Hawaii’s Bishop Museum Unveils New Online Database of Hawaiian Fishhooks

From Hawaii Magazine:

In the 1950s and ’60s, Dr. Yosihiko H. Sinoto and Kenneth P. Emory of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu unearthed thousands of early Hawaiian bone fishhooks. The researchers used the fishhooks, and other culturally significant artifacts found throughout the Islands, to model when the earliest Hawaiians arrived in the archipelago and where they came from.
Now, 65 years later, some of the same fishhooks used in their studies are fueling new inquiries about how fishing, fishhooks and Island culture changed through time and across Polynesia. These artifacts are part of the first-ever public online reference database of Hawaiian fishhooks unveiled by the Bishop Museum last month.
[Clip]
To create the database, the museum’s anthropology team used high-resolution 2-D scanners to create images of each of the fishhooks. They then posted the images along with a brief description, listing them by excavation site.

Read the Complete Article
Direct to Hawaiian Fishhook Databases

Filed under: Public Libraries