Aiming for the Stars? Contextualizing Society Islands Marae Alignments within an Archaeoastronomical Framework

Oral historical and ethnohistorical accounts provide insight into cosmological belief systems of pre-contact Eastern Polynesian chiefdoms and suggest that certain astronomical cues, like the Pleiades constellation or sunrise, played a significant role in defining peoples’ relationships to history, religion, and landscape. Recent archaeological work in Eastern Polynesia has sought to identify the material expressions of these worldviews, often through the medium of monumental architecture. Aligned with these interdisciplinary efforts, I have incorporated ethnohistorical data from the Society Islands, French Polynesia into an archaeological settlement pattern analysis, in order to question the ways cosmological worldviews may have influenced site-formation patterns, site locations on the landscape, and sociopolitical complexity. In this paper, I will use data on the orientations—taken as azimuth measurements—of temple sites, known as marae, to contextualize marae locations and alignments within a broader ethos of pre-contact Eastern Polynesian cosmology. Furthermore, the goal of this paper is to expand upon traditional models and methodologies of settlement pattern archaeology by introducing the skyscape as a legitimate component that can inform settlement histories and architectural construction patterns in Eastern Polynesian chiefdoms. Despite certain epistemological challenges to this type of work, I hope to show in this paper that archaeoastronomical models are a promising step toward reshaping our understanding of landscape histories and human-environment interactions in Oceania.