Auckland Museum, December 24, 2009

The Auckland Museum is superb!  We got there about 3:30 pm and it closed at 5:00, but even in that hour and a half we saw some amazing things and learned a lot.  They have the  best collection (and instructive commentary) on Maori culture and history in the world.  For a stone-age culture that had no metals, it was amazingly complex and sophisticated technologically.  There is no doubt that their discovery of New Zealand was not entirely accidental.  They (and kindred Polynesian societies on other islands) had large twin-hull ocean-going sailing canoes, and they had the ability to navigate by combining several indicators, including the position of the stars, knowledge of the ocean currents and prevailing winds, behavior of sea birds, and subtleties in the pattern of ocean waves and swells.  The earlier ideas that the Pacific islands were settled by a random process of canoes getting accidentally blown away from the vicinity of their home island and finally, luckily, stumbling across a new unknown island, nearly dead from hunger and thirst, is clearly wrong, as is the idea that hundreds of such strays must have perished at sea for every one that successfully found land.  The Maori legends tell of one early explorer who discovered New Zealand, reprovisioned, and sailed back to his home island to tell about.  He recruited settlers and returned with 6 large sailing canoes, probably around 800 - 1000 AD.  He was followed by other waves of settlers.  One particular tribe in the Rotorua area traces their ancestry to a canoe that landed in 1347 - their legendary memory is that precise.  Although details of these voyages have been embellished and assumed mythical characteristics by now, there is no reason to doubt the veracity of the basic underlying legend.

The Maori's stone technology benefited because they had access to both obsidian (volcanic glass that can be fractured conchoidally to give razor sharp edges) and greenstone, a hard metamorphic rock consisting mainly of nephrite, a type of jade.  I haven't seen yet whether they had wheeled transportation, but I don't believe they had any large draft animals (oxen, horses), so they may not have had the wheel.  It was a highly aquatic culture anyway, and river  and coastal navigation were more important than moving stuff overland.

One historical factor I have not yet seen any mention of is the earlier people whom the Maori exterminated.  The Maori certainly don't bring it up in their cultural displays for the tourists, but I know from previous reading that there were people here before the Maori.  I need to read up about it.  See my comments in an earlier post about how the telling of history invariably reflects a point of view and is subject to "political correctness" controls.

Speaking of navigation, here is Tyler with his GPS trying to find his way from one side of the museum to the other.