| Abstract: |
Introduction: During the transition from the late prehistoric to early historic era in Hawai'i, the morphology of residential features underwent significant change. Typically, prehistoric house sites were composed of several discrete single component dwellings in which specific activities were conducted. The ethnohistorical data indicate that preContact Hawaiian beliefs dictated the spatial separation of activity areas within a household. In contrast to the morphology of prehistoric households, historic residential features usually contained a number of contiguous platforms, pavements, and terraces. The activity areas within these households had been spatially collapsed into adjoining localities. This contrast suggests that Hawaiian settlement patterns should not necessarily be considered the reflection of ecological adaptation or social organization but in fact may be viewed as the result of people actively creating and manipulating their cultural landscape according to their symbolic systems. By recognizing that residential features reflect the builder's cognitive categories, it is possible to archaeologically document through architectural variability, several aspects of the ideological change that occurred during the early years of European contact. This paper documents changes in architectural style from the prehistoric to the historic using a statistical analysis of 467 hectares in the southeast section of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park (Fig. 1). Intensive surveys over the past 14 years have mapped a 6-km coastal transect that ranges in width between 0.4 km and 1.2 km, and a 3.7-km inland transect that ranges in width between 0.3 km and 0.55 km. The survey program produced a series of 88 base maps. Each map or quadrant is 400 by 200 meters, although some areas within the quadrants were not completely surveyed.
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