The sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas) was important in many agricultural systems throughout the Pacific Islands long before Europeans arrived. Yet botanists have established that the cultivar was first domesticated in the New World, probably in South America. How and when did it arrive in the Pacific Islands? Scientists have applied evidence from diverse disciplines in investigating this problem. Archaeological research indicates the presence of sweet potatoes in central Polynesia more than 1,000 years ago, and linguistic evidence suggests a human-mediated introduction. The word kumara is used throughout the Pacific islands and also in parts of South America, suggesting the introduction of the sweet potato into the Pacific could have been effected by Polynesian voyagers who sailed to the west coast of South America, collected the tuber, and brought it back to Polynesia. From there it may have spread more widely throughout the Pacific. Currently, DNA fingerprinting techniques are being applied to analyze hundreds of sweet potato samples to test hypotheses about where ancient Polynesians may have made contact with the New World, the number of lineages introduced into Polynesia, the spread of sweet potatoes into Western Oceania and the influence of European-era introductions on modern diversity.  The movement of sweet potatoes throughout the Pacific can teach us much about human migration and mobility in Oceania.

Key Publications:
Scaglion, Richard and María-Auxiliadora Cordero. “Did Ancient Polynesians Reach the New World? Evaluating Evidence from the Ecuadorian Gulf of Guayaquil.” In Polynesians in America: Pre-Columbian Contacts with the New World. T. Jones, A. A. Storey, E. A. Matisoo-Smith, and J. M. Ramírez-Aliaga (eds.), pp 171-193.  Altamira Press, Landham, MD , 2011.

Scaglion, Richard. “Kumara in the Ecuadorian Gulf of Guayaquil?” In The Sweet Potato in Oceania: a Reappraisal. C. Ballard, P. Brown, R.M. Bourke and T. Harwood (eds.), pp. 35-41. Ethnology Monographs 19 and Oceania Monograph 56, Pittsburgh and Sydney, 2005.

Scaglion, Richard and Todd R. Hooe. "Tuber Transformations: The Impact of the Sweet Potato in the Indo-Pacific." In The Globalization of Food, L. Plotnicov and R. Scaglion, (eds.), pp. 105-118, Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, IL, 2002).

 
     
 
 

The region commonly termed “Polynesia” includes thousands of islands, most of them arranged in a rough triangle bounded by Hawai‘i, Easter Island, and New Zealand. Outside the Polynesian Triangle, in areas commonly designated Micronesia and Melanesia, lie about two dozen islands, most of them small and widely separated, whose inhabitants speak Polynesian languages and share other characteristics with triangle Polynesians. These islands are collectively termed the Polynesian outliers. The great Polynesian centers endured major change before trained observers had an opportunity to record their lifeways. In contrast, owing largely to their remote location, the outliers were spared much of the trauma suffered by their larger and more accessible neighbors, making them particularly interesting for anthropologists, and critical for the comparative study of Polynesia. Who are these peoples? Where did they originate, and how did they come to settle in these remote islands? What is their relationship to the better-known Polynesian societies? Can they, in some way, be thought of as representing Polynesian society before it became permanently altered by contact with Europeans? I have collaborated with many anthropologists who have worked in these islands to produce a new volume exploring these and other questions and to provide the first synthetic, comparative treatment of the Polynesian outliers. The settlement and development of these remote outposts of Polynesia can also teach us much about human migration and mobility in Oceania.


Key Publications:
Feinberg, Richard and Richard Scaglion (eds.) Polynesian Outliers: The State of the Art. Ethnology Monographs No. 21, 2012.


Scaglion, Richard. “Socio-Political Organization.” In Polynesian Outliers: The State of the Art. R. Feinberg and R. Scaglion (eds.), Ethnology Monographs No. 21, 2012.

 
 
Photos: R. Feinberg