History in Prehistory: The Oral Traditions of the Rarotongan Land Court Records

The records of the early 20th century Rarotongan land courts are an invaluable source of ethnohistoric information regarding pre-contact land tenure, social and political relations, and historical processes affecting tenure and relations. They are analysed here from the point of view of contextualising the archaeological record of the island. Pre-contact Rarotongan society is shown to have been fluid and flexible, although one notable trend is the gradual aggrandisement of ariki power. This trend continues into the missionary and early colonial periods, where political unity and ariki hegemony become established. European intervention was a single, though defining, episode in a long history. Although it transformed the political order, Rarotonga remained resolutely Rarotongan.