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An upland agricultural residence on Rapa Nui: occupation of a hare oka (18-473G) in the Vaitea Region.

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Abstract

Beginning in the early 14th century, Rapanui agriculturalists established remote field systems in the upland regions of Easter Island. The excavation of a hare oka, or circular house, reveals that many of the fields were tended by task-groups of two or three persons living in small dwellings. The use of the house over four centuries was followed by abandonment in the late 17th or early 18th century. These dates correlate with the chronology established by earlier excavations in the uplands and argue for a broad regional withdrawal near, or at the time of, chiefdom collapse.

Keywords: Polynesia, Rapa Nui, agriculture, settlement, dating

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The upland central region of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) was extensively farmed during prehistory for the production of sweet potato, yam, and taro (Cummings 1998; Flenley 1993). Investigations at Maunga Tari (Figure 1) suggest that the interior of the island was initially used around AD 1300 and was abandoned around AD 1700 (Stevenson 1997). The exodus from upland settings may have coincided with a period of political unrest that destabilized the island chiefdoms in the late AD 1600s. Remote agricultural farmsteads in the interior are characterized by small dwellings dispersed among the numerous rock gardens that surrounded outcroppings of basalt. Farmers were likely attracted to this region because of the higher annual rainfall and an irregular terrain that offered delicate crops protection against the wind. Upland farming was not a casual activity but highly structured by elite managers who directly supervised agricultural activities (Stevenson et al. 2005). Religious shrines (ahu) and elite dwellings in the form of rectangular and oval houses are scattered across the landscape and reflect this managerial process. It is, however, unclear whether non-elite farmers occupied the interior on a permanent basis, or whether they lived amongst the field systems on a temporary basis for days or weeks, returning to coastal locations after planting, weeding or harvesting the tuber crops.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

A recent archaeological survey of the interior Vaitea region provides insights into the residential patterns of the farmers who occupied the area. We have recorded more than 300 surface features that consist mainly of small house entrance pavements, rectangular houses, circular enclosures, earthovens, pathways, planting circles, alignments of unknown function, and hundreds of additional agricultural features. Many of these features have been disturbed by over a century of sheep and cattle grazing. As a result, they are difficult to interpret and excavations are often required to determine the morphological, functional, and temporal characteristics of the features.

In this paper we report on the excavation of one house form referred to as a hare oka or circular house. Circular house forms are scattered across the survey area and vary in diameter from 1.5 to 15 m. As such, we hypothesize that a variety of functional types are incorporated under this descriptive category with the larger structures possibly serving as community houses and the smaller structures as dwellings for several persons. Here, we report on a small circular house located on the eastern slope of Maunga Terevaka at an elevation of 230 m. We approached the excavation of the structure with the objectives of understanding the function of the structure, the range of activities conducted around the feature, the age-range of site occupation, and how activities reflect the general use of the landscape in the upland region.

The Hare Oka (Site 18-473G)

Site 18-473G is situated on the edge of a natural terrace between the cinder cones of Maunga O Koro and Maunga Pui. Prehistoric rock gardens are numerous in the area and occur at the base of the terrace edge and in the lower basin shaped region to the east. The circular house is part of a cluster of ten surface features within 150 m of each other. These include three house pavements (473A, 473C, 473D), a house entrance sill (473E), three isolated paenga (473B, 473F, 473J), a second circular house (473I), and a destroyed structure (473H). Although these remains are spatially separated from other archaeological feature clusters there is insufficient surface information to determine if they are temporally or functionally related.

The ground cover within 25 m of the hare oka consists of surface rock distributions and clear areas. Some or all of this area may have been cultivated in the past. At the base of the slope to the east, a typical rock garden consisting...

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