Book: The Decorative Arts of the NZ Maori

Barrow, T. The Decorative Arts of the New Zealand Maori. Charles E Tuttle Company Inc, 1973

• “The ancestors of the Maori were seafaring Polynesians who sailed their canoes to New Zealand” 7

• “The first settlers of New Zealand came from the Society and Cook Islands between AD 750 – 950” 8

• “Classic Maori Culture which flourished in such splendid isolation until the advent of Western culture with Captain James Cook in 1969” 8

• I disagree, when reading other sources there were wars among different tribes – it was not entirely peaceful before the Europeans arrived. Wait… its talking purely about culture.

• “In the decades after Cook, iron tools firearms, imported cloth and a new religion transformed traditional Maori culture.”

• “Maori art is the result of the adaption of a tropical island culture to an environment rich in resources of wood, stone, and bone” 8

• “The arrival of Europeans transformed Maori society. For example, firearms turned the old seasonal game of war into mass slaughter. The acceptance of Christian ideas disposed the old gods and ancestral spirits.” 9

A list of the artworks:

• Tribal Aristocrats (who were ornamented)

• Dyed Cloak Borders

• Taniko – weaving (some were patterned) (look for pattern ideas)

• (Check the patterns to the patterns of beading from SA)

• Feather cloaks

• Treasure boxes

• Ceremonial Adze

• Greenstone pendants

• Musical instruments

• The long club

• Greenstone short clubs

• Whalebone clubs

• War canoe

• Preservation of human heads

• Tattoo patterns (moko)

• Ancestral sculpture and the spiral (woodcarving)

• Ridge-support images

• House panel images

• Gable figures

• The meetinghouse and its arts

• The carved image and house structure

• Lattice panels

• Painted rafter patterns (use for pattern ideas)

• Bone chests

• Monuments

• The lizard - -appears in carving, tapu mark as a protective guardian but also as death (research further…) (link to beaded lizards)

• Godsticks

• Crop gods (little statues)

• Kites

• The storehouse

• Fishing tackle

• Engraved Gourds

• Plaiting of baskets and mats (look for patterns)

• The marionette (similar thing in South African art)

• Museums and Maori collections

• Rock painting and stone engraving (same as SA)

• “Before the Europeans, the Maori did not have any form of written language or a precise means of recording dates. Knowledge of the past was transmitted from generation to generation by means of an oral tradition of songs, stories, and chants rich in imagination but lacking in facts.” 98