Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

It is Both Palaeolithic and Neolithic

page 149

It is Both Palaeolithic and Neolithic

(3) But this last immigration must have found a vast population already settled in the islands, and that probably a population which was itself mixed; for there is found not merely in the ancient shell-mounds and caves of New Zealand, but also amongst the Maoris themselves, a stone culture that is at once palaeolithic and neolithic. They had the most beautifully polished weapons of various hard kinds of stone, that each meant years of patient work, but they also used the chipped weapons and flakes of the early stone age. Some of their axes and adzes were not much more than chipped, and in order to cut the hair and to gash themselves when mourning, and to perform certain ancient ceremonies and sacrifices, flakes of obsidian or flint had to be used, and in many of the islands rough stones were employed as pounders, and smooth beach stones as missiles hurled from the sling. What seems to indicate that the last immigrants did not introduce stone culture is the fact that stone is far less favoured in their weapons than in their implements. Most of their instruments of war, even their meres, when they could not afford greenstone, are of wood or bone. But their axes and adzes and chisels and files and pounders are chiefly of stone. When an adze was put into the hands of the warrior it was of greenstone, and meant rather to be symbolic of authority than to be used as a weapon. Now, the possession of weapons is the mark of a conquering aristocracy, whilst the instrument of daily and despised labour belongs to the conquered and the common; and, though the axe and the adze were tools of the canoe-making, house-building, wood-carving aristocracy, they were also the tools of the tree-felling, canoe-hollowing, and wood-carving aborigines.