.jpg)
Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture
Summary of Contents
page break
page break
Summary of Contents
| page | ||
| Chapter I | ||
| The Footprints of Primitive Man in Monumental Stone | 1 | |
| Paragraph (1) Written history is ephemeral. (2) Earth-preserved history lasts longer. (3) The record of man in the rocks of Java has lasted nearly a million years. (4) Palaeolithic man spans hundreds of thousands of years, neolithic man only tens of thousands. (5) Neolithic man specialised into megalithic man thousands of years ago. (6) Megalithic man started from Mauritania along the Atlantic and Baltic coasts of Europe, and crossed to Korea through the north of Central Asia. (7) From Korea he went into Micronesia; (8) thence into Samoa and Tonga. (9) In Eastern Polynesia he has left more traces. (10) Another megalithic track goes along the south of Asia into the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java, and there stops. (11) The northern route is fairly continuous across the Pacific into Central America and Peru. (12) It is the track of one division of mankind. (13) This division is Caucasian, not negroid or Mongoloid. (14) For it is also maritime and longvoyaging. (15) The track probably proves a line of inland seas from the Caspian to Lake Baikal. (16) A maritime and Caucasian people therefore found its way into Polynesia, and thence into America. | ||
| Chapter II | ||
| The Meaning of the Colossal-stone Record | 9 | |
| Paragraph (1) The myth-making faculty interprets the megalithic monuments with great variety. (2) But they originate in ancestor-worship, (3) which first abandoned the primeval cave-dwelling to the spirit, and afterwards built a colossal house for it in imitation of the cave. (4) Hence they were the primitive altars and temples. (5) The page viiiart of colossal-stone architecture ceased on the introduction of iron and mortar; (6) and later peoples used the monuments for inscriptions and other purposes. (7) There are two megalithic tracks across the Old World from the Mediterranean, one southern and the other northern, (8) and it is the Caucasian medium-head that follows both. (9) It is headform that permanently marks race. (10) But in addition to the medium head, the Caucasian is generally marked by much and wavy hair, light complexion, and sea-migratoriness, as contrasted with the Mongoloid and the Negroid. | ||
| Chapter III | ||
| European-like Races on the Colossal-stone Route | 18 | |
| Paragraph (1) Asia is not wholly Mongoloid, Caucasians having early appeared on the south and south-west of the Mongoloid breeding-place. (2) The desiccation of the Central Asian plateau hived off the Mongoloids, the negroids are broken into three divisions by the sinking of the Indo-African land-bridge. (3) The Mongoloid movement took place comparatively late in the history of mankind (4) The breeding-place of the Caucasian was the Mediterranean region. (5) But there were blonde Caucasians sprinkled over North Africa in pre-Roman times. (6) These must have come from the north, the breeding-place of light colour in animals as well as man. (7) The advancing icesheet must have shepherded them south, whilst also evolving in them the migratory habit. (8) The Caucasians found their way all over the south of Asia during the old Stone Age. (9) In the new Stone Age blondes appear amongst these immigrants into Asia. (10) The neolithic wave spread over Indonesia, and as far as Madagascar. (11) The blondes naturally predominated along the northern route. (12) Even in the far north-east, which has been so thoroughly Mongolised, there are many traces of Caucasians, and many of them blondes. (13) Did the Pacific stop their migration? | ||
| Chapter IV | ||
| Traces of European-like Peoples in the Pacific | 26 | |
| Paragraph (1) The Ainos retain Caucasian hair, head, and face, but are evidently not pure Caucasian. (2) They had absorbed peoples before them, and were themselves absorbed by their Japanese conquerors. (3) The "Stone Men," a megalithic race before them, had been partly page ixabsorbed, partly driven into migration. (4) The coastal ring of islands to the south reveals traces of fair Caucasian immigrants. (5) In the Ladrones the race-problem is complicated, but there are striking megalithic remains. (6) In the Carolines it is still more complicated by later Malayan and Papuasian invasions. (7) Long-headed skulls were found in the megalithic tombs of Ponape, whilst the natives are medium-headed. (8) The Spaniards reported two types, a tall, aristocratic, canoe-building, megalithic race, whom they called Blancos, and a dark, short, subject race, who were probably Papuasian or Melanesian. (9) There are many megalithic graves and other remains all over Ponape. (10) They are chiefly to be found in the east and south-east islands of the group. (11) The inhabitants of these are more Polynesian than to the west, and the affinity to Polynesia increases in the Gilbert and Marshall groups. (12) In Polynesia proper the European appearance of the islanders has struck all travellers; the headform is either long or medium. (13) In New Zealand the urukehu or red-headed Maoris indicate a cross with a blonde race. (14) Even the fairy peoples of Maori tradition had come over the ocean. (15) And the fairies are represented as fair-headed and fair-skinned like Europeans. (16) Their abhorrences reveal traits that do not belong to South Asiatics. (17) When absorbed they mellowed the fierce instincts of the Maori immigrants, (18) and taught them their arts of ornamentation, (19) the art of digging out the great single canoe, (20) and that of their spiral wood-carving. (21) The Maoris had several names for white sea-traversing races long before they saw Europeans. (22) New Zealand, as the farthest south, would be a refuge for exiles from the islands, and as of considerable size would preserve many types of aboriginals. (23) In the tropical islands a fair-haired race was known to tradition and prejudice before Europeans. (24) Father-right reigns throughout Polynesia, though mother-right is universal east and west of it; and this was an early mark of a Caucasian race. (25) This feature affiliates it with the North Pacific, whilst the matriarchate of Indonesia separates it from the patriarchate of India. | ||
| Chapter V | ||
| When did the Caucasians migrate into the Pacific, and when was the Pacfic Closed? | 39 | |
| Paragraph (1) The time of a prehistoric people is generally calculated by the layers of humus over their relics; (2) but we can also calculate it from historic movements. The page xnorthern great-stone route must have been blocked when the Turks and Finns migrated from the Altai Mountains. (3) On the desiccation of the central plateau of Asia the Mongoloid emigrants would first press south and east to richer lands and warmer climates; the northern issue would be the last to be chosen. (4) The northern route from Europe to the Pacific would be open later than the southern, hence the fair and even blonde Caucasians that, being absorbed, blanched the Turks and Finns. (5) The time when it was closed will be approximately fixed by the time of southern migrations. (6) The Akkadian Mongoloids must have issued from their plateau some eight or nine thousand years before our era. (7) The northern issue was later, and the northern route to the Pacific for the megalithic people remained open later; some of that people reached Micronesia and Polynesia without copperin other words, some four or five thousand years before our era. (8) But some of the kurans of this people show copper in their graves. (9) But bronze, as taking the keener edge, spread more rapidly, and defines an age better, and in north-east Asia it began between three and four thousand years before our era. A bronze-weaponed people came into Japan about 1240 b.c., probably the Japanese, and drove off various aboriginal peoples, among them megalithic peoples, into Micronesia and Polynesia, and probably also into British Columbia. (10) But no migration could have taken place from Japan into Polynesia after the foundation of the Japanese empire in the seventh century before our era, else it would have taken bronze. (11) The absence of iron from pre-European Polynesia defines the backward limit of immigration into it more exactly. (12) Iron closes the Stone Age, though great forests of timber close the megalithic age earlier. (13) In Indonesia there was no copper or bronze age; the entrance of iron into it about the beginning of our era indicates that the last expedition into Polynesia had gone through before this. | ||
| Chapter VI | ||
| The North Pacific and the Polynesians | 47 | |
| Paragraph (1) Migrations usually keep up a sentiment that looks to the original home. (2) In early times this tended to idealise it into a paradise. (3) The route the spirit is supposed to take after death often indicates the direction in which this lies. (4) In all Polynesia, except Hawaii and New Zealand, the spirits go west; in these two they go north-west. (5) In them, with their large areas and mountain forests, the aboriginals would survive, and certain of their page xibeliefs would be adopted into the households of the newcomers from South Asia with the women, who have to do there with the dead. (6) Some of these aboriginals therefore must have come from the north. (7) Cultivated though the Japanese are, they have customs that show some affinity with the Polynesians, especially the eastern Polynesians, probably through absorption of some aboriginal element, (8) and in Japan this must have been pre-Aino; for the Ainos, though they have striking ethnological resemblances to the Maoris, that show some common racial element, differ largely from them. (9) The British Columbians differ more from the Indians over the Rockies than environment can explain. (10) They resemble far more the Polynesians ethnologically, a resemblance usually explained by similar environment. (11) The method of steam-cooking their food is peculiar to the two. (12) The natural genesis of the Maori oven is in the frost-bound north, (13) and not in the tropics, where the natives avoid disturbing the malarial humus in New Zealand it has been found buried fourteen feet below the surface. (14) The absence of pottery from both British Columbia and Polynesia does not explain it, for they use wooden and other vessels to boil water in. (15) Nor does the custom of boiling water by throwing red-hot stones into it explain it, for the Arctic peoples have this without the steam oven. (16) Both regions tend to the patriarchate in the midst of tribes that tend to the matriarchate, and both combine polygamy with considerable respect for women; (17) chastity of married life with abortion and infanticide, and practical absence of marriage ceremony and exclusion of the women from all share in religion with reverence for some of them as seers. (18) War and its customs and methods were alike in the two regions. (19) But the resemblances that struck travellers first were that between the great houses and their luxuriance of carving, (20) and that between the great single dugout canoes with their carved bows and sterns. (21) In New Zealand the single war-canoes of the aborigines ultimately drove out of fashion the outrigger canoe and the double canoe of the Polynesian; scantier forests prevented this in Hawaii. (22) The wave on wave of Indian race that swept over British Columbia obliterated the Caucasian features, without quite obliterating the long head or the complexion or the character of the hair. (23) The ethnological resemblances are too numerous to be due to mere similarity of environment; (24) they enter into every department of their existence. (25) The megalithic route from North Asia into Polynesia reveals the explanation in community of certain aboriginal elements. (26) Many features of Polynesian culture cannot be explained without page xiiassuming a racial migration from the North Pacific. (27) The megalithic route and the spirit-way of the Maoris alike point to North-east Asia. | ||
| Chapter VII | ||
| The Stratification of the Maori as seen in his Customs | 64 | |
| Paragraph (1) As immigration after immigration entered Polynesia from the north, emigration after emigration would have to sail away farther and farther south to find new homes. New Zealand is the farthest south, and was large enough to give footing to all comers. (2) It is, therefore, the palimpsest of the prehistoric history of the Pacific, revealing a marvellous tangle of customs and stages of culture. (3) There are piquant antitheses in the emotional phases of Polynesian life, some crude and primitive, others advanced and on a level with modern civilisation. (4) The attitude to slaves is an example; the Polynesians dealt humanely with them, and allowed them great freedom, yet used them as victims of all sacrifices and ceremonies. (5) The women were treated no better than slaves, being drudges and outcasts from religion and all honoured pursuits. (6) Yet they were sometimes reverenced as seers and war-leaders. (7) The combination of polygamy and female inheritance, of the romance of love and complete prematrimonial licence, can be explained only by the conquest of a primitive people, and the appropriation of their women by warriors. (8) The women alone cooked, and, like the pre-Polynesian Patupaiarehe, had no karakia or religion. The whole treatment of women is full of contradictions. (9) So, too, are their burial customs, which are perhaps the most persistent in a people's culture. The Polynesians bury and exhume the body, and then finally bury the bones, set the body adrift in a canoe, cremate it wholly or partially, mummify it, or cut off the head, and preserve it in the house. (10) These belong to different stages of culture and types of life, some to landnomades, some to settled agriculturists, some to seamigrants. (11) The social relationships of the people and their relationships to land show the same contradictory varietiesvarieties that could not have been evolved; the village community of Aryan-speaking races is the basis, adapted to a region that has no mammals or cereals. (12) But there are also traces of the hunting and fishing stage, of the land-nomade and the sea-nomade, as well as of the agriculturist. (13) There are traces of the patriarchal stage and the clan stage, and there are germs of democracy, oligarchy, and monarchy, with a strong tinge page xiiiof socialism. (14) Feudalism also tended to arise, and was to be seen all over Polynesia in more or less advanced stages. (15) This is the result of intermixture rather than of evolution. (16) Religion that has evolved keeps but obscure traces of its early stages. (17) Family religion and tribal religion stand side by side in Polynesia. (18) Ancestor-worship exists alongside of a priesthood. (19) The germ of a temple ranges alongside of open-air rites. (20) The fetichistic and totemistic stages of religion appear alongside that of an imageless worship. (21) The tapu system, so universal and all-embracing, is fetichistic, probably belonging to an aboriginal element. (22) Some at least of the aboriginals were without ceremonies or a priestly caste, whilst the dominance of magic came in with immigrants from South Asia. (23) These contradictions are violent, and not to be explained as developments, but as intermixtures. | ||
| Chapter VIII | ||
| The Stratification of the Maori as seen in his Language | 81 | |
| Paragraph (1) Language, lightly worn and changed as it is, is not always a safe indication of race. (2) Malayo-Polynesian is a fallacy. The Polynesian has no Malay blood in his veins, nor is his language agglutinative or Turanian; (3) it has relics of inflections like the Aryan languages; (4) it is most of all like modern English; (5) uninflectional and isolating, it is as simple in grammar as English, a language which is the result of the collision of two inflected tongues. (6) The decay of inflections has gone further than in English; but the traces that are left are distinctly Aryan in form and method. (7) Two inflected languages must have gone to the making of Polynesian. (8) This change in grammar occurred in Indonesia. (9) Neither Malay nor Malayan ever migrated or traded as far as Polynesia. (10) Two Caucasian, probably Aryan, tongues came into collision in Indonesia through the crossing of two Caucasian races; (11) and this some centuries before our era, (12) and some time before the intrusion of the Mongoloid element and the departure of the Malagasy migration. (13) The phonology that the migrants from Indonesia brought with them was reduced in range by fifty percent in Polynesia, a fact that shows aboriginals before them there; the vowels are constant, the consonants differ somewhat in different dialects. (14) Polynesian phonology is of the simplest, consisting of only fifteen sounds, there being only one guttural, one dental, and one labial. (15) The fulness of the vocabulary shows the advanced culture of the immi-page xivgrantsthey must have brought in abstract words; but all that remain of them are the personified names of the cosmology, (16) The language is exceptionally figurative; (17) but the ramifications of meaning in many words cannot be explained as metaphorical extensions. (18) The irreconcilable meanings are due to assimilation of different words through the reduction in the number of available sounds. (19) The phonology and the vocabulary thus reveal stratification. (20) The grammar indicates one Aryan stratum at least. (21) Polynesian roots consist of one or two consonants and a vowel, like Aryan roots; (22) resemblance to those common to most Indo-European tongues. (23) Examples are "ane," to blow, (24) "us," to shine, (25) "mu," to sound, (26) "ra" or "la," to please, love, r and 1 being interchangeable in both Aryan and Polynesian, (27) and (28) "ra" or "la," to sound, etc. (29) Most havoc has been done in the gutturals, dentals, and labials, and the gutturals are especially elusive. (30) Yet guttural roots are common to the two types of languages; as, for example, "kei," to reside, (31) "kok," to cook, "ko," sharp, (32) "kak," to sound, "kak," to bend, "ko," to be glad, "kar," to break, "kar," to round. (33) The roots of one half of the Maori words beginning with k and m have been found to be the same as Aryan roots, the forms being more like the European, and the considerable number of Polynesian words that are exactly the same in form and meaning as European words is probably more than coincidence. (34) The likeness between Indonesian and Polynesian words is largely due to the Sanskritic influence of immigration from India into Indonesia before our era. (35) But the likeness of the Malay vocabulary to the Polynesian is insignificant compared with the likeness of the grammar and even phonology. (36) An Aryan-speaking Caucasian race came by sea into Indonesia. (37) But Mongoloids came down the Malay Peninsula and absorbed the Caucasian Indonesians, their sea-going qualities and the grammar of their language, whilst retaining much of their own vocabulary. (38) The Polynesian migration was driven off by this intrusion. | ||
| Chapter IX | ||
| The last Migration into Polynesia | 98 | |
| Paragraph (1) Both Polynesian language and genealogy point to South Asia as the origin of the last migration. (2) The Vedic race and the Polynesian cultivated abnormal powers of memory in order to hand down their traditions intact. (3) A comparison of Polynesian genealogies from groups that had no intercourse for centuries reveals much page xvidentity in them. (4) A Rarotongan genealogy takes us back to 450 b.c., to Atia (probably India, the home of rice), later to Hawaiki (probably Java, where rice was changed for breadfruit). (5) Kura-a-amoo migrated thither about 60 b.c. (6) The change of food means intercourse with a new type of civilisation and people; but the derivation of an old geographical name is uncertain evidence. (7) Ethnology and philology are safer. (8) There are many Caucasian-like peoples in Indonesia; but these may be due to a palaeolithic or megalithic immigration. The Mentawi Islanders and the tribes in the north of Ceram are not distinguishable from Polynesians. (9) They could not have come into Indonesia by the land route; (10) they must have crossed from Ceylon to the Mentawi Islands, and thence to Ceram, the same word as Ceylon and the Rarotongan Erangi. (11) They must have come from a people long accustomed to the sea and to voyaging to Indonesia, and probably inhabiting the south of the Punjaub. (12) There are definite traditions of large migrations from that coast to Indonesia in the third century before our era. (13) Polynesian religion has no affinity to Vishnuism or Buddhism; but it has a distinct affinity and likeness to the early Vedic religion (14) before the development of Brahmanism. (15) The Vedic Aryans made for the sea, and absorbed a race of sailors. (16) Though there are some features of Polynesian culture that seem Semitic, the language has no Semitic affinities. (17) If the ancestors of the Polynesians were Semitic, they must have been absorbed by a race of Aryan speech. (18) But the clenching argument against Semitic origin is that the Polynesians have no script, (19) whilst all the Semites in South Asia had one many thousand years before our era. (20) Nor could they be from China for a similar reason. (21) The Sanskritic was the only semi-cultured race in the south of Asia that had no script. (22) The expedition or expeditions on leaving Indonesia took the median route into Polynesia, north of Ceram and New Guinea, through the New Hebrides and Fiji to Tonga and Samoa. (23) In order to explain the comparative purity of the race, we must assume that, when they rested on the way, the people at the resting-places were already largely Caucasianised. (24) The flat nose that appears amongst the Polynesians is part of their ideal of beauty, so that artificial means are taken in infancy to produce it; so, too, is the dark skin admiredhence the tattooing of the face. (25) This and the comparative infrequency of negroid features prove that Melanesianism came into Polynesia with the last-comers, who became the conquering aristocracy.page xvi | ||
| Chapter X | ||
| Polynesian Religious and Mythological Ideas | 113 | |
| Paragraph. (1) Fetichism, the deification of anything that comes to hand, is the first religious attitude, (2) as shown by the psychological history of the child. (3) The lesser features of nature that stir wonder raise the plane of worship a little higher. (4) Reverence and imagination are added to religion when the overwhelming processes of nature stir the emotions and thoughts. (5) The analogy of sleep and death induces ancestor-worship, and infuses personal warmth into the religious attitude. (6) Personification begins to fill out the pantheon, (7) and the personified element becomes difficult to distinguish from the deified hero. (8) The last stage is philosophy, appearing first in rationalised cosmology, and then in rationalism. (9) The co-existence of two or more of these argues racial intermixture. (10) The Polynesian religion mingles all the stages. (11) It often more closely resembles the Teutonic open-air and imageless worship than the rites I of the Vedic system. (12) The megalithic habit that i built the truncated pyramids of colossal stone in Eastern Polynesia and worshipped in the open air might well have come into the Pacific from the northern Aryan-speaking peoples; it is contradictory of both fetichism, the primitive stage,, and image-making, a later. (13) The huge carved figures of Polynesia are not images so much as memorials of ancestors; they are, therefore, a phase of ancestorworship. (14) The magic and witchcraft of Polynesia came from the culture of South Asia. (15) The Polynesian genealogies make little distinction between personified nature-phenomena and deified ancestors. (16) No national unity effaced ancestral deification and worship. (17) The maritime demigods and heroes of Polynesia remind the student of Greek, but still more of Scandinavian mythical voyagers. (18) It is to the cold north that much of the culture of Polynesia points, as also does that of the Aryan races. (19) In both cases the importance attached in mythology to the discovery of artificial fire, points also to the north. (20) The primitive matriarchate is manifest in the part the woman takes in Polynesian fire-making, and in the goddess rulers of the under-world. (21) The firebringing of Prometheus and Maui must go back to palaeolithic times; and Polynesia is the only region that retains the most ancient method, the fire-plough. (22) The fire-habits of Polynesia and the myths of Prometheus and Maui indicate a northern origin. (23) The story of Maui's noosing the sun in order to lengthen the day indicates page xviimigration from the north. (24) His entry into the womb of the Great Lady of Darkness goes with Greek and Teutonic descents into hell; (25) it is, like the others, a half-effaced sun-myth; and sun-myths belong properly to the north. | ||
| Chapter XI | ||
| Polynesian Theogony and Mythology | 127 | |
| Paragraph (1) Sun-worship appears at the root of many Polynesian cults, and points, as in India, to the north. (2) Rangi, the incarnation of the shining heaven, becomes important again in the colder climate of New Zealand. (3) Most of the main deities reveal in some or other group their origin as sun-gods, and some of them in their transformations exhibit singular coincidences with Teutonic deities. (4) Tangaroa in the western groups bears evidence of his having been a sun-god; but in the eastern he is dethroned, and as the representative of the fair-haired from the north, is a god of darkness, of evil and the under-world. (5) Both he and Maui evidently belong to a race that came from the north. (6) There are later fire-deities that rule the zones of heaven. (7) The worship of Ra, one of the oldest and least personified of sun-deities, survives obscurely in New Zealand. (8) He probably came in with the megalithic people, for the stone circle at Kerikeri was used in the ancient festival of Ra, the sun. (9) In the obscurer and more esoteric phases of Polynesian religion, which resemble the pre-Buddhistic thought of the Vedic system, there are traces of a tendency to monotheism. (10) Io is the oldest of the gods of the Maori aristocracy, and is addressed as supreme, and the hymns and incantations to him are not Biblical, but Vedistic; for they are chaotic and mystical. (11) There is a natural vein of mysticism and religious philosophy in the deeper Maori mind. (12) The cosmology deals in the personification of abstract ideas. (13) No likeness to the imaginative metaphysics and chaotic mysticism of Maori religious thought can be found so close as the Hindu sacred books. (14) The poetic formlessness of thought in both is drowned in dreary catalogues and genealogies. (15) Amongst the Polynesians this metaphysical tendency forms a violent contrast to the more primitive elements of their religion, and is by no means traceable to them as a development. (16) The mixture with aboriginal races in lower grades of culture can alone explain the anomaly. (17) Biblical knowledge vitiates the Polynesian myths of the deluge; (18) but has left untouched the myths of the under-world. page xviii(19) There is a general likeness in the ideas of the future life in most races; but the details differ, owing partly to environment, partly to racial tradition. (20) Migration and conquest both place their mark on them. (21) All these have modified the idea of the life beyond amongst the Polynesians, as amongst the Aryans, and the primeval Aryan story of the rebellion in heaven is in all important particulars the same as the Polynesian. (22) In both cases it points to the north and the long winter darkness. (23) There are varying versions of it in Polynesia, and yet its main features resemble those of the version Milton gives in his "Paradise Lost" from Aryan sources. (24) In both Aryan and Polynesian future life we have evidence of a conquest of aboriginals in the gods cast into the darkness of the under-world. (25) There are even in Polynesia some germs of an ethical element in the functions of the gods. (26) There is much vagueness and inconsistency in the Polynesian ideas of the future life; but on the whole they are unethical. (27) The Maori paradise of warriors is in heaven. (28) In Eastern Polynesia the paradise is epicurean, (29) and up in the region of the clouds. (30) The western Polynesians are not quite certain as to the locality of their paradise. (31) The uncertainty arises from the confusion between the birthlands of the race, the paradise of the aboriginals from the north and the place of soul-extinction of the immigrants from South Asia being both in Po or subterranean darkness. (32) The aboriginals had gods that were not the same as those of the Polynesian immigrants into New Zealand. (33) In the religious stratification some strata are South Asiatic and others North Aryan. | ||
| Chapter XII | ||
| Polynesian Arts and Industries—The Primitive and the Architectural | 147 | |
| Paragraph (1) The most striking contrast in Polynesia is in arts and industries; the most primitive have survived beside the most advanced. (2) The immigrants into it could not have used metals before they left the continent; they used stone weapons and implements. The consolidation of the Japanese empire must have stopped migration from the north, and the piracy of the Malays must have stopped it from the south. (3) The later immigrants were neolithic people; but they found a palaeolithic people already settled, using only chipped implements, flakes and round beach stones. Where the conquerors could not get greenstone or other hard stone to polish, they preferred page xixwood and bone for their weapons. (4) There was never any pottery in Polynesia except in Tonga, although the adjacent regions of Melanesia and Papuasia with a lower culture had it. (5) The pottery-like statuette of a Maori found in New Zealand is no proof that the Melanesians or any other pottery-making people lived there. The Fuegians and the Australians are the only other peoples that are so primitive as to have no pottery, (6) and the Polynesians are lower than even these in fire-making; they use the fire-plough, although they apply the drill to other purposes. (7) Over against this primitive culture stands the architecture of their houses and canoes, marked by fine art and great engineering skill. (8) It is the household arts that are in the palaeolithic stage; and this must be due to the women of the aboriginals filling the households of the conquerors. (9) Even in the building of the houses there is sign of the stratification of the people; there are here and there old examples in New Zealand of megalithic building, lake-dwellings and tree-dwellings. (10) Ancient pit-dwellings have also been found in two districts of New Zealand. (11) And these may have been dug and used by members of the same race as the Men of the Hollows, who came before the Ainos in Japan. (12) Such dwellings naturally belong to the cold regions of the north, as the lake-dwellings and tree-dwellings belong to the warmer zones. (13) The same striking contrast appears in their adherence to the primitive paddle, whilst building great ocean-going canoes. (14) The Morioris, even in their primitive raft-canoes, had got as far as using the paddle like an oar. But the oar could not easily be manipulated in the outrigger or double canoe that the conquerors of Polynesia brought with them or developed. (15) The large canoes, and in some groups all the canoes, were sacred, and not to be touched by women. Only in New Zealand was the large single dugout of the conquered adopted, probably because of the abandonment of far-voyaging and the predominance of inland navigation. (16) But primitive bulrush canoes or rafts were used up into the nineteenth century. (17) The canoes of the north of the North Island of New Zealand, the district of the fair-skinned Patupaiarehe, were painted black, and not red like the canoes of all other districts. (18) The primitive raft-canoes were navigated on the roughest oceans, and must have come in with bold palaeolithic sailors, who had to cross wide seas in them. (19) The Polynesians knew the stars, currents, and winds well, and even made rude maps. (20) Yet none of the knowledge was taught in the wharekura or sacred school of New Zealand. The management of canoes had become traditional and instinctive.page xx | ||
| Chapter XIII | ||
| The Polynesian Textile, Military, Agricultural, and Medical Arts | 161 | |
| Paragraph (1) Polynesian seacraft, even when not sacred, was out of the women's province, because it needed specialisation and long absence from home. (2) The textile art is, on the contrary, almost wholly a woman's art; it can alternate with other duties. But there was little weaving in Polynesia, for bark-cloth was easier to make. (3) The making of it was not sacred. The conquerors, if they came from an Aryan race, would bring textile and skin raiment. (4) The Polynesians came to New Zealand chiefly as makers and wearers of tapa; the men made it, but more and more seldom, till at last only chiefs wore it in their hair. They also brought the dogskin mat and cloak, and these were only for the chiefs. (5) Weaving they knew when they came, for the women had to learn it from priests with solemn rites. (6) The pre-Polynesians knew it also, as coming from the north temperate zone, the natural zone of textiles, and as knowing New Zealand flax; but the weaving-frame probably came in with the Polynesians. (7) Several other details of weaving came in with them, the making of mat-borders, the secret of the red dye, and perhaps the maceration of the flax. (8) Everything connected with fishing was sacred, and therefore aristocratic; only the men were allowed to make nets, ropes, hooks, and lines. (9) Yet the aboriginals were also a fishing race, and taught the new-comers the mesh of their nets, the barb for the hook, and the centre-piece for the eel-basket. (10) The implements and the methods of producing the textiles were extraordinarily primitive; no loom, not even a spindle or the germ of it. (11) The Maoris were more advanced than any others of the Polynesians in the arts of fortification and siege, being quite modern in their engineering. (12) Evidently the Polynesians on arriving in New Zealand had to struggle against a well-matched enemy expert in such arts and devices. (13) But the weapons all over Polynesia are exceedingly primitive, chiefly modifications of the braining instrument or club. (14) There were thrusting and piercing weapons, as amongst all primitive peoples; but they were very primitive. (15) The cutting weapons, like the adze, were seldom or never used in war. (16) But the poverty of projectile weapons is most striking; such bows as they had in Tahiti and Hawaii were not for use in war; only in later Tonga was there a war-bow in imitation of the Fijians. (17) The substitute for the bow was the much page xximore primitive throwing-stick, though retrieving projectiles, including a barbed hook and a casting-net, were occasionally used. (18) Agriculture was not very advanced, the chief implement being the stepped digger; the abhorrence of animal manure, and the abandonment of patch after patch, could not have come from the intensive methods of South Asia. (19) These point to the north-east of Asia, as does also the almost complete absence of the wheel in Polynesian locomotion, industry, and art, the only form of it being the hoop. The South Asiatic immigrants must have known the wheel; but they took their art mainly from the aboriginals. (20) Had there been no great aboriginal population from the north, there is certain to have been wheeled traffic, and the wheel in art from South Asia. (21) The use of stilts in myth and in dancing points back to some birthland that was marked by plains full of shifting sand. (22) The agriculture of Polynesia belonged to both conquered and conquerors, women and men, and must have come partly from North Asia and partly from South Asia. (23) The art of medicine, as a matter of incantations, was in the hands of the men. The absence of the great epidemics of the crowded shores of the East, and the decimating effect of epidemics when once introduced into Polynesia, show that the region was quarantined for thousands of years. (24) The physician was also priest, and could inflict diseases and deal death by incantations, as he could cure the former by them too. The system of tapu was based on this priestly power over the imagination of the race. (25) The art was taught solemnly in the wharekura, a sacred building which no woman but an aged priestess could approach. (26) The elaboration of the sorcery and the predominance of man in medicine points to South Asia as the source of the art. (27) In all the arts and industries, then, though there are traces of the matriarchate, there are clearly traces of conquest by an immigrant male aristocracy. | ||
| Chapter XIV | ||
| Polynesian Art—Carving and Tattooing | 178 | |
| Paragraph (1) Art appears in primitive life when the arts become masculine and are specialised. (2) The art of neolithic man is not so true to nature as that of palaeolithic, because it has passed out of the hands of the free depicter of the totem into those of the priest and his satellites, and from the natural into the conventional and symbolic stage. (3) Polynesian art had reached this latter stage. (4) Carving shows it at its highest; and develops southwards page xxiiin boldness and luxuriance, in New Zealand and Easter Island; for these, as the culs-de-sac of the Pacific, had layer on layer of immigrants and their culture, New Zealand as forested adopting wood as its medium, Easter Island as bare taking stone. (5) Mangaia in the Cook group comes nearest to New Zealand in the beauty of its carved work; but it confines itself to the conventional, symbolic, and ceremonial. (6) The Maori aimed at general effect, symmetry, and variety. (7) The distinctive element in New Zealand carving is the use of the curve and the spiral; this latter in the canoe-carving is not unlike the centre frond of a tree-fern (or pitau, as both are called); but it is unlike it in being more concentric and having a double spiral; it shows no relevancy to it, and it has missed its greatest beauty in omitting the tapering stem. (8) The spiral might have been suggested by tattooing, the earlier art as giving vent to the self-decorating passion; but the rondures of the cheeks, temples, upper thighs, and arms would encourage the concentric circle, which does not originate the spiral, but comes from it as a degeneration. (9) The spirals of the finger-points, sometimes used as signatures, might have given the tattooers their model; but they are too elongated and involved to have been the models of the wood-carver. (10) Other types of tattooing in Polynesia are the old moko kuri, or dot-and-dash, and the floral and faunal of the Marquesas and Easter Island. (11) But it seems impossible for the delicate face scrollwork of the Maori to have developed out of these. Probably the aboriginals from the north had it; for Mataora, the legendary inventor of it, learns it in Po, the under-world, the paradise of the immigrants from the north. (12) Yet it is a warrior's decoration, only the married amongst women having it, and then only in order to obscure the red of the lips, which was repulsive to the dusky Polynesians. (13) In adopting the new models of their old art from the conquered, the conquerors in New Zealand must have prohibited its use by them and surrounded it with the sacredness of the old. (14) One of the purposes of the art was sexual. Amongst the Maoris it laid out its treasures on the face, though the tattooing of other parts was evidence that they had come from warmer lands, where clothing was scantier; and amongst the Polynesians some of the body tattooings seem imitations of the body coverings of colder climates. (15) The face decoration was the essential and the artistic in New Zealand, because of the preservation of the heads and the wearing of garments. (16) Though the art was surrounded with tapu, the artists might be slaves outside the pale sacrednessa proof that it came from the aboriginals. The result was greater variety and beauty than in house and canoe carving, page xxiiithere being no families to monopolise it. (17) It was the heraldic blazon of the deeds of a warrior or of his family or tribe, (18) and the primary purpose was to add to the terrifying effect of grimaces in war. But red was the favourite colour of warriors; the black or dark blue of the tattooing must therefore have come with the new art from the aboriginals. | ||
| Chapter XV | ||
| Polynesian Art—Carving and Design | 191 | |
| Paragraph (1) The scrollwork of the house and canoe carving could not have had the same origin as that of tattooing; for in the one the human figure predominates, in the other there is no trace of it. (2) The most appropriate origin and model of the canoe scroll designs would be the forms that ropes take; they are all rope patterns, and a people seldom indicates by its metaphors the primitive origin of its customs and forms. (3) There are generally five sculptured figures in the war canoe, two definitely human figures inside as guardians, the figurehead a bird-like human form, Maui, a flattened human form under the spirals, and a taniwha (half walrus half snake) under that; the two midribs of the stern suggest the tusks of some sea animal in the process of being mastered. (4) Had these not come from the conquered aboriginals they would have each had some legend of its origin taught in the wharekura, and canoe carving differed from canoe building in having no human blood spilt at its beginning or completion. Special families on the east coast of the North Island, probably families adopted with the art from the aboriginals, monopolised it. (5) There is the same intertwisted coilwork in the carving of the barge-board and lintels of houses; but the human figure is the basis of it. (6) This figure, whether inside or outside of the house, is generally made monstrous, often with tongue thrust out of a huge double-bayed mouth; like the demons and gargoyles in mediaeval buildings, it was evidently meant to scare off evil spirits. (7) A confusion between the different racial beliefs as to the life beyond death produced fear even of ancestors in the native mind; their spirits had to be scared away as well as propitiated; the unborn were especially feared, and the heitiki or image of the embryo was worn, probably as an amulet against them, (8) The figures on carved boxes are human and true to nature; those in house carving are composite, either taniwhas or distortions of the human, many of them bird-headed. (9) The three fingers of the hand in human page xxivfigures, always widely separated from each other, and generally with the end of a spur appearing on the other side of whatever is held by it, are probably meant to be a claw, so as to indicate the birdlike but supernatural power of the ancestral spirit to pass through the air of heaven. (10) The New Zealand carving in stone is very elementary. (11) But there have been old specimens found that seem to indicate an early racial but feeble and vanishing element that was expert in it. So the Maori myths of the making of man out of red clay seem to point to a feeble and vanished racial element that could make human figures of clay. (12) The designing on the baskets and mats is angular and poor, having none of the scrollwork of the carving; that on mat-borders evidently came from Polynesia into New Zealand; for the men produced it. Probably the lack of pottery accounts for the stiffness of the designs. (13) Rafter, cornice, and rock paintings. As in all early art there is no attempt at landscape, in spite of the striking scenery and the artistic talent. The extraordinary development of the conventionalised art of design in New Zealand, compared with the extreme primitiveness of much in Polynesian life, seems to demand some racial explanation; it is not Mongoloid, and cannot have come from the Japanese, but may have been from emigrants of an artistic race that the Japanese absorbed. | ||
| Chapter XVI | ||
| Polynesian Art—Dance, Games, and Music | 202 | |
| Paragraph (1) The culture of New Zealand is not so deeply contrasted with its mobile arts, dance and music, as with its arts of carving and design; for the progress in them from cross-breeding is more individual. (2) Yet dancing and music depend more on mass-combination in early times, music being a mere rhythmic sound to mark the harmonious movements of the limbs of regimented crowds. (3) In its origin dancing is pantomimic and religious. (4) In Polynesia it had so far conventionalised as to lose some of its pantomimic elements, and so far secularised as to be an amusement for spectators and to admit women into its performance. Yet its predominant posturing and use of the upper part of the body show the traces of the primitive mould. (5) The dances that continued to be monopolised by the men retained the early religious significance. (6) The war-dance in New Zealand retained to the last the pantomimic and religious elements that moulded it: it was sacred and monopolised by the men. (7) Most Polynesian dances show in their almost stationary character and the predominance of the body as contrasted with the legs page xxvtraces of their origin in the fight; the Malagasies and the Easter Islanders seem to reveal a reminiscence of four-footed domestic animals in the backward kick. (8) But the introduction of women and lascivious pantomime must have begun before the Maoris left Polynesia; certain muscular movements of the women are the acquisition of centuries; but this degeneration was checked in New Zealand by the persistence of war conditions. (9) The poi dance, the rhythmic swing of light balls by girls, is probably the relic of a religious rite, as so many children's games are. These latter, in a majority of cases the same as those common to Japanese and European children, bear amongst the Maoris traces of their original religious purpose. (10) Some of them, according to Maori myth, were learned in the under-world, and thus point, like so many phases of their culture, to the long-nighted winter of the north. Even the giant's stride and stilts indicate their original religious use. (11) That goddesses, according to the Maoris, originated these games indicates a history as far back as the matriarchate. (12) Knucklebone as played by Maori and Scotch children points back to palaeolithic times, and the toboggan of Maori and Hawaiian boys points to the snowy north. (13) Children are even more conservative of the relics of the past than women, and the community of Maori and European games has real historical significance. (14) The men were as conservative in New Zealand in their war-dance, and out of it evolved another masculine and pantomimic art, that of oratory. (15) The strenuous character of Maori life prevented the development of the pantomimic element into a drama; this development took place with much licentiousness amongst the luxurious eastern Polynesians. (16) The evolution of dancing was much obstructed by the short range of their music and its elementary character. (17) The drum or gong, the most primitive of musical instruments, was the commonest. (18) They had several other percussive instruments of not much more advanced type; but they preferred to make their own limbs and bodies the instruments of their percussive sounds. (19) Their wind instruments were as limited, the flutes having at most but five notes, one hand being occupied in the nose-flute in stopping one nostril. (20) This peculiar instrument came through Indonesia, but with an earlier immigration; for it was used for amatory, and not for religious purposes. (21) The trumpet was still more limited in its capacity, and was purely ceremonial. (22) A stringed instrument was used only in Nukuhiva and Hawaii, a great contrast to Malaysia and Asia taken as a whole. (23) The rarity of the bow in Polynesia and its wide use in Asia account for the contrast. (24) The page xxvilimitations of both arts by each other and by their instruments are distinctly primeval. | ||
| Chapter XVII | ||
| Polynesian Art—The Literary | 217 | |
| Paragraph (1) It is difficult to think of literature without books; (2) but literature existed long before script, and belonged even to savage tribes. (3) It becomes true literature when, helped by music, dancing, and religion, it develops a special style and diction. (4) Prose, first throwing off these aids, deals freely with the legends. (5) Polynesian prose legends take contradictory forms therefore. (6) Thus the functions and honours of gods of the same name have often little or no relationship in the various islands, (7) for the tales of the gods and demigods were told around the fire or lamp for entertainment, and the art of legend-making about the gods was thus secularised. (8) This argues various racial elements in the audience, if not in the narrators and makers of the legends. (9) The later stories of the demigods and heroes are the product of imagination untrammelled by religious tradition; they are fairy tales. (10) They show as they get nearer to modern times an improved and often refined ethical atmosphere. (11) The incantations, belonging as they did to the lastcomers and aristocrats, retain the marks of their birthtime. (12) Chanting of them with responses has been an ancient habit of the Maoris, and has been revived in full force in the Hauhau religion. (13) They have all a recurrent phrase or sentence that in its simplicity contrasts with the frequent obscurity of the rest of the chants. (14) Women have nothing to do with either the making or the use of these, and where their influence enters the poetry is secularised. (15) Their share in the poetry, both as themes and makers, grows as we approach modern times, and a striking feature of their laments and love-songs is the predominance of lawful and married love. (16) The men's songs are as full of beautiful emotions, and are largely dirges or laments or songs of farewell. (17) The most pathetic are those that are inspired by the love of children. (18) And the love of nature, wild as well as peaceful, runs through their poetry, as it runs through the modern poetry of the West. (19) Always married to music and generally to dancing, it had no need of the external moulds of syllabic or accentual rhythm that Western poetry has considered as its first essential. (20) Prose, being early emancipated from religion, contains many of the traditions and feelings of the conquered; poetry, as always aristocratic, excludes them.page xxvii | ||
| Chapter XVIII | ||
| The Antiquity of Man in Polynesia, as seen in his Traditions and Relics | 230 | |
| Paragraph. (1) Maori tradition recognised aboriginals and arrivals from Polynesia before the arrival of the six canoes in the fourteenth century. (2) The Malayo-Polynesian fallacy seemed to fix the peopling of Polynesia in the thirteenth century, the time of the expansion of the Malayan power. (3) Yet observers had noticed from the first European-like features and forms in the island region that were quite unlike the Malay; occasional negroid traces led to a theory that there had been a negroid substratum. (4) The genealogies take the peopling of the region back to near the beginning of our era; (5) but some genealogies overdo their task, and induce doubt of their evidence. (6) The extraordinary development of the military art, and especially the arts of fortification and siege, imply a large and formidable enemy when the six canoes landed. (7) The few hundreds that came in them could not have increased so rapidly in a dozen or two generations. (8) The land-hunger they brought with them from the Polynesian islets remained as strong in this extensive land, and premises a large population to fight with for its possession. (9) With only their own small numbers to operate upon, it is inconceivable that slavery could have grown to such proportions or come to be so feared by the Maoris. (10) North Island legend names a considerable number of aboriginal tribes haunting the mountains and forests as fairies and supernatural beings; and even yet the Maoris fear "wild men" in the interior. (11) South Island story tells of the Ngaitahu, the Ngatimamoe, and the Waitaha being exterminated, the Waitaha in the sixteenth century; (12) of these last arriving in canoes in the eighth century and "covering the land like ants." (13) Contrary to legend, they took long to subdue and absorb Te Rapuwai, who preceded them, as their great stone-fortified pas show, and their stories of cave-robbers to be encountered. (14) Te Rapuwai themselves, arriving from the islands, drove Te Rahui Tipua into caves. (15) The Maui legend makes that hero give the land to the Kui, whom the Tutumalo annihilated or absorbed, to be treated likewise by the Turehu or fairies, a fair-haired people. Such a history must take us back thousands of generations. (16) Shell-mounds tell the same tale, huge specimens being found not only on the shore but far inland, and revealing in their strata various types of implements and page xxviiitreatment of game. (17) There is in them evidence of an edible dog, but, unlike the dog the Polynesians introduced, undomesticated. (18) All the strata show traces of the hunting of the moa, but none of cannibalism, and, according to tradition, it was during the period of Te Rapuwai, or before the eighth century, that the moa became extinct, and the forests of Otago and Canterbury were burnt, two events not unconnected. (19) But the different strata indicate that the game had been getting scarcer through the centuries or millenniums, and the Waitaha had evidently to dwell inland in pas. (20) The discovery of a Maori oven fourteen feet below the surface is surer evidence of great antiquity of human occupation. (21) So is the discovery of neolithic implements fourteen feet below the soil of an ancient forest. (22) New Zealand is the only part of Polynesia that has supplied us with such relics of a far past, because it alone has had its surface disturbed for railroading and mining purposes. | ||
| Chapter XIX | ||
| The Antiquity of Man in Polynesia, as seen in his Culture | 244 | |
| Paragraph (1) A far greater antiquity is indicated in the culture than in the legends or the relics of human occupancy. (2) But there is also a very advanced culture, implying a comparatively late migration from South Asia, but not later than the beginning of the Iron Age in Indonesia, about the commencement of our era. (3) The northern route from the Japanese Archipelago closed long before; for no copper came into Polynesia, nor did any of the epidemics of congested population. (4) The use of palaeolithic implements alone is no proof of great antiquity; for they have been used alongside of neolithic in Polynesia till recent times. (6) The practical absence of pottery goes back to palaeolithic times. (7) This and the practical absence of the bow in war prove that there was no Melanesian or Papuasian substratum; the negroid features came in with the aristocracy or last conquerors. (8) From no region bordering on the east or the west of the Pacific could a potteryless people have come since palaeolithic times. (9) The only age in which the immigrants brought their wives into Polynesia must have been the palaeolithic; for pottery is amongst primitive peoples a household art. (10) The textile art, as far as it was a household art, remained palaeolithic; for Polynesia never had a spindle for twisting the threads. (11) The fire-plough is also palaeolithic and household; but in the process the woman has the attitude of master; it must page xxixhave come in when the matriarchate prevailed. (12) The later male immigrant expeditions substituted the patriarchate, but left the symbol of the matriarchate in the art of making fire; Polynesia is a realm of father-right. (13) Much of the food of New Zealand belongs to the omnivorous stage of palaeolithic man; the absence of cereals and domestic animals proves that the mass of the population entered in palaeolithic times. (14) The domestic fowl and the pig came in with a later migration, and went right through from Indonesia to Eastern Polynesia; the dog came earlier, for it appears all over western Polynesia; the women were not allowed to eat the flesh of these. (15) The palaeolithic households, with their elementary navigation and their natural fear of the ocean, must have had a less incontinuous land-bridge than exists now; this could not have been the rising or volcanic belt from Indonesia; it must have been the subsiding belt from the Japanese Archipelago. (16) There could have been no continuous land into the Pacific, else the continental animals would have come with man. (17) Wider breaches in the land-bridge must have isolated Polynesia with its palaeolithic people for tens of thousands of years. (18) Neolithic man, when he mastered the art of the single oceanic canoe, ventured gradually along the same northern route. (19) One of his migrations was megalithic, and one an artistic race, all probably Caucasian; the advanced food-culture came later from South Asia; the implements and methods remained palaeolithic and early neolithic. (20) The household arts continued palaeolithic, whilst the arts and the industries of the men advanced. The later expeditions therefore could not have brought their women with them. (21) But New Zealand was too far distant even in palaeolithic times to have been reached before the neolithic invention of ocean-going canoes. | ||
| Chapter XX | ||
| Recapitulation and Conclusion | 256 | |
| Paragraph (1) The primary problems of Polynesia are three; the first is, whence came the fair, European-like people. (2) Crozet was nearer to the truth in thinking these were aboriginal; the negroid features, as an element in the Polynesian ideal of beauty, must have come in with the last conquerors. (3) The second problem is the origin of the many megalithic monuments; their derivation from the American coast is barred by the absence of the characteristic American foods and narcotics. (4) The third problem is the origin of the extraordinary resemblance page xxxbetween British Columbian culture and Polynesian. (5) The three taken together are mutually solvent: Caucasians had reached the Pacific coast of Asia and British Columbia long before the Mongoloids were driven out of the central plateau and drawn across Behring Straits. (6) Megalithic monuments mark their path right from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, and across that ocean by Micronesia and Polynesia into Central and South America. Only in New Zealand and British Columbia did the huge timbers of the forests substitute wood for stone. (7) They also left waymarks all the way in the long head and wavy hair and often fair complexion. (8) No Mongoloid immigration obscured the Caucasian in Polynesia, the only non-Caucasian features being negroid, brought in by the last immigrants and conquerors. (9) The Malayo-Polynesian fallacy based on language made such a solution seem impossible. (10) The foundations of the Polynesian dialects are not the Mongoloid tongues, but the Aryan, coming through Indonesia, and encountering a highly primitive phonology in Polynesia. (11) The problem of problems is, however, the origin of the strangely varied web of culture in the region, a singularly advanced barbaric woof crossing a palaeolithic warp. (12) The solution lies in the distinction between the household culture and that of the men; it is the former that is palaeolithicwhich means that the only women that came in with immigrant expeditions came in palaeolithic times. (13) This implies that with the elementary navigation of palaeolithic peoples there must have been some island-bridge not nearly so incontinuous as at present from the coast of Asia into Polynesia; this must have been the subsiding belt that runs from Japan south-east to Easter Island. (14) It could not have been continuous enough to allow of animals or plants migrating as well as man; and the whip that goaded man on to the sea was doubtless the glacial. (15) After that immigration all communication with the continent must have been cut off for tens of thousands of years. (16) Once man began to venture into this isolated region again, he had entered the neolithic period, and learned the art of digging out huge single canoes; with his neolithic weapons, and unhampered by the necessity of protecting his household and women, he always came as conqueror, and settling down as aristocrat left the palaeolithic women of his new household to follow their own ways. (17) The process went on for thousands of years, till he had to seek realms to conquer farther afield away to the south. New Zealand and Easter Island would be the last to be populated. (18) In all the spheres of Polynesian life there are evidences of this long infiltration of men from Asia in the variant and often contradictory page xxxiphases of the culture. (19) Much of this it would be difficult to disentangle and assign to the north and the south of Asia, especially in the language and mythology, though the legends of the spirit-world and the culture-heroes point to the north, whilst the cosmogony points to the south. (20) In the arts it is easier; for what belongs to the household and to women is ancient, and came from the north; what belongs exclusively to men is neolithic; but part of the latter is from the north, part from the south, of Asia; the huge single dugout canoe, the arts of carving and designing, the art of fortification, much of the house-building and the agriculture, and the aute or paper-mulberry tree came from the north; edible bulb-culture, the edible domestic animals, and the final healing art came from the south. (21) So did negroid features and cannibalism come in with the South Asiatic conquerors, but the former only sporadically and the latter as an intermittent habit. The pig and the domestic fowl missed some of the groups. (22) All the immigrants from the north came in by the sixth century before our era; all those from the south came in by the beginning of our era. (23) Nor did any of them come from a Semitic race, or any race that had a script several thousand years ago. (24) The methods employed in the book have been those of scientific research. | ||