Summary: In the last two decades, the development of New Zealand prehistory has seen a movement away from a strong emphasis on archaeology to a growing concern with synthesis and theory. One aspect of this has been the prolonged discussion of the cultural status of the New Zealand Maori during the �Classic Maori Phase�. In part this was stimulated by an increase in knowledge of the earlier Archaic period (Duff, 1956:73-82). It was also influenced by a widespread interest in the records of early voyagers and travellers encouraged by the wealth of new editions available (for example, the Beaglehole editions of the journals of Cook and Banks).
The inadequacies of the archaeological assemblages belonging to this phase were acknowledged at the Second Annual Conference of the New Zealand Archaeological Association (Golson, 1957:279). Consequently, many prehistorians began to regard these records as supplementary information. Observations made by Europeans, as visitors or residents in New Zealand were compiled in order to delineate the differences between the earlier and later phases of New Zealand prehistory (Golson, 1957:279-280; Golson and Gathercole, 1962:271).
The past seven years have been seen a marked upsurge of interest in the precise details of culture contact between European and Maori during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This period of initial contact was named the �protohistoric� period of Maori culture in line with the terminology adopted overseas (Golson and Gathercole, 1962:173). The French, who differentiated between the prehistoric period when writing was non-existent, and the historic period when cultural developments could be studied with the aid of written documents, introduced the term �protohistoric� to mark the early historic period when written documents were occasionally produced, but not on a universal scale (Hawkes, 1951: 1, 3)--Chapter One.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/217677 |
| Date | January 1972 |
| Creators | Mair, Gaela M., n/a |
| Publisher | University of Otago. Department of Anthropology |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://policy01.otago.ac.nz/policies/FMPro?-db=policies.fm&-format=viewpolicy.html&-lay=viewpolicy&-sortfield=Title&Type=Academic&-recid=33025&-find), Copyright Gaela M. Mair |
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