The influence of religious authority in everyday life: a landscape-scale study of domestic architecture and religious law in ancient Hawai’i

ABSTRACTPublic architecture has proven its utility as a metric for the materialization of religious authority; however, archaeologists have been less successful at identifying how ideology is materialized outside formal ritual settings. Here we address the question of how religious laws that dictated separation of people and activities – known as the kapu system – influenced the way homes were built in pre-European contact era Hawai‘i. On the landscape scale, we consider three variables that could be correlated with the influence of religious authority: distance to a local temple marking a district boundary, the degree of daily interaction within the community and investment in household architecture. Our findings suggest religious authority was materialized with a high degree of ubiquity across all house sites without regard to any of these factors, a pattern consistent with pervasive religious authority across daily life.