By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

This is the time to make resolutions for the New Year. Today we will do just the opposite and look back to a resolution made almost 85 years ago. It finally came true this year. Before the year is gone I want to dedicate a column to the man who made the resolution, the late Dr. Kenneth Emory.

Kenneth was Hawai'i's pioneer archaeologist. He was also my kupuna. He taught me more than any other person. He opened the world of Hawaiian culture to me and he did it for many others. His whole life was an adventure in search of Hawaiian origins. It was as if God intended for him to be an anthropologist.

As a student at Punahou, he decided to learn Hawaiian. God knows why. His parents hired a Hawaiian tutor who translated documents for the register of deeds, Tom Maunupau. He and Kenneth read the Hawaiian newspaper, Kuakoa, together.

When the Bishop Museum got a new director from Yale, Kenneth was hired as an apprentice ethnologist. He had to go to the dictionary to look up what an ethnologist is.

He started at the museum as a messenger for the first Pacific Science Congress in 1920. That's when the top scientists in the world got together at the Bishop Museum to plan the first organized research in the Pacific. Kenneth listened in on the lectures and seminars. He caught fire. He resolved to dedicate his life to what he called "The Polynesian Quest."

In those days, nobody dug in the ground to find traces of the past in Hawai'i because the experts said it was a waste of time. Polynesians didn't have pottery to use as a time tracer. Their culture was too new to produce stratified digs. Anthropologists got information from the old people. They studied myths and legends. Kenneth became an expert on the heiau and stone tools.

Kenneth spoke to kupuna in Hawaiian. Most anthropologists specialized in one discipline or the other; ethnology, linguistics, physical anthropology, archaeology, etc. He talked the Outdoor Circle in Kailua into preserving a heiau. He talked Sophie Cooke on Moloka'i into sponsoring a dig at Mo'omomi Beach. In Kona, he stood in front of a bulldozer to save a house site.

To send his kids to college, he had to moonlight at the University of Hawai'i as an archaeology professor in the late 1940s. So he took his students to a shelter cave in Kuli'ou'ou and taught them the rudiments of excavation. Guess what? They found a tattoo needle, tapa, stone tools, fish hooks, 'opihi shells. And charcoal from old fires.

About that time, the first carbon-dating laboratory opened in Chicago. Kenneth sent in a sample that yielded a date of about A.D. 1000, the first carbon date in Polynesia. Nobody had dreamed that the Hawaiians had been in Hawai'i that long. That carbon date set off an explosion of archaeological expeditions all over the Pacific.

I followed him from the Na Pali Coast to South Point to Tahiti and wrote about his discoveries. It was a terrific continuing story, a new window on Pacific history. Kenneth was like a bloodhound following the trail of the Polynesians back to their source.

By the time he died in 1992 at age 94, the first traces of the pre-Polynesian Lapita people had been discovered in the Admiralty Archipelago. But Kenneth didn't live long enough to know that the origins of the Polynesians have been traced back to China.

When I was writing his biography, he said, "Bob, hurry up or I'll be make (dead) before you finish." I couldn't hurry. His life was too important to do a slap-dash job. Sure enough, he had a stroke before I finished the book. He lost the power of speech and nobody knew if he understood what went on around him.

I knew that he understood. For years, he had a quaint habit of clicking his tongue in approval when he liked something. I brought the first copy of the book to show him. He was lying on the couch, skin and bones. I opened his book and showed him the pictures. He couldn't talk. But guess what? He clicked his tongue.

If only he could have read last Sunday's column about the area in China where there is evidence that the ancestors of today's Polynesians began evolving the culture at that very place. He would be thrilled. His ghost is probably patting the Chinese archaeologist on the back over there.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.