| Abstract: |
Introduction: Archaeological evidence known for the Hawaiian Islands up to about 1985 led most archaeologists to accept a date for initial settlement by approximately A.D. 500-600 (e. g., Bellwood 1978
Jennings 1979). As new dates were announced, many archaeologists shifted their estimate for Hawaiian settlement to approximately A.D. 300-400 (e.g., Bellwood 1987
Kirch 1985), and some recognized the potential for even earlier dates with additional field research (c. g., Kirch 1986: 31). The corpus of radiocarbon dates available to date, when considered in their entirety, may be suggestive of colonization of the Hawaiian Islands significantly earlier than has been generally accepted. The purpose of this article is to further analyze and evaluate the earliest radiocarbon chronology now available for the Hawaiian Islands. In so doing, it (1) provides an overview of Hawaiian dates with ranges (those with the highest probability at one standard deviation) that fall within the first millennium A.D.
(2) employs the latest advances in the calibration of radiocarbon dates, including the new curves for marine samples
and (3) analyzes synthetically the dates and their implications for the colonization and earliest centuries of Hawaiian prehistory.
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