750 which now formed the basis of a claimed first discovery. Testing continued at sites around Hawaii to find the earliest dates. At the same time of the research done by the Honolulu Museum, the University of Honolulu excavated several sites in O'ahu which would suggest dates of AD 600 to 1100. However these results did not match the archaeological results obtained from examining the spread of Polynesians from their homeland in Tahiti. Regardless by the close of the 1970s a model of Polynesian settlement chronology emerged suggesting multiple contacts with the island relying on the Pu‘u Ali‘i sand dune sample posited (although revised in 1969 as actually sometime between 1000 and 1350 AD) as supporting a possible earlier wave of settlement in 124 AD, with a long pause in between. For a time this Polynesian triangle became the "orthodox" scenario. By the 1990s with the advances in radiocarbon dating taking place and more samples tracking the spread across the Polynesian islands, including New Zealand archaeologists found significant support for a late colonization of the eastern Polynesian islands, suggesting Hawai'i, like New Zealand was colonized around 1000-1200 AD. Refinements in radiocarbon dating Since the invention of Radiocarbon dating in 1949 scientists started to recognize various problems with radiocarbon dating from the labs to the samples being submitted. For instance the preliminary samples tested by Emory and Sinoto who raced to determine first contact had rather large standard deviations, reflecting the crude solid-carbon counting methods first used by the pioneers of the radiocarbon dating method. By late 1970s the most significant improvement by then was the use of accelerator mass spectrometry or AMS. Equally important to the refinements in laboratory methods was the realization by archaeologists that they needed to pay close attention to the kinds of samples they submitted for dating. This was especially the case for wood charcoal, perhaps the most commonly dated material from Polynesian sites. In the early years of radiocarbon dating, the tendency was to select the largest pieces of charcoal. The problem, of course, was that such samples in many cases included old growth timber, which had an “in built” age that was potentially much older than the time at which the wood was actually burnt in the hearth or oven. Therefore, the date returned by the radiocarbon lab may have been an accurate indication of the age of the timber, but not of the