Tuhinga 27: 10-19, doi: 10.3897/tuhinga.27.e34221

Maori fishhooks at the Pitt Rivers Museum: comments and corrections

Jeremy Coote

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Citation: Coote J (2016) Maori fishhooks at the Pitt Rivers Museum: comments and corrections. Tuhinga 27: 10-19. https://doi.org/10.3897/tuhinga.27.e34221

Abstract

Chris D. Paulin’s account in the pages of this journal of the Māori fishhooks at the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum provides an inaccurate picture of the collection and its history. In particular, he misattributes to Hawai‘i an important Māori fishhook acquired on Cook’s first voyage (1768–71). An accurate account of the museum’s collection is provided here, some of the errors in Paulin’s report are corrected, and the evidence for the Māori provenance of the first-voyage hook is presented.

Keywords

Māori fishhooks, Cook-voyage collections, collections history, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.