This article talks about some of the things found at Makauwahi, and has a good summary of the various hypotheses and evidence for and against them (note that in some places they give uncalibrated carbon dates first; the accurate date is the second one, calibrated by tree rings):
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Dav...000000.pdf
This one, cited in the paper above, has some more detail on the findings. One of the striking things is that the pueo is *not* found in prehuman layers - it seems to have found its way here on its own, but was only able to establish on the islands after rats were introduced (there was another, now-extinct, bird-eating owl here before).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hel...000000.pdf
IMO, even if only the windward valleys were settled first (a hypothesis suggested by those who still support the early settlement), it's unlikely that all the other changes associated with humans - arrival of rats, extinction of large birds and snails, much greater fire frequency - would not be seen in the fossil record until hundreds of years later. On top of that, the supposed earliest site based on the old dating was South Point! If people were living there early on in settlement (even if not as early as thought), then surely they were living on the south coast of Kauai as well.
One way that the fossil record and oral tradition can be reconciled is if the timeline is tighter. The Hawaiian language is closest to Marquesan, so the Hawaiians almost certainly came from there. There seems to have been a near-simultaneous outflow from that area that settled Hawaii, New Zealand, and Rapa Nui in close succession. But the ones who went east had to get to South America, pick up sweet potatoes, and bring them back before the settlement of NZ and either before or not long after settling Hawaii when travel was still taking place.
So it's entirely possible that Hawaii was first settled by Marquesans around 1000, then a wave of Tahitians arrived (around the time that they were leaving for New Zealand) bringing sweet potatoes and a new political order, maybe around 1100-1200. Its not uncommon for the ruling people to claim to have wiped out the previous inhabitants - just look at the Anglo-Saxons and the Britons, the Franks and the Gauls, the Turks and the Anatolians, the Israelites and the Canaanites, etc., when in reality they simply imposed their rule while the same commoners remained.
And it's worth noting that while Hawaiian society had two main social strata, alii (nobility) and makaainana (free commoners), Tahiti had a third - menehune, who were effectively serfs. It's not hard to see how the story of Hawaii's menehune - cheerful, short, hard-working - could have evolved as a sanitized version of a semi-slave class that no longer (or never) existed here.
