Abstract
THE MOEIOEI OF CHATHAM ISLAND.—Vol. 9, No. 5 of the Memoirs of the Bernice P. Bishop Museum, is a further study of the Moriori, which is the result of a second visit paid to Chatham Island by Mr. H. D. Skinner in 1924, supplemented by an account of their life and customs by Mr. William Baucke. This supplements and extends the conclusions at which Mr. Skinner arrived in his previous memoir, as well as corrects other accounts which he considers vitiated by faulty evidence. He is of the opinion that there were two influxes of the Moriori into the Chatham Islands, of which the southern, the Rauru, was pre-eminent, but holds that the Moriori claim that they were autochthonous is incredible. The theory that the islanders were immigrants from New Zealand is fallible, unless it can be shown that the two types co-existed in New Zealand or that two immigrations into New Zealand were repeated in the same successive and separate manner in the Chatham Islands. It is possible that the northern and weaker strain was the first to arrive and began to decay on the arrival of the second; but there is no evidence to show whether the northern Wheteina or the southern Rauru was the first. Nothing is known of inter-tribal wars which can be construed as history, while there is no evidence for the construction of the fortified villages on the lines of the Maori pa, which have been attributed to them, the suggestion that there were being due to knowledge of such structures obtained from Maori stories. Notwithstanding their genealogies, the evidence of the deeply rutted native paths in hard cemented quartzite points to a stay in the islands of not less than a thousand years.
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Research Items. Nature 122, 550–552 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122550a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122550a0