Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson

Author:Christina Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Cultural; Ethnic & Regional, General
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2019-03-12T07:00:00+00:00

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

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