Resumen de Strategies for constructing religious authority in ancient Hawai'i

Mark D. McCoy, Thegn N. Ladefoged, Michael W. Graves, Jesse W. Stephen

• Through intensive archaeological investigation of temples in Hawai'i, the authors reveal a sequence of religious strategies for creating and maintaining authority that has application to prehistoric sequences everywhere. Expressed in the orientation and layout of the temples and their place in the landscape, these strategies develop in four stages over the course of a few hundred years, from the fifteenth to nineteenth century AD, from local shrines associated with agriculture to the development of a centralising priesthood serving the larger political economy.