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Archaeological science meets Māori knowledge to model pre-Columbian sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) dispersal to Polynesia's southernmost habitable margins
- Source :
- PLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 4, p e0247643 (2021), PLoS ONE
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2021.
-
Abstract
- Most scholars of the subject consider that a pre-Columbian transpacific transfer accounts for the historical role of American sweet potato Ipomoea batatas as the kūmara staple of Indigenous New Zealand/Aotearoa Māori in cooler southwestern Polynesia. Archaeologists have recorded evidence of ancient Polynesian I. batatas cultivation from warmer parts of generally temperate-climate Aotearoa, while assuming that the archipelago’s traditional Murihiku region in southern South Island/Te Waipounamu was too cold to grow and store live Polynesian crops, including relatively hardy kūmara. However, archaeological pits in the form of seasonal Māori kūmara stores (rua kūmara) have been discovered unexpectedly at Pūrākaunui on eastern Murihuku’s Otago coast, over 200 km south of the current Polynesian limit of record for premodern I. batatas production. Secure pit deposits that incorporate starch granules with I. batatas characteristics are radiocarbon-dated within the decadal range 1430–1460 CE at 95% probability in a Bayesian age model, about 150 years after Polynesians first settled Te Waipounamu. These archaeological data become relevant to a body of Māori oral history accounts and traditional knowledge (mātauranga) concerning southern kūmara, incorporating names, memories, landscape features and seemingly enigmatic references to an ancient Murihiku crop presence. Selected components of this lore are interpreted through comparative exegesis for correlation with archaeological science results in testable models of change. In a transfer and adaptation model, crop stores if not seasonal production technologies also were introduced from a warmer, agricultural Aotearoa region into dune microclimates of 15th-century coastal Otago to mitigate megafaunal loss, and perhaps to support Polynesia’s southernmost residential chiefdom in its earliest phase. A crop loss model proposes that cooler seasonal temperatures of the post-1450 Little Ice Age and (or) political change constrained kūmara supply and storage options in Murihiku. The loss model allows for the disappearance of kūmara largely, but not entirely, as a traditional Otago crop presence in Māori social memory.
- Subjects :
- common
Archaeological Excavation
Social Sciences
01 natural sciences
Starches
Archaeological science
Megafauna
Historical Archaeology
Ethnicities
0601 history and archaeology
Ipomoea batatas
History, 15th Century
Multidisciplinary
geography.geographical_feature_category
060102 archaeology
Organic Compounds
Agriculture
06 humanities and the arts
Aotearoa
Radioactive Carbon Dating
Chemistry
Archaeology
common.group
Archipelago
Physical Sciences
Medicine
Research Article
Crops, Agricultural
010506 paleontology
Science
Carbohydrates
Crops
Research and Analysis Methods
Polynesia
Polynesians
Humans
Traditional knowledge
Chemical Characterization
Ecosystem
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Isotope Analysis
geography
Polynesian People
Organic Chemistry
Chemical Compounds
Biology and Life Sciences
Austronesian People
Bayes Theorem
Archaeological Dating
People and Places
Biological dispersal
Population Groupings
Chiefdom
Crop Science
New Zealand
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 19326203
- Volume :
- 16
- Issue :
- 4
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- PLoS ONE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....587719e525bf5e9f6d3ff4c40b112424