This is an auction for THE MOA-HUNTER PERIOD OF MAORI CULTURE by Roger Duff.

From the dust jacket:

“Of all the Polynesian voyagings, none is more impressive than the settlement of New Zealand, not once, but several times by canoes which followed the flight of the albatross into the cold seas of the south-west. The epic of the last migration of AD 1350 is well remembered in the proud memories of the canoes of the Heke and immortalized in Te Rangihiroa’s THE COMING OF THE MAORI. Concerning the numerous tribes the 1350 fleet found scattered from North Cape to the Bluff, Maori tradition of our day maintained such a conspiracy of silence that they were widely alleged to by dark-skinned Melanesian stock, inferior in every way to the Fleet Polynesians. In 1939 a chance discovery by a thirteen-year-old boy revealed in the gravels of the Wairau Boulder Bank the grave of a chief who lived before this last fleet – to lift the curtain on the appearance and culture of these first New Zealanders. The grave goods and bones of this ancient chief, prone in his gravel grave, with skull directed towards the setting sun, spoke with more authority regarding his race than the distorted memories of Maori tradition. This book shows him to be of the same Polynesian stock as the Maori, sailing before him down the long sea road from Tahiti to exterminate the Moa and earn the title Moa-hunter Maori. Although scholarly and technical, Roger Duff’s book sustains throughout the drama of this archaeological discovery, and recreates from the evidence of bone and stone the life of our first Polynesians in the Moa-hunter period of the Maori culture.”

Hardback 1977.

436 pages + photographs & diagrams.

Very good condition.

The cost of shipping is $6.95 (tracked mail). If you are on rural delivery and want tracked mail, the shipping cost will be $9.95.

There is of course no charge for shipping if you collect this book from my shop in Palmerston North following the auction.

Payment within seven days, please.