larger political economy.

Hawaiian temple sites of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries have diverse orientations previously thought to be random. Using precise measurements and nineteenth-century native Hawaiian sources, the author shows that the temples cluster into groups whose orientation was deliberate and likely to relate to a particular god.

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Strategies for constructing religious authority in ancient Hawai'i

Temple Sites in Kahikinui, Maui, Hawaiian Islands: their orientations decoded

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Strategies for constructing religious authority in ancient Hawai'i

Temple Sites in Kahikinui, Maui, Hawaiian Islands: their orientations decoded