Tikopia: The Prehistory and Ecology of a Polynesian Outlier

by Patrick Vinton Kirch, D.E. Yen

Tikopia is a small (some 2 km by 2 km) island in the Santa Cruz Islands in the Pacific Ocean. It is an outlier due to the distance of 137 km to the next (even smaller) island, and a distance of more than 200 km to two separate groups of larger islands.

The book is an account of the combined archaeological and environmental studies of Patrick Vinton Kirch and D. E. Yen of Tikopia in 1977 and 1978.
It describes results of research into the current agricultural system (arboreal permaculture), the geology and archeology of the island and concludes with a time series of the prehistory and the history of the people of Tikopia.

396 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1982

About the author

Patrick Vinton Kirch, Director of the Oceanic Archaeology Laboratory, holds the Class of 1954 Professorship in Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.