ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Polynesia where a wide variety of headmen, chiefs and kings once existed. Polynesia comprises the islands lying within the triangle formed by the Hawaiian Islands, Easter Island and New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean. The beginnings of Polynesian culture go back about 2,500 years, when a small number of people, carriers of the so-called Lapita culture, left the islands of Melanesia, where they had lived for a thousand years or so, and settled on the Samoan and Tongan Islands in the west of the Pacific Ocean. The Polynesian data make it possible to formulate some tentative conclusions regarding kingship. The Polynesian cases indicate that the development of kingship (whether or not in connection with the development of an early state) is a matter of sociopolitical scale.
