Ruins may show Incas beat Maoris to New Zealand?
An article in The Daily Telegraph dated June 11 1998, of a story filed by Paul Chapman in Wellington tells of an ancient earthwork that has been discovered in a remote forest in New Zealand. It challenges the long-held belief that the Maoris, who were previously credited with arriving in canoes from Polynesia, were the first people to discover and inhabit those islands.
“An amateur researcher, Noel Hilliam, said yesterday he had discovered the site at Kaipara, in the far north of the country, and was certain it was not of Maori origin. The earthwork could have been built by a South American civilisation that arrived 1,000 years before the Maoris arrived, he said.”
Mr Hilliam, aged 60, who lives near the site, at Dargaville, and has spent the last 40 years studying hundreds of Maori sites, told Chapman he is convinced that this site is completely different.
“He said the site was only a few hundred yards from where the remains of a mysterious ancient statue were found in 1991. The 10ft statue of a woman is carved in native Kauri timber but bears none of the distinctive signs of Maori artwork.”
Mr Hilliam is the curator of Dargaville museum, to where the statue was taken, though he says he could not interest any professional researchers to investigate it further. This is a great pity, as amateur researchers play a valuable part in other disciplines such as astronomy. But as archæologists are notorious for hanging on to their ”paradigms” until they are totally impossible to defend, we shouldn”t be surprised at this ignoring of yet another oopart (out of place artifacts). Maybe someone”s Phd on the Maoris was felt to be under threat? Who knows?
He told the Daily Telegraph that he had now arranged for an anthropologist to examine the earthwork, which consists of a series of ”overgrown circular banks”, and covers around 1 square mile. He also said that local Maori oral tradition told of a race that lived in the area for more than 1,000 years before the Maori arrival, and that these earlier settlers survive today as the Waitaha people. “A recent blood test on a Waitaha woman had revealed a factor otherwise only seen in Peru, Mr Hilliam said. Most of the 1,400 Waitahas live in the South Island, to which their own legend says they fled from the more war-like Maoris.” The writer also interviewed an Waitaha descendent, Patrick Runka, who told him that his people were really excited about the discovery, but: “We”re not waiting for proof because we”ve always knownit was there.”
This is yet another example of scientists not listening to oral traditions, or to amateur archæologists, and once again it is left up to the media to highlight discoveries that challenge the views of prehistory we continue to be taught in schools and colleges.
The newspaper also interviewed another researcher, Sir Gary Cook, who has spent the past three years photographing and recording stone structures that he says are also pre-Maori. He told Chapman that the Waipoua Forest, also in the Northland, conceals a “treasure trove” of such artifacts, and pointed out that:
“The disclosures come just a few weeks after a Christchurch scientist, Richard Holdaway, confirmed that radio-carbon datings on rat bones he had discovered in the South Island proved they were about 2,000 years old.”
“Dr Holdaway, a fossil researcher, said that because New Zealand had no indigenous mammals, the rats could only have arrived with humans on sea-going craft.”
Article reproduced with kind permission of John Michael at the Morien Institute http://www.morien-institute.org
