Historicizing Food Production in Polynesia: A Case Study of 2700 years of Land Use on Ofu Island,American Samoa

Strategies and techniques of food production change throughout the world reflecting the influence of a range of social and ecological factors. Often excluded in discussions of changing cultivation strategies, however, are the structuring effects of history. Within this paper, an examination of how history structured changing food production over the last 2700 years is presented using a case study of the island of Ofu in the archipelago of Samoa. The environment of Ofu has been altered significantly since human colonization, and many of these changes were caused or modulated by cultivation strategies. These cultural landscapes were inherited by subsequent generations of producers, impacting future productive strategies. Far from being simple artifacts of the past, these modified landscapes created by past producers continue to be inherited and cultivated by modern groups.