Patrick Vinton Kirch

In <i>How Chiefs Became Kings</i>, Patrick Vinton Kirch addresses a central problem in anthropological archaeology: the emergence of «archaic states» whose distinctive feature was divine kingship. Kirch takes as his focus the Hawaiian archipelago, commonly regarded as the archetype of a complex chiefdom. Integrating anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, traditional history, and theory, and drawing on significant contributions from his own four decades of research, Kirch argues that...

The Pacific Ocean covers one-third of the earth&rsquo;s surface and encompasses many thousands of islands that are home to numerous human societies and cultures. Among these indigenous Oceanic cultures are the intrepid Polynesian double-hulled canoe navigators, the atoll dwellers of Micronesia, the statue carvers of remote Easter Island, and the famed traders of Melanesia. Decades of archaeological excavations&mdash;combined with allied research in historical linguistics, biological...