A Prehistory of the Mangaian chiefdom

Abstract

This essay examines the history of the Mangaian polity drawing on the fields of archaeology and indigenous history. Both disciplines are concerned with explaining the past, but they operate at different scales, and their methods, sources and forms of representation are different. We argue that the strength of a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding Mangaia’s history lies in recognising disciplinary differences rather than cross-checking one against the other, or using the paradigms of one to interpret the other. When read together the two discourses provide a more nuanced, multi-layered representation of Mangaia’s political history than either does on its own.