MUSEUM OF NATURE Maori Artifacts Of Unknown Use

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31676, 11 May 1968, Page 5

MUSEUM OF NATURE Maori Artifacts Of Unknown Use

(Contributed by the Canterbury Museum >

When the writer joined the museum staff as ethnologist many years ago and started to recatalogue the Maori collections, there was on loan one artifact of unknown use.

This (see left of illustration) was in the shape of a flat-based pounder only 6in long and rather too short in the hand-grip to be easily used. It was carefully shaped in grey-green serpentine from the Nelson deposits, a stone we later found to be the precious stone of the Moa-hunter Maori before the harder nephrite-greenstone was discovered, perhaps 500 years ago.

It had been ground flat at the top of the grip, and the rim pierced with two suspension holes. We speculated, in spite of its weight of 2Jlb, that it was a Moa-hunter breast pendant in the form of a pounder and labelled it accordingly, it had been

ploughed up by Elijah Smart, near Simon’s Pass, Mackenzie Country, about 1907, and further investigation established that the Maoris of Temuka recalled traditions of an ancient village called Rauru established near here when their earliest ancestors first entered the tussock wastes of the Mackenzie basin on summer visits in search of birds and eels, and made skining knives from the quartzite flint of Grey’s Hills near Urquhart’s “Streamlands” sheep station. The finder’s daughter, Mrs W. B. Manning, later presented it to the Museum, where it remains as one of our most treasured exhibits.

One day in February this year, to my surprise and delight, Mr and Mrs Alex Greig brought in a second and mueb larger example of this rare artifact type (see right of illustration) which they had recently brought back from Australia, where a member of Mrs Greig’s family had taken it in 1952. This one was so large (9in long) and so heavy (41b) that any suggestion of use as a pendant had to be abandoned. Like the Simon’s Pass example this was also in dense Nelson serpentine, but of an almost black variety, and polished to a mirror finish.

The only respect in which the shape differed was in the absence of suspension holes in the butt rim. Although it was found by Mrs Greig’s father, F. H. (Herbert) Breitmeyer (of an early Akaroa family), Mrs Greig was not told by him before his death in 1954 exactly where it had been found, except that it was from a cave in Sumner. As a boy Herbert Breitmeyer used to accompany his father, then working on the Sumner road, and on one occasion, filling in time by exploring a nearby cave, found this artifact which remained so long unknown to museum science. We might guess this was about the magic age of 13 when boys are at the peak of childhood’s curiosity and enterprise.

As Herbert was born in 1875 this would make the date so close to the discovery of Moncks Cave, Redcliffs, in 1889, that this cave might be

the first possibility. A subsequent recollection from another member of the family is that the cave was behind the Marine Hotel, Sumner. It is unlikely that at this date anything so large could have been found in the wellknown Moa-bone Point Cave in the Redcliffs cutting, as this had been thoroughly investigated by Julius von : Haast in 1872. Whatever the exact site, the Sumner-Redcliffs area is a likely area for the discovery of what we believe to be a Moa-hunter Maori artifact, as the Moa-hunters found the warm and sheltered cliffs adjoining the Heathcote Estuary ; a good base for hunting the moa, and the extinct swan, ; with deep sea fishing over the Estuary bar, plentiful shell fish in the Estuary mud, the odd stranded whale and still numerous seals. From finds such as this the 1 Museum ethnologist and archaeologist gradually recreate the Maori past, and we are grateful to Mr and Mrs Greig for providing this second clue in a continuing scientific detective story. Meanwhile we are left with the problem of discovering what these pounders were used for. In later Maori times stone pounders of a quite different shape were used for softening the threads of flaxfibre cloaks, which we believe the Moa-hunters had not yet invented. In Moa-hunter times we can imagine wooden mauls being used as carving mallets for driving in hard wood wedges to split felled trees and for driving the stakes of fishing weirs. Perhaps on occa sions of ceremony and magic when the craftsman priest (tohunga) presided he used a ceremonial form of the mallet made from the most precious stone, then known, the Nelson serpentine. The everyday mallets of wood have long since rotted away and we know of their existence only from the ceremonial versions made in serpentine. These would always be few and we can be grateful to the family of Elijah Smart and Herbert Breitmeyer for preserving these two ceremonial mallets for posterity.—R.S.D.