Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/608

298 open-work decoration from an outward facing terminal in the form of a bird-headed man. On the assumption that the Kaitaia carving was a doorway lintel Major Waite suggested (J.P.S., vol. XXX. p. 426) that the two reptilian terminals might be equated with the wooden lizards, moko miro, of Easter Island, two of which, as Mrs. Scoresby Routledge has shown, were placed one on either side of the doorway in the ritual of opening a new house. If considered of good omen at the entrance, might not the pair have been placed permanently above it, at either end of the lintel? When Major Waite made this suggestion it was not known that the Kaitaia carving differed from all recorded Maori lintels in one very important respect, namely, that it was carved behind as well as in front. All known Maori lintels are designed to fit flat against a wall, and so the inner side is uncarved. It follows, therefore, either that the Kaitaia carving is not a lintel, or else that it was used in conjunction with a type of architecture never before recorded in New Zealand. But its resemblance to the genus lintel is so strong that I feel bound to suppose that it is one, and that the house it adorned was entered by a low porch or passage, above the doorway of which the lintel was set, visible from before and behind. Such a type of entrance was commonly used in the houses of Easter Island. This suggestion of Easter Island affinities in the ancient architecture of New Zealand receives support from the fact, also unpublished when Major Waite made his suggestion, that the central human figure has a well-marked vertical column. This feature has never been before recorded in Maori carvings, but, as all students are aware, it is a notable characteristic of one type of Easter Island wooden figure.

Mr. T. F. Cheeseman has pointed out that the decorative details of the Kaitaia carving ally it to a series of bone pendants of intricate design, examples of which have been found in different parts of New Zealand. Thus it is not to be classed as an isolated piece.

The facts set out above give some faint indication of the intricacy of cultural and racial problems in the Pacific. They also serve to warn the student how far afield the investigation of a minor aspect of culture on a tiny, isolated island may carry