Author: James Stanley Daugherty

Publisher:

Published: 1979

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13:

Fortifications are found on many of the scattered Polynesian islands. In no place are they known to have occurred until at least 200 years after the initial settlement, and each island group that built them initiated their own particular style. It is my contention that the building of fortifications is not a rote cultural activity divorced from any cultural context, but that their construction reflects individual responses to a complex of military needs. Different types of fortifications served different functions. A garrison camp built to hold siege against a fortified village serves a different purpose than the walls of the village it is besieging, and both are different from a walled fastness in some desolate area serving to protect fugitives when all else has failed. Societies have specific concepts of social structure and military procedure, and if they built fortifications, these defences will reflect the specific criteria of their builders. It is my intention to correlate the available data on political organization, military organization, weapons, and patterns of warfare to the advent of fortifications. The massive amounts of labour involved in the construction of some of the Polynesian forts did not require, as some might think, a highly structured system of government. But the manner in which the society was organized, their level of factions, does influence the construction of their forts by influencing the size and organization of the armies that could be fielded, the reliability of allies, the probable results of the conflict, and the reasons for which the war was being fought. When this is understood, along with a knowledge of their available military tools, we should then be able to grasp the functional aspects of the Polynesian fortifications and correlate similar input with a similar constructural response.