Polynesian voyaging curbed by climate change?

Is there a role for climate science in archaeology.Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes.
One of the mysteries of Hawaiian history has been why voyaging between the Hawaiian Islands and the South Pacific stopped several hundred years before the arrival of Europeans in the Islands.Climate researchers say that the decline in long-distance Pacific voyaging may have coincided with a significant change in climate.

which would have changed weather patterns throughout the region.For traditional navigator Bruce Blankenfeld, the link between climate and voyaging success is perfectly reasonable.
“You take a lot of your cues from the weather. If the weather changes, that changes everything,” he said.Blankenfeld is one of five Hawai'i non-instrument navigators who recently was inducted into a traditional Micronesian navigation society.

He is one of the veteran navigators of the Polynesian Voyaging Society's canoe, Hōkūle'a.Around the year 1300 the global climate began a switch from a warm period, often referred to as the Medieval Warm Period, to a cooler pattern known as the Little Ice Age.“There were changes in weather patterns and climate patterns, and there were more storm events in the Little Ice Age.

This would have made traveling much harder, less predictable and less successful,” said Oliver Timm, a paleoclimatologist with the University of Hawai'i's International Pacific Research Center.What caused the climate to cool? There are a couple of suspects, Timm told RaisingIslands.One is that solar radiation dropped at the end of the warm period, although the drop was so small, about a tenth of a percent, that Timm believes it was unlikely to be the sole cause of cooling.