| Moncks Cave | |
|---|---|
 Moncks Cave in 2012. | |
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| Coordinates | 43°33′52″S172°44′21″E / 43.5644006°S 172.7392656°E Coordinates: 43°33′52″S172°44′21″E / 43.5644006°S 172.7392656°E |
| Discovery | 1889 |
Moncks Cave is a cave located in Redcliffs, Christchurch. It is notable for the amount of wooden artefacts discovered there in 1889 by workmen while quarrying for road metal. [1] [2]
The cave was discovered in 1889 by workmen who were quarrying for road metal, as had been done for several years prior. [3] The workmen cleared and dug through the base of the hill, which led to the discovery of the entrance to the cave. Large amounts of cockle shells were discovered when the cave was opened. The cave was most likely closed by a landslide that occurred before European settlement. The cave showed evidence of previous fires by the amount of charcoal found on the roof. [3]
One artefact found in the cave is a wooden ama, which is also known as an outrigger canoe. It was found in 1889, in the same year as the cave's discovery. Other artefacts discovered include a carved paddle, a canoe bailer, a wooden carving of a dog, fragments of a fishing net, a number of greenstone axe, an amount of black hair and bones of fish and moa, which were found in another cave inside the main one. [3] [4] [5] These artefacts have helped researchers learn about Māori culture. Due to the many artefacts found in the cave, it is considered to be one of the greatest archeological finds in New Zealand. [2]
Aoraki / Mount Cook is the highest mountain in New Zealand. Its height, as of 2014, is listed as 3,724 metres. It sits in the Southern Alps, the mountain range that runs the length of the South Island. A popular tourist destination, it is also a favourite challenge for mountain climbers. Aoraki / Mount Cook consists of three summits: from south to north, the Low Peak, the Middle Peak and the High Peak. The summits lie slightly south and east of the main divide of the Southern Alps, with the Tasman Glacier to the east and the Hooker Glacier to the southwest.
The swamp harrier, also known as the Australasian marsh harrier, Australasian harrier or swamp-hawk, is a large, slim bird of prey widely distributed across Australasia. In New Zealand it is also known as the harrier hawk, hawk, or by the Māori name kāhu. Its arrival in New Zealand happened within the last 700 years, replacing its sister species, the larger extinct New Zealand endemic Eyles's harrier.
Milford Sound / Piopiotahi is a fiord in the south west of New Zealand's South Island within Fiordland National Park, Piopiotahi Marine Reserve, and the Te Wahipounamu World Heritage site. It has been judged the world's top travel destination in an international survey and is acclaimed as New Zealand's most famous tourist destination. Rudyard Kipling had previously called it the eighth Wonder of the World. The fiord is most commonly accessed via road by tour coach, with the road terminating at a small village also called Milford Sound.
The New Zealand swan is an extinct indigenous swan from the Chatham Islands and the South Island of New Zealand. Discovered as archaeological remains in 1889, it was originally considered a separate species from the Australian black swan because of its slightly larger bones, and swans not having been introduced to New Zealand until 1864. From 1998 until 2017, it was considered to be simply a New Zealand population of Cygnus atratus, until DNA recovered from fossil bones determined that it was indeed a separate species, much larger and heavier than its Australian relative.
A dugout canoe or simply dugout is a boat made from a hollowed out tree. Other names for this type of boat are logboat and monoxylon. Monoxylon (μονόξυλον) is Greek – mono- (single) + ξύλον xylon (tree) – and is mostly used in classic Greek texts. In German, they are called Einbaum. Some, but not all, pirogues are also constructed in this manner.
Outrigger boats are various watercraft featuring one or more lateral support floats known as outriggers, which are fastened to one or both sides of the main hull. They can range from small dugout canoes to large plank-built vessels. Outrigger boats can also vary in their configuration, from the ancestral double-hull configuration (catamarans), to single-outrigger vessels prevalent in the Pacific Islands and Madagascar, to the double-outrigger vessels (trimarans) prevalent in Island Southeast Asia. They are traditionally fitted with Austronesian sails, like the crab claw sails and tanja sails, but in modern times are often fitted with petrol engines.
Waka are Māori watercraft, usually canoes ranging in size from small, unornamented canoes used for fishing and river travel to large, decorated war canoes up to 40 metres (130 ft) long.
Kupe was a legendary Polynesian explorer, navigator and great rangatira of Hawaiki, who is said to have been the first human to discover New Zealand. Whether Kupe existed historically is likely but difficult to confirm. He is generally held to have been born to a father from Rarotonga and a mother from Raiatea, and probably spoke a proto-Māori language similar to Cook Islands Māori or Tahitian. His voyage to New Zealand would ensure that the land would be known to the Polynesians, and he would therefore be responsible for the genesis of Māori civilisation.
Various Māori traditions recount how their ancestors set out from their homeland in waka hourua, large twin-hulled ocean-going canoes (waka). Some of these traditions name a mythical homeland called Hawaiki.
New Zealand is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island and the South Island —and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island country by area, covering 268,021 square kilometres (103,500 sq mi). New Zealand is about 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and 1,000 kilometres (600 mi) south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The country's varied topography and sharp mountain peaks, including the Southern Alps, owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland.
The Austronesian peoples, sometimes referred to as Austronesian-speaking peoples, are a large group of peoples in Taiwan, Maritime Southeast Asia, Micronesia, coastal New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Madagascar that speak Austronesian languages. They also include indigenous ethnic minorities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Hainan, the Comoros, and the Torres Strait Islands. The nations and territories predominantly populated by Austronesian-speaking peoples are sometimes known collectively as Austronesia.
Vaʻa is a word in Samoan, Hawaiian and Tahitian which means 'boat', 'canoe' or 'ship'. A larger traditional seagoing vessel for long-distance voyages is referred to as vaʻa tele. The term alia is also used for larger vessels in Samoa. The smaller vaʻa used for fishing typically have a float, or outrigger, attached to the main hull for stability. This outrigger part of the canoe is called ama in various Polynesian languages.
The Wairau Bar, or Te Pokohiwi, is a 19-hectare (47-acre) gravel bar formed where the Wairau River meets the sea in Cloudy Bay, Marlborough, north-eastern South Island, New Zealand. It is an important archaeological site, settled by explorers from East Polynesia who arrived in New Zealand about 1280. It is the earliest known human settlement in New Zealand. At the time of the occupation it is believed to have been a low scrub-covered island 2 to 3 metres high, 1.1 kilometres (0.68 mi) long and 0.4 kilometres (0.25 mi) wide.
Māori are the indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand. Māori originated with settlers from East Polynesia, who arrived in New Zealand in several waves of canoe voyages between roughly 1320 and 1350. Over several centuries in isolation, these settlers developed their own distinctive culture, whose language, mythology, crafts, and performing arts evolved independently from those of other eastern Polynesian cultures. Some early Māori moved to the Chatham Islands, where their descendants became New Zealand's other indigenous Polynesian ethnic group, the Moriori. A June 2022 estimate gives the Māori ethnic population of New Zealand as 892,200, or 17.2% of the total population.
Since the early 1900s the theory that Polynesians were the first ethnic group to settle in New Zealand has been dominant among archaeologists and anthropologists. Before that time and until the 1920s, however, a small group of prominent anthropologists proposed that the Moriori people of the Chatham Islands represented a pre-Māori group of people from Melanesia, who once lived across all of New Zealand and were replaced by the Māori. While this idea lost favour among academics, it was widely and controversially incorporated into school textbooks during the 20th century.
Camakau are a traditional watercraft of Fiji. Part of the broader Austronesian tradition, they are similar to catamarans, outrigger canoes, or smaller versions of the drua, but are larger than a takia. These vessels were built primarily for the purposes of travelling between islands and for trade. These canoes are single hulled, with an outrigger and a cama, a float, with both ends of the hull being symmetrical. They were very large, capable of travelling open ocean, and have been recorded as being up to 70 ft in length.
New Zealand's archaeology started in the early 1800s and was largely conducted by amateurs with little regard for meticulous study. However, starting slowly in the 1870s detailed research answered questions about human culture, that have international relevance and wide public interest.
Polynesian multihull terminology, such as "ama", "aka" and "vaka" are multihull terms that have been widely adopted beyond the South Pacific where these terms originated. This Polynesian terminology is in common use in the Americas and the Pacific but is almost unknown in Europe, where the Anglo-Saxon terms "hull" and "outrigger" form normal parlance. Outriggers, catamarans, and outrigger boats are a common heritage of all Austronesian peoples and predate the Micronesian and Polynesian expansion into the Pacific. They are also the dominant forms of traditional ships in Island Southeast Asian and Malagasy Austronesian cultures, where local terms are used.
The history of the Māori began with the arrival of Polynesian settlers in New Zealand, in a series of ocean migrations in canoes starting from the late 13th or early 14th centuries. Over several centuries of isolation, the Polynesian settlers formed a distinct culture that became known as the Māori.
Browning Pass / Nōti Raureka is a mountain pass across the Southern Alps, on the South Island of New Zealand. The pass reaches an elevation of 1,411 metres (4,629 ft) above sea level, connecting the upper reaches of the Wilberforce River with the West Coast.
