Museum uncovers Maori-China link

An American museum is tracing back to mainland China the ancestors of the voyagers thought to have become New Zealand's Maori.

The chairman of anthropology at Hawaii's Bishop Museum, Tianlong Jiao, says he has excavated solid evidence that the first voyages of the ancestors of Polynesians were made between the South China Coast across open ocean to the Penghu Islands, 160km away in the Strait of Taiwan.

It is the first direct archaeological link established for the beginnings of the prehistoric Pacific Ocean voyaging, the Honolulu Advertiser reports. The people who made the initial voyages were early members of the Austronesian language group, ancestors of Polynesians, Dr Jiao said. The evidence was stone tools excavated at an ancient fishing village called Damaoshan on the small island of Dongshan on the South China coast.

"We compared stone tools with local materials," Dr Jiao told the newspaper. "Lab analysis indicated that none of the stone tools was made of local materials. They must have been imported."

An isotope analysis comparing the composition of the tools with material from surrounding areas showed that the stone came originally from the Penghu Islands, he said. Adze stone from Penghu also was used on Taiwan.

"We believe the Damaoshan people went to Penghu and brought back material," he explained. "This is the first evidence of ocean voyaging in the Taiwan Strait.

"I consider this the first stage of Austronesian seafaring. The evidence indicates continuing contact across the Taiwan Strait, and helps us understand why the material cultures are so similar."

One of the Taiwanese archaeologists, Dr Tsang Cheng-hwa, said his opinion, based on pottery, was that the cultures at Damaoshan and on Penghu were so similar as to be one people.

University of Hawaii archaeologist Barry Rolett, who helped begin the excavations in China, said adzes found there could have been made in Samoa.

Dr Jiaou said the finds were further support for the theory of Austronesian dispersal advanced by leading Pacific archaeologists Patrick Kirch of the University of California Berkeley and Peter Bellwood of the Australian National University.

Dr Bellwood has argued that farming people who appeared in southern China and Taiwan about 6000 years ago migrated to the Philippines, New Guinea, and central Polynesia over 2000 years. They then began spreading north to Hawaii and south to New Zealand 1500 years ago.

A scientific paper on the dig will be published next year.

- NZPA