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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

They are as Primitive in Agriculture and Hunting

They are as Primitive in Agriculture and Hunting

(18) Their agriculture and hunting were as unprogressive; the ko, a stepped digger, the chief implement in the one, page 172and the traps and snares for rats and birds, are no more advanced than those of the Melanesian or Aino or savage American. At whatever time the yam and taro came into Polynesia, there is every indication, in the large number of varieties, and in the elaboration of religious ceremony connected with it, that the kumara came long before the South Asiatic immigration. The fern-root is a specialty of New Zealand, and must have been resorted to by primitive peoples that could find no such sources as the cocoanut and the bread-fruit. The abhorrence of animal manure could not have come from the south of Asia, where the mammals had been domesticated, and agriculture was in full swing amongst all the peoples of that region long before the Polynesians could have left. It seems to point rather to the North Pacific, where peoples accustomed to nomadism on the continent settled down to agriculture without domesticated animals in the islands. And the wasteful method of burning the scrub on a patch, exhausting it by culture, and in a year or two passing on to another, belongs to the most primitive of all agricultural tribes, and to forest regions; it could not well have come from the cultured peoples of South Asia.

(19) In the same direction does the absence of all memory or relic of wheeled traffic point. All the southern Asiatic races, from whom the last migration could have come, had developed some form or other of wheeled vehicle many centuries before our era. Now there is not the smallest approach to the semblance of a wheel in any of their ornamentation, either painted, tattooed, or carved. There is the spiral and double spiral, the ellipse and the crescent of a bewildering number of varieties; but no complete circle, still less a circle with rays or spokes, a form that we should have expected in a people that worshipped the sun. The use of the hoop as a child's toy, and, covered with his tattooed thigh skin, as an insult to a dead enemy, indicates that the wheel page 173had been seen without being understood as a new means of easing transport. Manifestly the great mass of the population of Polynesia and New Zealand, in short, the element that gave the deepest impress to the culture, and primarily moulded the ornamentation, came from a land that had no wheeled traffic. This must have been either the north-east of Asia, and especially the Japanese Archipelago, or the Pacific coast of America; but in the ornamentation of civilised peoples of the latter there appears ever and again the wheel or rayed circle, and even occasionally in Central America the winged wheel, such as we meet in old and buried Assyria. This was clearly a representation of the sun as a deity, and had the Polynesians with their sporadic sun-worship come thence, they would have doubtless introduced the symbol into their ornamentation. There is no alternative left but the north-east of Asia, if we are to explain the absence of all semblance of the wheel in the art-forms of Polynesia, and especially of so artistic a people as the Maoris. The legends attribute the teaching of both tattooing and carving to the aborigines; and the Hakuturi, or wood-fairies, and the Ponaturi, or sea-haunting fairies, who seem to have either taught or given the models for carving, are but the imaginative transformation of pre-Polynesian peoples. Others, like the Turehu, are not only spoken of as fairies, but as human beings, who amalgamated with certain tribes from Polynesia. So Mataora, who taught the spiral tattooing to the Maoris, had to go down into Po, or the underworld, to learn it, an indication of the northern or long-winter source of the art.

(20) Had all the inhabitants of Polynesia come from the south of continental Asia just about the beginning of our era, they could not have failed to bring with them ideas of the wheel for ornamentation, if not of wheeled traffic for use in daily life. And there was plenty of level ground in all the larger islands for the resumption of the habit.

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(21) Polynesian agriculture had doubtless a double origin. It is doubtful which birthland the use of stilts points to, for there are low sandy stretches on the coasts of both North-west India and North-east Asia. That the habit is an old one is shown by the story of Tamatekapua, who went on stilts to steal the fruit of his enemy, Uenuku; and in some versions of the legends he is not merely the chief of the Arawa canoe, but a giant. The story evidently belongs to mythical times, and the habit may go back to some birthland before the arrival on the Asiatic coasts. The dancing stilts of the Marquesans take the usage back still farther, and in their ceremonial use seem to indicate derivation from some other race that was looked up to or revered.

(22) Whatever the source of this usage, the agriculture of the region draws its customs from both North and South Asia, for women as well as men have a share in it. Much of it is consecrated to religion; but there is much of it, too, that women can assist in without profaning tapu or angering the gods. Even the chiefs took their place in the field beside the women and slaves when cultivation or harvesting was in hand. This could not have occurred unless the immigrant aristocracy had been accustomed to agriculture as an honoured and immemorial art, nor unless the art had also existed in the islands before they arrived. Other arts were too sacred to let the women or the slaves have any share in.