The scientist in Hawai'i who most closely resembled Indiana Jones was Kenneth Pike Emory, pioneer archaeologist, who sailed schooners, crawled through caves and marched through jungles to make the discoveries that brought archaeology in the Pacific into the modern era.
Before Emory, study of the Polynesian past consisted of talking to old people who remembered the ancient myths and legends. Emory uncovered a new window into Pacific history by digging into the ground. His dig in a shelter cave off Kalaniana'ole Highway in Niu produced the first Polynesian carbon date, about 1,000 A.D.
Born in 1897, Emory was one of the few Punahou School students who learned Hawaiian. He did it by taking lessons from a court interpreter. He started at the Bishop Museum in 1920 without having taken a single course in anthropology. By the time he earned his doctorate at Yale, he knew more about Pacific archaeology than his professors.
Emory carried on a lifelong love affair with Polynesia. He married a Tahitian, worked at sites all over the Pacific and authored hundreds of scientific reports on all aspects of anthropology from linguistics to ethnology to archaeology to physical anthropology. He died in 1992.
