BEFORE THE MAORI.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 May 1921, Page 9

BEFORE THE MAORI.

PREHISTORIC NEW ZEALAND. NORTH CLOSELY POPULATED. THE RECENT AWANUI FINDS. (By Professor J. Macmillan Brown in Auckland Herald.) 1 Few, if any, students of Maori culture and history but have abandoned the long-held idea that there were no inhabitants of New Zealand before the eix canoes arrived in the fourteenth century. If any have not, the accumulating evidence of wide-spread population, as European settlement and agriculture advance inland, especially in the North Island, should shake their faith. Every year some settler in the back blocks after the removal of the ancient forests reports clear indications of long-vanish-ed occupants of the soil. But this last evidence from the Far North is the most striking of all. Methods of irrigation for tuber culture, such as terracing the hills and slopes, and even artificial aqueducts, have left their traces in various parts of New Zealand and even in Melanesia, as, fd|- example, in the largest island of the New Nebrides, Espiritu Santo. But, as far as I know, no trace has hitherto been found of a drainage •system such as has now revealed itself in the Awanui swamp. It means that open unforested land was becoming limited in supply for at least some of the aboriginal peoples. It is not impossible that when these sft wide, sft deep, drains were dug the great peninsula north of Auckland was still an island, the Manukau Harbor having a straits connection with the Hauraki Gulf; and, in that case, the peoples of the Far North would be “cribbed, cabined, and confined.”

One thing we may be certain of is that those miles of drains were not without huge supplies of labor to draw upon, nor without an organised government that could plan extensive schemes for the relief of over-population and could command the armies of labor that %>ere needed for the achievement of such schemes. The great fortified pas found all over both North and South Islands indicate the same state of affairs. Their huge trenches and earthworks, that remind us of the entrenched methods and engineering of the war just finished, meant armies of toilers highly organised by efficient command. The cyclopean maraes of the Marquesas, Society Islands, and Rarotonga, and the great stone cities of refuge, and the huge stone-enclosed fish ponds of the Hawaiian Group have the same implication; whilst the one thing that makes the immense stene platforms and images of Easter Island an insoluble mystery is the assumption that it has been always the barren speck in the waste of waters, two thousand miles from anywhere, that it is now.

THE CARVED LINTEL AS EVIDENCE. The carved lintel that has been dug up in the neighborhood of these drains leads to the same conclusion that before the six canoes arrived there was, in the Far North at least, an overflowing population along with great surplus wealth. A poverty-stricken people has no time for art even where their religion demands it. Wherever we find traces of fine decorative art we can always assume liberation of a section of the people that produced it from enslavement to hand-to-mouth toil. There must have been a leisured class with sufficient stored-up capital to support professional artists and relieve them from merely utilitarian work that -would hamper the development of their artistic skill. That so delicate a piece of carving has kept its outlines so well, indicates no such antiquity as the chert adze and its sandstone sharpener found in Bruce Bay, in the south of Westland, in 1868, 14ft below* a surface that* .had evidently borne a succession of giant forests, or the Maori oven found on the Manuherikia Plains in Central Otago, also 14ft below the surface. Even allowing for some wood-preserving element in the moisture of the soil, it cannot be more than a few centuries old. .Probably it may have been buried in the wars and turmoil that must have ensued on the arrival of the new and masterful contingent of warriors from Polynesia in the fourteenth century. The much less fragile wood-carvings that have been rescued from the caves in wfhich they were hidden for safety for a few generations have often lost much more of their sharpness of outline. ’ A NEW TYPE OF CARVING.

But the most significant fact about this carving is that it has no resemblance to any known work of Maori art. It is to be classed by itself, not merely for the spear-head scroll-work of its open-work carving and its saurian finials, but for the grotesque figure that with out-stretched hands holds the two limbs of the carving in place, and forms its centre and bond. In the figure-heads and stern-pieces of the larger Maori canoes, and sometimes in the bargeboards and lintels of the doors, there is great delicacy of open-work carving, consisting generally of pitau or tree-fern-frond spirals; but occasionally, in the lintels, of interlacing conventionalised human figures. The stern-piece is especially a masterpiece of lace-like tracery that has no compeer for refinement of outline, except in the roodscreens of mediaeval cathedrals in Europe, or the ivory carved fans of Canton. Its safety . from fracture is generally secured by making the pinnae of the pitau, or fern-frond, the solid bonds between the fragile curves of the spirals. But so much more delicate is the tracery of the stern-piece that the artist has to give a solid back-bone to it by two tusk-like nuclei that curve through three-fourths of its length and are usually grfpped near the point by an arm protruding from above. Perhaps it was to give more firmness to the scroll-work that the fern-frond model was departed from and the spiral made double and interlocking like the coiling of a doubled rope. The spiral is to be found here anTl there in the, carving of Melanesia and Now Guinea, as well as eastwards in Polynesia; and in the former region its genesis is found by Professor Haddon in the beak of frigate birds, though Edge-Partington shows the handle of a lime-spatula from Matty Island, west of the Admiralty Islands, in which the spiral is manifestly developed from the tail of the lizard. There is even some of the open-work, carving to be found eastwards in the decoration of dancing paddles and Marquesas stilts, and westward tip the Kaiserin Augusta River in the former German New Guinea: D’Alberti’s figures from Geelvink Bay, a karwar (or carving

that catches the soul of a dying chief)! with a shield of fine caryed scroll-work; | and the Lorentz expedition, working from the South Coast in 1907 and 1909, 'brought back from the rivers inland dance-paddles and dance-spears distinguished by handsome open-work carving. Though these carvings from New Guinea are often spoken of as Maori, none of them are to be compared with the pitau for beauty and refinement. Still less are they to be compared with this newly-discovered type of carving from New Zealand, so delicate is it in its tracery, so unexpected in it's style and method. The contrast is as great when we come to the finials; they are meant to be conventional figures that inspire terror like the fierce bird-headed Manaia, with its snake-like body and coils. But this conventionalised croco-dile-jawed creature has been so manipulated as to be in harmony with the refinement of the rest of the carving. One might almost conjecture that it has been suggested by some saurian skeleton uncovered in the rocks by an earthquake fracture, perhaps the genesis of the earth-burro wing taniwhas of Maori myth.

The central binding figure forms a third contrast to the grotesque humans in the usual Maori carving. They are generally terrifying in their expression, distorted in their features, and defiant in their tongue-protrusion. Even the tekoteko or gable figure, has often a, fearsome facie. This little figure is gentle, almost ingenuous, if not benign in its expression. The eyes are rather sleepy than mongoloid, and the mouth has the amazed naivete of the surprised child. The only feature that could be called negroid is the nose, which has its nostrils flattened out as those of Polynesian infants are flattened out by the fingers of admiring gossips and mothers who wish to make them beautiful. The wedge shape given to the face and its Substitution for the body were evidently needed by the timber and the art. There is far less of the mongoloid in the eyes than in the eyes of the ancestral figures of tne Maori carved house, which usually have an obliquity far beyond that of Chinese or Japanese dyes. There is nothing in the face of that prognathism (which makes the little carved figure hung from the bow of Solomon Island canoes as a charm so simian. If we are to judge of the people for whom this carving was- made by the face of the little figure we should say that they were unwarlike juid unsophisticated, a perfect contrast wo the tongue-thrust-ing, haka-loving warrior we are familiar with as Maori.