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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

Iron gives the Most Definite Time

Iron gives the Most Definite Time

(11) A still stronger proof of the final closing of Polynesia to the peoples of the north-east of Asia is the complete absence of iron from that island region. When the Polynesians realised what a sharp edge the new metal introduced by the Europeans would take, they seized on it with avidity. They would give their dearest possessions for a hatchet, or even a piece of hoop-iron or a nail. It is this passion for iron that makes the beginning of its age all over the Old World so nearly contemporaneous. Its use spread with extraordinary rapidity through Europe, Asia, and Africa. And we may say roughly page 45that its age has its backward limit in the earlier part of the millennium before our era.

(12) It is this metal that, when introduced into a region, finally closes its stone age. The sharpest and hardest of stone tools and weapons, even obsidian and greenstone, are not to be compared with it in incisive efficiency. The tribe equipped with iron weapons soon masters the users of stone spear-heads. The iron hatchet gives them their houses and canoes in a fraction of the time and with half the trouble that the old stone axe gave them. And, if timber abounds on the continent, the wooden house takes the place of the mound house or the stone house, and, if on the coast or on the islands, the canoe becomes universal. The beginning of the iron age in any country is also the close of its megalithic age. For iron tools so quicken the process of stone-cutting that people can afford the time to quarry small blocks that do not need vast masses of labour to move them. The stone tomb raised by a single family takes the place of that which needed a whole tribe or nation to manipulate it. And timber, now so easily cut, takes the place of stone in most burial monuments. In the Pacific the colossal-stone-building habit continued except where forests abounded, as in New Zealand and the old volcanic islands; and there the canoe and its carving taught the people to use timber for their dwellings and tombs. Obsidian and greenstone tools made the cutting of wood more rapid than the old flint or basalt.