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Ngata was a leading Maori scholar in his own right, a longtime member of the society and later its president, and a frequent contributor to JPS. The board subsidized the society’s publications and other activities.

Although Maori scholarship remained the main focus of the society’s work and publications, the wider Pacific was not ignored. An important figure in this regard was Ngata’s friend and former political colleague, Te Rangihiroa (Peter Buck), who first became a research fellow at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii in 1927. He subsequently became its director. Buck remained in frequent contact with Ngata, as can be seen by their extensive correspondence, published as Na To Hoa Aroha (Sorrenson, ed. 1986–1988). He was also in touch with Andersen, sometimes contributed to the JPS, and solicited copy from his Bishop Museum colleagues, including E. C. S. Handy and Kenneth Emory. Nevertheless, the bulk of the material for the JPS still came from enthusiastic amateurs.

The professional takeover of the journal and eventually the society did not occur until after World War II and the establishment of an Anthropology Department at the University of Auckland in 1950, when Bill Geddes, jack golson (the first archaeologist to be appointed to a New Zealand university), Murray Groves, and Bruce Biggs took turns as editor of JPS. They also infiltrated the Wellington-based council of the society. The editorship of the JPS has remained with the Auckland Anthropology Department, and the Auckland editors have given the journal a thoroughly professional appearance and content, drawing most of their material from academic colleagues at New Zealand universities and from abroad.

Most of the articles have been on social anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology, and the balance between New Zealand and Pacific material has gradually tilted in favor of the latter as the Pacific peoples, several of them in the process of gaining independence, became the focus of intense academic interest. A notable case was papua new guinea, the anthropologists’ last frontier. But old perennials, like the quest for Polynesian origins, have continued to tease scholars and fill the pages of the society’s publications. That subject got a new lease of life when the society published Andrew Sharp’s controversial Ancient Voyagers in the Pacific in 1956, and there have been numerous subsequent contributions published in JPS or as separate memoirs. The subject is far from exhausted, even today.

With the later establishment of Maori studies departments in most New Zealand universities, there was a greater involvement of Maori scholars in the journal and the society. In 1979, Bruce Biggs, the first professor of Maori studies at Auckland, became president of the society, and in the following year, the society’s office was shifted from Wellington to Auckland, where it remains. In 1999, Biggs surrendered the presidency to his successor in the Maori studies chair, Sir Hugh Kawharu.

The society ended its first century as it had begun: a small band of dedicated scholars, now mainly university academics, who in their “spare” time continue to put together a journal that remains preeminent in its field.

M. P. K. Sorrenson

Pompeii

No archaeological site has captured the popular imagination like Pompeii, a prosperous Roman town on the Bay of Naples, some 200 kilometers south of Rome. It was effectively discovered in 1748; inscriptions and other finds made during the construction of an aqueduct between 1594 and 1600 had failed to raise interest. Destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in a.d. 79, ancient Pompeii covered 66 hectares within the city walls, with villas, cemeteries, and other