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Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 20065, 23 March 1935, Page 20

There is no real mystery about the monoliths of Easter Island, according to Dr. Peter Buck, the distinguished Maori anthropologist, who visited New Plymouth at the week-end. The carving on the stones is now definitely established to be the work of Polynesian craftsmen who, in all probability, developed their own designs and craft under the stimulus of local conditions, just as did the Maoris. Another popular fallacy was that the images were wrought in a stone foreign to the island, whereas in reality there were plentiful supplies of that particular volcanic tufa on the island itself. More interesting and mysterious, however, were the inscriptions carved in a peculiar sequence on wooden plaques, a recent parallel to which had been discovered in a remote part of the world with no Polynesian association whatsoever.