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Polynesia)
Polynesia is a subregion of Oceania, comprising a large grouping of over 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. A subdivision of Oceania, Polynesia includes New Zealand, Hawaii, Samoa, the Line Islands, French Polynesia, the Cook Islands, the Phoenix Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, Pitcairn Island, and Easter Island. The people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are termed Polynesians.
[edit] Understand
The Polynesian people are considered to be by ancestry a subset of the sea-migrating Austronesian people and the tracing of Polynesian languages places their prehistoric origins in the Malay archipelago. Polynesia divides into two distinct cultural groups, East Polynesia and West Polynesia. The culture of West Polynesia is conditioned to high populations. Eastern Polynesian cultures are highly adapted to smaller islands and atolls. Settlements by the Polynesians were of two categories: the hamlet and the village. Size of the island inhabited determined whether or a not a hamlet would be built. The larger volcanic islands usually had hamlets because of the many zones that could be divided across the island. Food and resources were more plentiful and so these settlements of four to five houses (usually with gardens) were established so that there would be no overlap between the zones. Their languages belong to a subfamily of the Austronesian languages. Contact with European culture began in the late 1700s with the arrival of Spanish explorers, which radically altered life in Polynesia.
