Space, time, and content must be the prime definitional axes for any phylogenetic entity in the kind of historical anthropology for which this book is an extended argument. We insist that the issue itself requires multiple perspectives: linguistic, ethnological, biological, and archaeological. Having laid out specific methods and procedures by which a phylogenetic model can be promulgated, we now scrutinize the Polynesian case, searching for congruence among independent lines of evidence to test whether Polynesia meets the criteria for a discrete “segment of cultural history.” We will demonstrate, first that the linguistic subgrouping of Polynesian languages is closely mirrored by systemic ethnographic patterns across Polynesian societies, and second that there is biological coherence as well among the various Polynesian populations.

It is also essential for us to define precisely what is meant by “Ancestral Polynesian” culture and societies. This is not some vague notion of a putative cultural stage loosely corresponding to a set of reconstructed Proto Polynesian words. On the contrary, we will identify a discrete group of archaeological sites and their artifactual assemblages, dating to the second half of the first millennium BC, as the physical manifestations of those Ancestral Polynesian societies and communities that flourished in the Tonga–Samoa homeland region prior to the diaspora that ultimately put Polynesians on virtually every habitable island in the vast eastern Pacific.