Patrick Vinton Kirch

Last updated

Patrick Vinton Kirch is an American archaeologist and Professor Emeritus [1] of Integrative Biology [2] and the Class of 1954 Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. [1] He is also the former Curator of Oceanic Archaeology in the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology, and director of that museum from 1999 to 2002. Currently, he is professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i Manoa, [3] and a member of the board of directors of the Bishop Museum.

Contents

Early life

Kirch was born in Honolulu, Hawaii and was raised in Manoa valley from 1950s to 1960s. At the age of 13, he became an intern to Yoshio Kondo, a Bishop Museum malacologist. While there, he was studying Linnaean taxonomy and helped curate his mentor's collection of Polynesian snail shells. At the time, despite his strong interest in snails, he already had a passion for archaeology. Seeing it, Kondo suggested him to work with Kenneth Emory, a renowned Polynesian archaeologist. Unfortunately, Emory refused on working with Kirch, so Kondo took him under his wing so that Kirch could spend the whole summer conducting archaeological digs of his own. [4]

A year later, securing the permission of a landowner and some help from his father, Kirch had dug out a three-by-three-foot test pit at Hālawa on Molokai. In the midden of the pit, he found bone and shell fragments, which he carefully assembled, counted and wrote up results on. The results made Emory furious, but Kondo insisted that Kirch did everything right and therefore deserved to go with him to the South Point's excavation site. [4]

Career

After graduating from the Punahou School, he attended University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, from which he obtained a Ph.D. in 1975. From 1975 to 1984 Kirch served on the staff of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum in Honolulu. Due to the research decline in mid-1980s, Kirch relocated to Seattle, Washington, in 1984, where he was a director of the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture at the University of Washington and then became its associate professor. In 1989, he moved to California, where he took a position at the University of California, Berkeley, in the department of anthropology, [4] where he held the Class of 1954 Chair from 1994 till July 2014.

His research focused on the archaeology, ethnography, and paleoecology of the Pacific Islands. He carried out original field research in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, the Loyalty Islands, Kingdom of Tonga, American Samoa, Yap, Belau, the Marshall Islands, the Cook Islands, French Polynesia (Mangareva, Mo'orea), and Hawai'i.

Kirch retired from the Berkeley faculty in July 2014, becoming chancellor's professor emeritus and Class of 1954 Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Integrative Biology. [1] He is currently a professor in the department of anthropology at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa. [5]

He was one of the founders and the first president of the Society for Hawaiian Archaeology. In 2017 he was appointed to the board of directors of the Bishop Museum. He is a member of the advisory board of the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust, advising on the preservation of cultural sites. [5]

His international collaborations include work with the Australian National University, the University of Auckland and University of Otago (New Zealand), and the University of French Polynesia (Tahiti). He is a member of the International Center for Archaeological Research on Polynesia, based at the University of French Polynesia. As a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, he served as a liaison to the Pacific Science Association.

Through his work, he has come to the belief that practitioners of archaeology, historical linguistics, human genetic studies, ethnology, and archival historical research can work together to give a fuller picture of the past than any discipline alone could do.

Awards and honors

In 1997 Kirch was awarded the John J. Carty Award from the National Academy of Sciences [6] and in 2011 became recipient of the Herbert E. Gregory Medal for Distinguished Service to Pacific Science from the Pacific Science Association. [7] He is also a Doctor Honoris Causa of the University of French Polynesia (2016). [8]

Kirch's research was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.

From 1997 to 1998, Krich was a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences [9] and, in 2010, Kirch was elected as an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. [10]

Publications

Kirch has authored more than 250 books, monographs, articles, and chapters. [11] His major books include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polynesian mythology</span> Body of myths in Polynesia

Polynesian mythology encompasses the oral traditions of the people of Polynesia together with those of the scattered cultures known as the Polynesian outliers. Polynesians speak languages that descend from a language reconstructed as Proto-Polynesian – probably spoken in the Tonga and Samoa area around 1000 BC.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bishop Museum</span> Museum of history and science in Hawaii, United States

The Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, designated the Hawaiʻi State Museum of Natural and Cultural History, is a museum of history and science in the historic Kalihi district of Honolulu on the Hawaiian island of Oʻahu. Founded in 1889, it is the largest museum in Hawaiʻi and has the world's largest collection of Polynesian cultural artifacts and natural history specimens. Besides the comprehensive exhibits of Hawaiian cultural material, the museum's total holding of natural history specimens exceeds 24 million, of which the entomological collection alone represents more than 13.5 million specimens. The Index Herbariorum code assigned to Herbarium Pacificum of this museum is BISH and this abbreviation is used when citing housed herbarium specimens.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ancient Hawaii</span> Period in Hawaiian history

Ancient Hawaiʻi is the period of Hawaiian history preceding the unification in 1810 of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi by Kamehameha the Great. Traditionally, researchers estimated the first settlement of the Hawaiian islands as having occurred sporadically between 400 and 1100 CE by Polynesian long-distance navigators from the Samoan, Marquesas, and Tahiti islands within what is now French Polynesia. In 2010, a study was published based on radiocarbon dating of more reliable samples which suggests that the islands were settled much later, within a short timeframe, in about 1219 to 1266.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anuta</span>

Anuta is a small volcanic island in the province of Temotu in the southeastern part of Solomon Islands. It is one of the smallest permanently inhabited Polynesian islands. It is one of the Polynesian Outlier communities in Melanesia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tikopia</span> Island in the far southern Solomon Islands

Tikopia is a volcanic island in Temotu Province, in the independent nation of Solomon Islands, southwestern Pacific Ocean. Although most of Solomon Islands is Melanesian, Tikopia is culturally Polynesian. The first Europeans arrived on 22 April 1606 as part of the Spanish expedition of Pedro Fernandes de Queirós.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Buck (anthropologist)</span> New Zealand physician and anthropologist (1877–1951)

Sir Peter Henry Buck, also known as Te Rangi Hīroa or Te Rangihīroa, was a New Zealand doctor and a prominent anthropologist who served many roles through his life.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Polynesian navigation</span> Methods to navigate the Pacific Ocean

Polynesian navigation or Polynesian wayfinding was used for thousands of years to enable long voyages across thousands of kilometres of the open Pacific Ocean. Polynesians made contact with nearly every island within the vast Polynesian Triangle, using outrigger canoes or double-hulled canoes. The double-hulled canoes were two large hulls, equal in length, and lashed side by side. The space between the paralleled canoes allowed for storage of food, hunting materials, and nets when embarking on long voyages. Polynesian navigators used wayfinding techniques such as the navigation by the stars, and observations of birds, ocean swells, and wind patterns, and relied on a large body of knowledge from oral tradition. This island hopping was a solution against the scarcity of useful resources, such as food, wood, water, and available land, on the small islands in the Pacific Ocean. When an island’s required resources for human survival began to run low, the island's inhabitants used their maritime navigation skills and set sail for a new island full of possibilities. However, as an increasing number of islands in the South Pacific became occupied, and citizenship and national borders became of international importance, this was no longer possible. People thus became trapped on islands with the inability to support them.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Green (archaeologist)</span> American-born New Zealand archaeologist (1932–2009)

Roger Curtis Green was an American-born, New Zealand-based archaeologist, professor emeritus at The University of Auckland, and member of the National Academy of Sciences and Royal Society of New Zealand. He was awarded the Hector and Marsden Medals and was an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his contributions to the study of Pacific culture history.

Ben Rudolph Finney was an American anthropologist known for his expertise in the history and the social and cultural anthropology of surfing, Polynesian navigation, and canoe sailing, as well as in the cultural and social anthropology of human space colonization. As "surfing's premier historian and leading expert on Hawaiian surfing going back to the 17th century" and "the intellectual mentor, driving force, and international public face" of the Hokulea project, he played a key role in the Hawaiian Renaissance following his construction of the Hokulea precursor Nalehia in the 1960s and his co-founding of the Polynesian Voyaging Society in the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kenneth Emory</span> American anthropologist

Kenneth Pike Emory was an American anthropologist who played a key role in shaping modern anthropology in Oceania. In the tradition of A. L. Kroeber and other pioneering anthropologists who trained him, Emory's works span all four major fields of anthropology: archaeology, physical anthropology, ethnography, and linguistics. With fellow scientists Gerrit P. Wilder, Honolulu botanist, and Mrs. Wilder, historian; Dr. Armstrong Sperry and Dr. Stanley Ball, he was part of the Bishop Museum scientific research party who explored the South Pacific on the schooner Kaimiloa.

The Mangarevan expedition of 1934 was a scientific expedition to investigate the natural history of the farthest southeastern islands of Polynesia, including Mangareva. It was a comprehensive natural history expedition of a kind more common during the previous century.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isabella Abbott</span> Hawaiian ethnobotanist

Isabella Aiona Abbott was an educator, phycologist, and ethnobotanist from Hawaii. The first native Hawaiian woman to receive a PhD in science, she became a leading expert on Pacific marine algae.

Yosihiko H. Sinoto was a Japanese-born American anthropologist at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is known for his anthropological expeditions throughout the Pacific, particularly Hawaii and French Polynesia.

Robert Bollt was an American archaeologist, specializing in Pacific Archaeology.

The Bayard Dominick expedition was a 1920 scientific expedition to the Pacific islands of Polynesia, with four teams sent to compile archaeological and anthropological surveys of the Marquesas, Tonga, Austral Islands, and Hawaiʻi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Native cuisine of Hawaii</span> Traditional Hawaiian cuisine

Native Hawaiian cuisine refers to the traditional Hawaiian foods that predate contact with Europeans and immigration from East and Southeast Asia. The cuisine consisted of a mix of indigenous plants and animals as well as plants and animals introduced by Polynesian voyagers, who became the Native Hawaiians.

Katharine Luomala was an American anthropologist known for her studies of comparative mythology in Oceania.

There have been changing views about initial Polynesian discovery and settlement of Hawaii, beginning with Abraham Fornander in the late 19th century and continuing through early archaeological investigations of the mid-20th century. There is no definitive date for the Polynesian discovery of Hawaii. Through the use of more advanced radiocarbon methods, taxonomic identification of samples, and stratigraphic archaeology, during the 2000s the consensus was established that the first arrived in Kauai sometime around 1000 AD, and in Oahu sometime between 1100 AD and 1200 AD. However, with more testing and refined samples, including chronologically tracing settlements in Society Islands and the Marquesas, two archipelagoes which have long been considered to be the immediate source regions for the first Polynesian voyagers to Hawaii, it has been concluded that the settlement of the Hawaiian Islands took place around 1219 to 1266 AD, with the paleo-environmental evidence of agriculture indicating the Ancient Hawaiian population to have peaked around 1450 AD around 140,000 to 200,000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Thomas Aitken</span> American anthropologist (1890–1977)

Robert Thomas Aitken was an American anthropologist known for his work in Oceania while at the Bishop Museum in Hawaiʻi.

Wayne Arthur Whistler was an American ethnobotanist, academic and writer. Whistler, an adjunct professor at the University of Hawaii's Department of Botany, was an expert on tropical flora of the Pacific Islands, especially Samoa and Tonga.

References

  1. 1 2 3 Patrick V. Kirch University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  2. ↑ Patrick Kirch University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  3. ↑ "Pat Kirch · Anthropology (ANTH), UH Mānoa, Hawaiʻi". anthropology.manoa.hawaii.edu. Retrieved January 5, 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 David Thompson (Spring 2017). "Unearthing Time". Hana Hou! Magazine. Vol. 20, no. 2.
  5. 1 2 "Pat Kirch · Anthropology (ANTH), UH Mānoa, Hawaiʻi".
  6. ↑ "John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  7. ↑ Kathleen Maclay (June 28, 2011). "Patrick Kirch awarded Gregory Medal for Pacific research". University of California, Berkeley. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  8. ↑ "Patrick Kirch awarded Honorary Doctorate by the Universite de Polynesie Francaise". University of French Polynesia. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  9. ↑ "Patrick V. Kirch". Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Retrieved February 28, 2019.,
  10. ↑ "Patrick Kirch". Australian Academy of the Humanities. Retrieved February 28, 2019.
  11. ↑ "Patrick Kirch | University of Hawaii at Manoa - Academia.edu".

13. Patrick Kirch | University of Hawaii at Manoa Retrieved April 23, 2022. 14. Patrick V. Kirch | Anthropology Department, UC Berkeley Retrieved April 22, 2022.

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.