SHRINES OF POLYNESIA

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 572, 26 January 1929, Page 7

SHRINES OF POLYNESIA

RESEARCH IN HAWAII SCIENCE CONGRESS ADDRESS A reconstruction of the ancient Polynesian shrine is now possible following the results achieved by Mr. Kenneth Emory, of the Bishop Museum, in his recent survey of the Necker and Nihoa Islands, in the Hawaiian Group. This was stated by Mr. H. D. Skinner. chairman of the anthropology and history section. in his presidential address to the Science Congress yesterday. Pie said it was now possible to suggest with a reasonable degree of certainty the following eight features as probably present in the shrine: A flat court in front: a terrace faced with stone; a row of wooden or stone slabs, set upright along the back of the terrace, each either representing or else marking the place of an ancestral deity. When the uprights marked the place of an ancestral deity there was a small figure placed before each slab, a repository for ritual material, a slanting slab, burial vaults and wooden platforms fur offerings. Some of these features, though not all, were undoubtedly found in the ancestral shrines of New Zealand. Probably the most important was the terrace often associated with stone, although not usually completely faced with it. The Maori form of the Polynesian shrine was a somewhat attenuated one, and still more attenuated, though still plainly Polynesian, was the tuahu of the Maoris of the Chatham Islands.