Fact checking those racist myths taught around New Zealand dinner tables.
Barry Fell’s claim that Māui—the legendary Polynesian cultural hero—was Egyptian is widely regarded as pseudoarchaeology and is not taken seriously by professional linguists, historians, or Indigenous scholars. Here is a…
The mainstream view of the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand and the Chatham Islands as representing the end-point of a long chain of island-hopping voyages in the South Pacific. Since the early 1900s…
The Moriori are the first settlers of the Chatham Islands Rēkohu in Moriori; Wharekauri in Māori). [3] Moriori are Polynesians who came from the New Zealand mainland around 1500 AD, [4][5] which was close to the time of the shift from the archaic to the…
Richard Walter, Hallie Buckley, Chris Jacomb & Elizabeth Matisoo-Smith This paper reintroduces the concept of mass migration into debates concerning the timing and nature of New Zealand’s settlement by Polynesians. Upward revisions of New…
Great-grandfather Allan Witana has a quiet giggle when people ask where he’s from. The 71-year-old speaks fluent te reo and identifies Maori as his native tongue. The 71-year-old speaks fluent…
The media love to manufacture a mystery, and the Kaimanawa Wall is a great example of this. Watch closely, as a perfectly natural rock formation becomes a megalithic structure... In…
A group of fringe “archaeologists” and self-proclaimed historians have been hijacking New Zealand’s media with tales of a pre-Māori European race. VICE has found at least one of them has…
Skeletons in the Cupboard, a documentary that includes the claim seven foot tall, red-headed Celts built complex astrological stone monuments before Māori arrived in Aotearoa, has been removed from TVNZ OnDemand,…
In 1996, the alternative historian Barry Brailsford drew the world’s attention to the Kaimanawa wall in New Zealand. The curious structure lies in the Kaimanawa State Forest, south of Lake…
Over the past 30 years a growing minority of New Zealanders has decided that the first inhabitants of their country had white rather than brown skin. They believe that one…
The Song of Waitaha begins with a dedication and ends with a "patriarchal blessing" from Pani Manawatu, past Upoko Runanga of the Ngai Tuahuriri hapu. A good start. One would…
Keywords: Chinese cartography; fake maps; 1421; Gavin Menzies; Liu Gang; dual hemisphere maps SummaryA Chinese world map purportedly drawn in 1763, and allegedly based on an earlier version of 1418,…
