Sidestep: Why burial boxes...?
Archaic burial boxes of this country seem to come in some odd shapes.Of course the more recent ones are classic Maori design such as below....the first being a copy of early styles and of the 1700's and the second being from the 18th Century
In these examples Maori have some produced intricate and beautifully carved burial boxes where exhumed and scraped bones of dead relatives were stored.
Once again we wish to ask questions to make a few think beyond the fact that Maori had burial boxes. Firstly did they have them in Raiatea and other islands in Polynesia where they came from in 1280 onwards. The answer is no.
That should raise an immediate question being why would Maori suddenly adopt a form of bone storage they had never seen before in Polynesia? Maybe the answer is because they saw them already in existence when they arrived here to find the second wave of immigrants already using them. By that we mean the Melanesian's.
The most common places for burial boxes were North of Auckland including the Hokianga. One was also found on the sandhills near Raglan. Of course Raglan is the location of a very ancient tribe of pre-Polynesian inhabitants – the ones who carved the rocks on the foreshore but the ancient ones we speak of did not use burial boxes - but the Melanesian's did.
We can’t find examples of Polynesians doing so, but the Melanesian's definitely did. We also know that those from Melanesian got here before the Polynesians. Even facial traits of Melanesian are readily seen in old photographs from the 1800’s. They are regarded as ‘Maori’ being the collective group of tribes existing when Europeans arrived – Maori being the term used for differentiation from the white skins.
We suggest that maybe Maori saw the burial boxes and adopted the custom eventually, but with the new carving styles they developed from observing designs already here and not in Hawaiiki…such as spirals in the first examples at the top of this post. The first example copied the very archaic designs that are not Polynesian Maori in design because no such designs existed in the islands they were meant to come from. Below are some photos of unusual styles.
Whangaroa is in Northland and is just across from Kaiatia, where the most unusual form of carving have been discovered. Co-incidence? No, these are from the same people...and not Polynesian Maori. These are from those here first or the Melanesian immigration. The above burial boxes bear no similarity to any Maori design, but do follow the styles of archaic artifacts of a race here when Polynesian arrived..fat lips and teeth as well as limb form. These can also be seen on the Orongotea carving, and even the Awaroa slabd (featured on 5th February) along with other examples.
