The Chumash Watched Cabrillo Sail In 1542 And Kept Paddling

Sewing hull planks with fiber and pitch, Chumash builders launched a craft with no sibling on the North American coast. In 2005 Kathryn Klar and Terry Jones traced Chumashan tomolo (sewn-plank canoe) to Central Eastern Polynesian tumu rakau, a stem missing from neighboring languages. Hawaiian kumu lāʻau and Tahitian tumu raʻau still name that timber in Honolulu and Papeʻete catalogues. Jones and Klar put the boat and the borrowed name together in the Santa Barbara Channel near cal AD 700.

On the Arauco Peninsula south of Santiago, Alice Storey and her colleagues recovered chicken bone at El Arenal-1, a horticultural site of the El Vergel group. Storey dated the first bone to cal AD 1304 to 1424 and the later pair to 1426 to 1459. Carbon and nitrogen isotopes show a terrestrial diet. Sulfur values agree. No marine correction applies to the intervals. Gongora and colleagues challenged the antiquity in 2008. Storey answered with two further bones and the isotope suite. Bone suited direct radiocarbon dating and mtDNA analysis, unlike the stone artifacts of the older debate.

Clava heads from the Chilean coast match Polynesian forms too closely for independent invention. José Miguel Ramírez-Aliaga had argued the Mapuche case in papers from 1990 and 1992, to almost no response from North American archaeology. Three Polynesian-looking items appear in one coastal assemblage, the sewn-plank boat, the compound bone fishhooks and the composite harpoon. Mapuche speakers call the boat dalca, a form probably inherited from the extinct Chono of Chiloé. West Patagonian kiālu compares with Hawaiian kialoa, a long light canoe used in surf.

After the long pause in the west, Polynesian crews pushed east over far greater distances. Finney demonstrated long ocean passages without instruments in 1988 and 1994. Irwin tied the order of island settlement to seasonal winds and currents in 1989 and 1992, against Sharp's 1957 thesis of incompetent voyaging. Marquesas settlements appear by cal AD 700, Mangareva by cal AD 900, Hawaiʻi by cal AD 800 to 900 and the Pitcairn group by cal AD 900 to 1000. Voyagers colonized mainland New Zealand as late as cal AD 1250. Inter-island contact had ceased in most groups by cal AD 1450.

There is a Quechua word for chicken, hualpa, noted by Acosta in 1590 and unexplained since. Polynesian speakers named the bird moa. Aotearoa is the exception, because the bird never survived the passage there. Māori speakers gave the name to the endemic ratites instead. Hualpa is not a Polynesian form. Its origin remains unknown. The El Arenal bones rule out a European introduction of the chicken to Chile. Quiróz and colleagues began a program in 2008 to find further bone in Chilean sites and in museum collections catalogued as intrusive.

Naming the tuber kumara in Polynesia and in the Gulf of Guayaquil puzzled scholars for a century. Douglass Yen argued in 1974 that Polynesian crews took the tuber, and possibly the bottle gourd, out into the Pacific by two-way voyaging. Donald Brand confined the South American variants to the highlands in 1971. Richard Scaglion documented a coastal variant in the Gulf of Guayaquil in 2005. Brand's last objection went with it. Hather and Kirch dated carbonized tubers from Tangatatau on Mangaia to around cal AD 1000. Rarotongan keeps kūmara for the crop. Reo Tahiti has ʻumara.

Larger polities formed in Ecuadorian prehistory during the Integration Period, around AD 800. Long-distance trade by sea increased with them. Roger Green treated the triangular sails of this sector in 2001 as a likely Polynesian transfer, because pre-Columbian sails in the New World cluster here. Independent invention remains possible. Green judged the late prehistoric transfer more economical, given the coincidence with the point of embarkation for the tuber. Fitzpatrick and Callaghan modeled successful passages from Tonga and Rapa Nui toward the Ecuadorian coast in 2009.

By Irwin's 1992 reckoning, a crew from Rapa Nui makes the Chilean coast in nine weeks across 3,700 km, though landfall farther north is likelier from Hangaroa. Caviedes and Waylen found in 1993 that El Niño conditions would have brought Rapa Nui voyagers into the Mapuche area. Pitcairn at 5,700 km takes twelve weeks in normal years, Mangareva at 6,200 km fourteen. Return by a direct course would have been hard. Crews had already repeated the 4,800 km crossing between Tahiti and Hawaiʻi by way of the Tuamotus.

Collerson and Weisler sourced a Tuamotu adze to hawaiite from Kahoʻolawe in 2007. Fieldworkers had collected the tool on a coral atoll without local basalt. Other adzes in that study came from Marquesas and Pitcairn quarries. Anderson disputed the Hawaiʻi-Tuamotus connection in 2008. The geochemistry answered him. Ramírez-Aliaga and his co-authors validated toki (adze) and its derivative toki kura for Chilean collections. Māori keeps toki for the adze in Auckland glossaries.

Assign the later Channel kit of cal AD 1300 to barbed shell fishhooks of Hawaiian type and to the compound bone hook without a local precursor. Jones and Klar treated the sewn-plank canoe and the composite harpoon as an earlier pair, Phase M3 in the local chronology, cal AD 400 to 700. Crews had paddled to the Channel Islands since 11,000 to 10,000 cal BC. Ten thousand years of maritime subsistence precede the two new technologies. The direct dates come from redwood planks with an old-wood problem. Stone drills and asphaltum plugs date the boats only loosely.

Chumashan tomolo is not built from native elements. Klar flagged the borrowing decades ago and proposed proto-Central Eastern Polynesian tumu rakau, a product from wood, as the source. The Gabrielino of the Los Angeles basin call their sewn-plank canoe tiʻat, from Central Eastern Polynesian tia (to sew). Gabrielino taraina answers talai (to carve, hew). The west Patagonian word for boat repeats that Gabrielino form. Chumashan kalui (harpoon) is no compound of Chumashan elements either. Klar derives it from proto-Polynesian tala (sharp-pointed object, prong) and hui (bone). ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi has ʻēlau and wēlau for that weapon. Chumashan wīlī names it again.

Once the research abstract went into Hawaiian, a cautious interval nearly became a firm date. The reviewer put the qualifier back and left the scope of the claim intact. Disciplinary terms followed Hawaiian field usage. Tahitian field usage supplied two further glosses. A synthetic Hawaiian voice from the house speech models then delivered the abstract to listeners at the length of the printed clause, with the two-sigma range unchanged. A machine version of that paragraph is graded on the Hawaiian panel. The reviewer called the phrasing equivalent and still allowed a shorter clause, provided the qualifier survived.

Canoes could sail north from Hawaiʻi and turn east with the westerlies on the northern side of the North Pacific High, as Finney described in 1994. Anderson doubted a robust upwind rig in historic Hawaiʻi. El Niño conditions like those of 1982 could have altered the odds. Klar and Jones attributed the cal AD 700 Channel changes in 2008 to an exploratory voyage, possibly from the Marquesan islands, 5,270 km against prevailing winds, against 3,955 km from Taiohaʻe to Hawaiʻi. Provisional staging through Hawaiʻi remains a live option. The first Hawaiian settlements postdate that voyage by a century.

In Polynesia and in the Americas, local populations accepted new technologies and domesticates without a break in the course of prehistory. The three contacts produced no New World civilization. Sweet potato altered Polynesian subsistence after its introduction, as Ballard and colleagues reviewed in 2005. Horticulturalists on the Chilean coast took chickens into an existing adaptation. Chumash builders never adopted the sail, even in 1542 with Juan Cabrillo's ships in view.