In the end, it is quite impossible to tease apart the strands of his thinking, or to know with any degree of certainty how much of what he thought was derived from customary Māori attitudes and how much from European prejudices. Nor, frankly, does it really matter, since both seem to have led him to the same point.
TE RANGI HIROA’S Micronesian theory was ultimately another of those red herrings, like drowned continents or the Beringian route: provocative but almost certainly wrong. It did, however, highlight an important issue: What was the nature of the relationship between Polynesians and their neighbors to the west? Might the Polynesians have originated in Melanesia? Did they pass through it on their way from someplace else? And what, in either case, did that actually mean, both culturally and biologically?
It was impossible to address any of these questions without also knowing who the inhabitants of Melanesia were, and this, too, was something of a mystery. Curiously enough, Forster, way back in the 1770s, had proposed what would prove to be a strangely prescient idea. He hypothesized that the darker-skinned peoples of the western Pacific, many of whom lived in the mountainous interiors of the larger islands, were “the more antient inhabitants,” while the lighter-skinned coastal peoples, who were related, he thought, “to the various tribes of Malays,” had arrived in the region more recently. No one would be able to prove it for nearly two centuries, but there was actually something to this idea.
We now know that the islands of western Melanesia (New Guinea and the Bismarck and Solomon Islands) have been occupied for tens of thousands of years—ages and ages longer than the islands of Polynesia. Modern archaeological evidence reveals that New Guinea and Australia, which were joined by a land bridge when sea levels were much lower, were settled at least forty thousand years ago, by people who then managed to spread themselves right out to the end of the Solomons. So there is an ancient substrate to this population. But forty thousand years is a long time, and it is quite inaccurate to suggest that the modern inhabitants of Melanesia can simply be equated with this very ancient population. There are not now, as Forster suggested, two great varieties of people in the Pacific: there is one quite homogeneous group in the central and eastern Pacific (Polynesians), and, thanks to the incredibly long time they have had to diversify, a hugely complex and heterogeneous mix of peoples and cultures in the Melanesian islands to the west.
One index of this complexity was actually recognized by both Forster and d’Urville, though neither of them understood it at the time. This was the extraordinary proliferation of languages in Melanesia. It had been the similarity of languages across the islands of Polynesia that had first led to the idea of a single Polynesian “nation,” but no such unity exists in the islands to the west. Even today on New Caledonia—an island roughly the size of New Jersey—between thirty and forty languages are spoken. One hundred and ten languages have been recorded in the islands of Vanuatu. And in New Guinea, which is famous for being the most linguistically diverse place on earth, there are more than 950 languages belonging to a still unknown number of language families. To a linguist, what such extreme diversity indicates is depth of time. Languages are always changing—splitting and morphing and turning into new languages—and the more time they have in which to do this, the more languages there are. Consider the changes that have occurred in English just since Chaucer’s day, and then imagine what might happen if this process were to continue for, say, forty thousand years.
All of this would prove important to the story of the Polynesian migrations, but in the 1930s the methods that would bring these facts to light had not yet been discovered. Although the impulse to use science to answer some of these questions was strong in the first half of the twentieth century, the early results were generally disappointing: some mystifying claims based on the measurement of bodies; a number of confusing attempts to deduce migration patterns from comparisons of ethnological traits; much speculative theorizing based largely on prejudice. But there was one branch of anthropology that had not yet really been brought into play, and over the next few decades, all the most exciting discoveries would be made by people wielding shovels and sieves.
The Moa Hunters
Stone and Bones
Rock painting of moa, in “The Material Culture of the Moa-Hunters in Murihuku” by David Tevitodale, Journal of the Polynesian Society (1932).
THE POLYNESIAN SOCIETY, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND.
FOR A LONG time, no one thought that archaeology was worth doing in the Pacific. Well into the twentieth century, it was assumed that there would be little to find (no ceramics or metal); that the history of occupation was not long enough to be interesting; and that the cultures of the Pacific were so static and unchanging that any archaeological discoveries would only duplicate what had already been revealed by other means. There was one exception to this, however, and that was New Zealand, where archaeology got a dramatic early start in the nineteenth century, when human artifacts were discovered mixed in with the bones of giant prehistoric birds.
The moa was quite a mystery in early colonial New Zealand. None of the early explorers appears to have known anything about it, but once settlers began arriving in the early nineteenth century, reports of mysteriously large bones quickly began to surface. An English settler by the name of Joel Polack described the “large fossil ossifications” that were shown to him by Māori, who told him that there had been very large birds in New Zealand “in times long past.” Polack also recorded a tale, then still current among the very old, of “Atuas [gods], covered with hair, in the form of birds, having waylaid former native travellers among the forest wilds, vanquishing them with an overpowering strength, killing and devouring [them].” A missionary traveling in the same region at about the same time was similarly treated to the story of “a certain monstrous animal.”
While some said it was a bird, and others “a person” all agreed that it was called a Moa;—that in general appearance it somewhat resembled an immense domestic cock, with the difference, however, of its having a “face like a man”;—that it dwelt in a cavern in the precipitous side of a mountain;—that it lived on air;—and that it was attended, or guarded, by two immense Tuataras [lizards], who, Argus-like, kept incessant watch while the moa slept.
The people who reported this also said that they made fishhooks from the creature’s bones, which were sometimes discovered among the sandbars and shallows of the river.
Polack shrewdly observed that these bones appeared to belong to an extinct “species of the Emu.” But no one seems to have paid any attention to this remark, and it was Sir Richard Owen, the famed British comparative anatomist and paleontologist (it was Owen who gave us the classification Dinosauria), who got the credit for identifying the bird. In 1839, Owen received a fragment of moa bone from a New Zealand traveler. It was a section of femur about six inches long and five and a half inches in circumference. At first he dismissed it as a piece of common beef bone, “such as is brought to table in a napkin.” On closer inspection, however, he concluded that it did not, in fact, resemble the long bones of a mammal, that it was even less like the bone of a reptile, and that if it did belong to a bird, it was not a species that had ever known flight. Owen eventually concluded that the bone belonged to a large struthious (that is, ostrich-like) bird, which he christened Dinornis novaezealandiae, by which he is said to have meant not so much “Large and Terrible” as “Surprising” Bird.
This was all quite wonderful in its own right, but then, in the 1840s and ’50s, evidence began to emerge that man and the moa had actually coexisted. In both the North and South Islands of New Zealand, moa bones were discovered in middens, that is, heaps of shell and bone left over from centuries of prehistoric meals. They were found in or near ancient cooking pits and ovens, mixed in with shells and the bones of ducks, dogs, rats, porpoises, and seals. Flaked stone knives lay scattered nearby, and enough pieces of eggshell were discovered to reconstruct at least twenty moa eggs, some of which showed signs
of having been drilled. The eggs looked, wrote one observer, “as if a hole had been artificially formed for the purpose of extracting the contents,” or “perhaps to allow of the shell being used as a water vessel.” But the coup de grâce was the discovery, a decade or so later, of a human skeleton buried with a moa egg in its hands.
Although some in the mid-nineteenth century held out hope that a species or two of moa might have survived into modern times—a few irrepressible hoaxers actually claimed to have chased one—most scientists accepted that the moa had been extinct for a period of time. The question was how long? And, even more intriguingly, who were these people, these moa hunters, who had killed and eaten them?
ONE SUGGESTION, REMARKABLE because it shows just how unclear the timelines for human settlement of the Pacific were, was made by a Prussian geologist and immigrant to New Zealand named Julius von Haast. Haast was strongly influenced by theories then being advanced in Europe about the ages of prehistoric man. Finds of prehistoric animal bones and human artifacts in France had led researchers to conclude that the Stone Age should properly be divided into two eras: an Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic, when primitive humans had hunted prehistoric beasts like mammoths and cave bears using only rudimentary flaked knives, and a New Stone Age, or Neolithic, when they had advanced to making tools of polished stone and bone.
The Māori, Haast reasoned, clearly belonged to the later Neolithic era, as evidenced by their beautiful greenstone pendants and finely polished stone adzes and clubs. But the moa, as a species of megafauna—New Zealand’s equivalent of “the huge pachydermata and other gigantic forms . . . in the northern hemisphere”—was obviously Paleolithic. And if the moa was Paleolithic, that meant that whoever killed and ate the moa was also Paleolithic. This, in turn, led Haast to the conclusion that there must have been an earlier, more primitive people in New Zealand who had lived—on the strength of the European analogy—perhaps as long as ten thousand years ago.
Haast believed that these Paleolithic people had hunted the moa to extinction and that they had died out long before the Māori arrived. He argued that many Māori seemed to know little about the moa and often did not recognize moa bones when they found them, believing them to be the bones of horses or cows and even misidentifying fragments of moa eggshell as pieces of human skull. But the real key to his argument was the ubiquitous presence of flint knives—the classic Paleolithic technology—at moa-hunter sites all across New Zealand. Haast considered this artifact diagnostic, proof of an essential primitivism in the tool makers. When it was discovered that some of the stone flakes found in South Island sites were made from a type of obsidian that could be obtained only on the North Island, he even suggested that this proved the antiquity of the moa hunters. Too primitive to have crossed a large water gap like Cook Strait, they must have occupied New Zealand in some geologic era before the North and South Islands had been divided.
This, of course, was absurd, and Haast’s timeline was controversial even in his own day. Few critics accepted that New Zealand had been occupied for anything like ten thousand years, or that the moa had been extinct for anywhere near that long. Some noted the “remarkably perfect” moa remains that had been discovered in caves, including some with ligaments, skin, and feathers all still attached, which appeared far too well preserved to have been around for millennia. Others felt that Māori tradition, though thin on the subject of the moa, should not be entirely dismissed. Sir George Grey, an important collector of oral traditions, was firmly of the opinion that the Māori people knew perfectly well what the moa was and that it was extinct, and that this knowledge had been handed down to them from their ancestors, who had encountered the creature when they first arrived. He noted that moa was a Polynesian word meaning “chicken” or “fowl,” and that it was “the very word which new comers to the islands of New Zealand would have been likely to apply to the Dinornis, if they had found it in existence there.”
But if the moa hunters were not primitive Paleolithic hunters, who were they? Independent of the timeline, Haast’s theory had raised an important question: Were the Māori the original settlers of New Zealand, or had they been preceded in the islands by somebody else? The issue was very much muddied by the claim, made by S. Percy Smith in his history of New Zealand, that the islands were already inhabited when the first settlers from Hawaiki arrived. According to Smith’s account, these first settlers were tall and thin, with black skin, flat noses, and lank hair. They lived in lean-tos, wore little or no clothing, and did not know their own genealogies or grow any of their own food. No one knew where they had come from, but they were believed to have been blown to New Zealand from some larger, warmer country to the west. According to this tradition, when the later, more sophisticated immigrants from Hawaiki (i.e., the ancestors of the Māori) arrived, they easily overpowered and enslaved these earlier arrivals, taking their women as wives and their boys as servants and killing whoever was left.
This obviously post-contact narrative, with its racist invocation of the Melanesia/Polynesia divide, had worked its way into New Zealand’s settlement story. Although it had nothing to do with moas or archaeological sites, it effectively cemented the idea of the moa hunters as a distinct, ethnically different (i.e., possibly Melanesian) people from the Polynesian Māori. This, then, was how things stood when the problem was taken up by the professionals.
THE FIRST SYSTEMATIC attempt to sort out some of these issues was made by a University of Otago anthropologist by the name of H. D. Skinner. Skinner, who held the first—and, for a long time, only—anthropology lectureship in New Zealand, was more of an ethnologist than an archaeologist, but his passion was for the classification of objects that survived in archaeological contexts: fishhooks, files, needles, awls, and especially adzes. Adzes—smooth, dark, heavy blocks of fine-grained stone, polished, in some cases, to a satin gloss—were one of the more important artifacts uncovered in moa-hunter sites. Haast had considered their presence there confusing, considering them too “sophisticated” to be associated with New Zealand’s first settlers, and one of the tasks Skinner set himself was to determine whether these objects could legitimately be associated with the moa hunters.
The obvious way to do this is through stratigraphy: the principle that, in undisturbed ground, older things lie beneath things that are more recent. If adzes and other sophisticated tools belonged to later occupants, they should be found only at higher levels in these sites. But the situation was confusing. Stratigraphy was not much on the minds of nineteenth-century curio hunters, and there had been a great deal of indiscriminate digging and mucking about, with the consequence that, as one of New Zealand’s modern archaeologists puts it, “many of the rich collections from this time are now of limited use.”
As a partial solution, Skinner and his colleague David Teviotdale came up with an ingenious idea. They realized that the mere presence of moa bones could not be taken as an indication of moa hunters, since anyone could scavenge old bones. But some parts of a moa were more useful than others: leg bones, for example, were good for making tools, but vertebrae were not. They therefore applied the following rule: an object could safely be associated with moa hunters only if it appeared in a site with “refuse” bones—ribs, vertebrae, pelvic bones, and so on—the presence of which strongly suggested that living moas had been butchered on the site.
Slowly, Skinner and Teviotdale began to piece together a sketch of the people widely presumed to be the first settlers of New Zealand. They noted their use of earth ovens, their fondness for dogs, the evidence in their middens of other extinct creatures, including Harpagornis moorei, the giant eagle, and Cygnus sumnerensis, the giant swan. Although there was no way to be absolutely certain, they believed that the moa hunters had left a record of themselves in drawings on the walls of rock-shelters and caves, depicting hunters and short-legged moas with plump, ovoid bodies and long, sinuous necks.
Based on an exhaustive study of artifacts—more than ten thousand in the Otago Museum alon
e—along with some more conscientious excavations, Skinner and Teviotdale ultimately concluded that the moa hunters were indeed New Zealand’s first colonists and settlers; that they had hunted the moa to extinction, along with a number of other large birds; and, most importantly, that they were culturally Polynesian. The similarities between their artifacts and those of both Māori and other Polynesians (including, surprisingly, far-off Easter Islanders) were too obvious to be ignored, and there was nothing whatsoever to link them to Melanesia or anyplace else, or to suggest that anyone had ever reached New Zealand before them.
Then, one day in 1939, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy named Jim Eyles stuck his shovel into the ground on his family’s farm and hit something that at first he believed to be the shell of a dried gourd. It turned out to be not a gourd at all, but a large and almost perfect moa egg. Continuing to dig, he uncovered the bones of a human skeleton, then a necklace made of seven large beads in whale-tooth ivory, with a central pendant made from a sperm whale tooth. He had discovered what is still considered the most important archaeological site in New Zealand, the “type-site of the earliest phase of New Zealand’s prehistory.”
The Eyles farm sat on a strip of land—a sand-and-boulder bank about four and a half miles long—known as Wairau Bar. Formed at the mouth of the Wairau River and built up “during the ages of ceaseless struggle between the river and the sea,” the bar separates the waters of Cloudy Bay, on the south side of Cook Strait, from a series of estuarine channels and lagoons. It is a barren, windswept place, but rich in marine resources, including kahawai and whitebait, eels, herring, flounder, and shellfish. Swans and ducks flock to the lagoons, and it appears to have been a good place for hunting (or perhaps preserving) the innumerable moas whose bones were strewn across the bank. Many of these were first uncovered when the area was plowed in the 1920s, but no one seems to have known, until Eyles made his startling discovery, that just below the surface lay the remnants of an entire settlement: middens, ovens, house posts, and more than forty graves.
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