The human colonization of the Polynesian Triangle marks the settlement of one of the last geographic expanses in the world. This series of migration events required the development of sea-faring navigation systems and transportable agricultural systems in order to overcome the previously insurmountable barriers to human settlement. Colonization of the region began approximately 3,500 years ago and by 1,000 B.P. the major Polynesian archipelagos supported biologically, linguistically, and culturally divergent human populations. For this reason, the reconstruction of Polynesian prehistory has aligned the attention of geneticists, linguists, archaeologists, and anthropologists alike. The recency of this population expansion and the shared ancestry of the colonists make the chronology of dispersal events and subsequent cultural diversification in Polynesian prehistory amenable to reconstruction using phylogenetic methods. This manuscript explores two such applications.

Chapter 1 presents a cladistic analysis of the evolution of Polynesian bark cloth based on ethnographic accounts of the manufacture, use, and decoration of cloth from archipelagoes across Polynesia. As the result of its prominent cultural position, the bark cloth complex diversified cross-culturally during the geographic expansion and radiation of Polynesian cultures. Using cladistic methods, the evolution of the bark cloth complex is reconstructed and the influence of religion and political power are proposed. Chapter 2 discusses the benefits and limitations of cladistic analyses of cultural data and proposes a set of guidelines for character analysis that align the assumptions of the cladistic method with the major tenets of cultural evolution. Chapter 3 describes a phylogeographic analysis of the candlenut tree, a human commensal organism dispersed by the Polynesians during the colonization era. Based on the population structure and geographic distribution of haplotypes recovered from the gapC nuclear gene family, prehistoric population dynamics of the tree are inferred and their implications for human prehistory are discussed.