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DESCRIPTION OF THE: MAORI! TOMB 
By the CURATOR and 
A. HAMILTON, Director Dominion Museum, 
Wellington.* 
Plates LX fVi—LXIX. 
So assiduously have dealers and collectors exploited the art 
treasures of the Maori that it is worthy of note when any old object 
is to-day met with outside our Museums. 
The introduction of European tools has produced a similar 
effect on the Maori as among other people: work is more rapidly, 
and possibly therefore, less carefully executed; and the old tra- 
ditions of their carvings has been so far departed from, that we are 
led to ask if the why and wherefore have not also been forgotten. I 
once asked a Maori carver why he represented his figures as having 
four fingers and a thumb on each hand, whereas the old carvers 
chiselled three fingers only. He replied, in effect, that when using 
a steel chisel there was little extra trouble in carving two additional 
digits, whereas with a greenstone tool the cutting of two more 
fingers took too much time. Either he did not know the tradition 
relating to the three-fingered hand, or, what is more likely, did not 
fear more nearly approaching the representation of the human form 
than his ancestors had dared to. 
Of the relics which remain’in different parts of the country 
probably a considerable proportion owe their preservation to the 
circumstance that they are ¢afu or sacred, and consequently are 
retained long after everything else has gone. 
One such object has quite recently been added to the Maori 
collection in this Museum and as a prelude to the description of 
this Pou-Pou, or tomb the following is culled from a newspaper 
account, which gave me the first intimation that a collector had 
secured the carvings and offered the same for sale. The word Pou 
means a carved slab but the combination Pou-Pou is here to be read 
as applying to the whole structure :— 
“For many years past, in the Maori village at Maketu, the 
visitor has been enabled to admire one of the best samples of Maori 
architecture in existence, in the shape of a Pou-Pou, or carved burial 
tomb. The tomb was in the form of a house, and having given 
sanctuary for generations to the remains of the principal chiefs of 
that locality, was held strictly tabooed by all, and no one, with the 
* Reprinted from ‘‘Guide to the Maori Tomb.” 
