The idea that the existing Maori were the product of a mixture of darker Melanesians and a lighter race goes back to French explorer Julien-Marie Crozet’s observations of 1772 (Ling Roth 1891) and to naturalist J.R. Forster on Cook’s second voyage (Sorrenson 1979). Sir George Grey’s collections of Maori traditions contained references to the presence of an aboriginal people, thought to be represented by the contemporary Chatham Islanders, who were displaced by a later migration from “Hawaiki,” the original homeland of the Maori. Not all contemporary writers, however, accepted the idea that Maori oral legends could provide a reliable historical account (see Travers 1871).

The discovery of human artifacts with the extinct moa added credence to the idea of a pre-Maori population, and a sort of scientific seal of approval was given by the scholar S. Percy Scott (1893) who made an osteological comparison of Maori and (Chatham Island) Moriori craniums. He concluded that the existing Maori race was the result of a mixture of Melanesian and Polynesian types with the Melanesian or Papuan characteristics being greatest in the north of the North Island and least on the South Island.

The various threads of evidence bearing on these questions—Maori traditions, physical anthropology and archaeology, and a chronology provided by genealogical dating—were brought together in works of Percy Smith (1921) and Elsdon Best (1915) published in the Journal of the Polynesian Society. Smith created an elaborate migration scenario that began with the discovery of an uninhabited New Zealand by Polynesian chief Kupe I in a.d. 925 and the arrival of its first inhabitants a generation later. Subsequent voyages by chiefs Toi and Kupe II culminated in the arrival of “the great fleet” consisting of Tainui, Arawa, Takitimu, and Mataatua canoes in 1350. Smith and Best identified the first inhabitants as Maruiwi or Moriori, a dark-skinned people of mixed Melanesian and Polynesian ancestry who were expelled to the Chatham Islands by the later Polynesian immigrants. Both authors thought that their ultimate Polynesian origins were Vedic or Aryan.

It is fashionable to dismiss the assembling of Maori traditions into a comprehensive historical account as the product of inept Pakeha (a New Zealander of European origin) scholarship (Sorrenson 1979), but it was the Maori scholar Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck) who added to their popularity in works such as Vikings of the Sunrise (1938) and The Coming of the Maori (1949). Buck made use of both the culture-area and the age-area theories to organize his data. In his accounts, Buck’s Polynesians came from Asia via Micronesia, and it was from the latter that they settled the central Polynesian area of Samoa and the Society Islands, known in traditions as Hawaii. From this center, new developments appeared and spread to more distant areas, and as a result of overpopulation, marginal polynesia, including New Zealand, was settled from this hub.

Buck accepted the traditional accounts of earlier and later waves of migration but substituted an economic advantage, the possession of domestic animals and crops, for Smith’s racial one. Mimicking World War I terminology, Buck described the second wave of Polynesian migration as the main body of “the Polynesian expeditionary force,” arguing that the food plants and domestic animals were first developed and tested in the Society Islands and then carried to other parts of Polynesia. It was these domesticates, including the sweet potato, brought from South America by a Polynesian “unknown hero,” that allowed the full flower of Polynesian society to bloom. In the Coming of the Maori, Buck used Smith’s and Best’s chronology of settlement, linking the earliest immigrants with the moa hunters. The final settlement period was the time of the great fleet migration (a.d. 1350) when the kumara (“sweet potato”) and other food plants were successfully transferred from Polynesia to New Zealand.

The weakest link in Smith’s and Best’s scheme of racial replacement was the lack of any ethnological or archaeological evidence in its favor. This lack was explored by Henry Skinner, who received his ethnological training at Cambridge University from anthropologist Alfred C. Haddon. Skinner quickly revised his initial conclusion that the differences between a northern cultural area, where Maori art was curvilinear, and a southern cultural area, defined by more rectilinear art forms, might be explained by waves of immigrants, the first being from the west Pacific and a later wave from