Does anyone have some good information and references for this topic. I have looked at two web sites with a book reference but they appear to be quite racist.
Is there some substance to this conspiracy type theory - that Maori have deliberately concealed the fact that Vikings were in NZ before Maori got here or is it purely generated by white NZers who are feeling discriminated against due to affirmative action programmes and land claims?
Vikings never got within 15,000 miles of NZ. I can’t believe anyone could conjure an idea of that sort. They did colonize Greenland, of course, and had a civilization for about 500 years, then disappeared in circumstances of the greatest mystery. They also visited Newfoundland in 100? . 200-300 years later they MAY have assimilated with the inhabitants of this magnificent country’s remote north. But, New Zealand? Dream on.
C’mon, it’s after Labor Day here is the US. Silly Season is supposed to be over!
Dude…I don’t know what to say… :smack:
Go out and buy a Globe.
Locate NZ on the globe.
Then, locate one of the Scandanavian countries, say Denmark, on the globe.
Measure the distance with a piece of string.
Find the scale printed on the globe. It will express distances as 1 cm = X number # of thousands of kilometers.
Multiply the number of centimeters measured out on your string by the scale # of kilometers.
Then, imaging sailing that great a distance in an open longboat.
:eek:
And that assumes you travel a straight line, & don’t get lost on the trip.
No–the Vikings did not reach New Zealand.
Your neighbors are racists and idiots.
Waa?! Which sites and what proof?
The only way to get to NZ from the Viking’s homeland would be
a) Leap frogging through South East Asian, which would have left a truckload of archaeological evidence
b) Going across the Pacific Ocean.
[Mutters about a certain crap NZ-made show that probably triggered this thread]
Vikings did not have navigation equipment, dude. They navigated by just reckoning. Which meant, basically, an ability to stay at the same latitude, barring one of the storms that continually occurred in those waters. Seven ships out of ten ships were able to successfully go from Bergen, Norway, to Iceland, to Eric’s place in Greenland, then back to Iceland, then back to Norway. It’s all exactly on the same latitude, til you hit cape farewell, then you turn north. New Zealand, though a desireable if remote tourist location, was not on the map.
Vikings in Nw zealand is certainly not mainstream history. I’ve come across
perhaps this led to some confusion.
I’ve also found a seemingly resonable site which lists various radical historical theories.
A lot of ruined stone buildings (or indeed burial chambers etc) look similar to one another. Many (or all) of the “anomolies” seen in New Zealand were probaly built by a pre-Maori culture about which we know very little or nothing. But our ignorance does not imply discovery the dicovery of New Zealand by ancient Europeans.
And a conspiracy by Maoris? First, you would have to have Maori archaeologists diligently removing/defacing the evidence, presumably prior to the arrival of Captain Cook. Then they kept silent for 250 years? What would they have had to gain from this?
I think it’s a case of extaordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And I don’t see any.
Well, if Denny Green was leading the way, the Vikings may have fumbled thru New Zealand.
And when the Vikings got there, they took a knee.
Bosda - I am very well aware of the distance thank you - maybe I wasn’t clear enough in my OP but I wanted to know where this historical ‘idea/theory’ has come from and what evidence these theorists are using.
Also, by the way, Maori got to NZ in similar type boats - albeit not from quite so far away.
Not in Anger - Maori had no navigation equiptment either
Rabid - perhaps I wasn’t very clear but these sites are in no way proof of anything, except some people’s racism (just Google Pre-Maori NZ history).
Tapioca - thank you for not treating me like an idiot
I’m sorry if I was sound condensending MelCthefirst. It’s the first time I’ve heard of the Vikings in NZ; I’m normally clued up on alternative theories. :dubious:
Thanks for the Goggle search-words!
I had understood that it was reasonably well accepted that the Maori were not the first human settlers in NZ. That distinction goes to an earlier wave of Polynesian voyagers often known as the Moa Hunters. They were displaced/conquered/subsumed by the later-arriving Maori.
I never heard anyone claim they had any connection with Vikings.
Maybe they were talking about OLD Zealand?
Denmark is a lot closer than Oceania
You’re right Xema, they were called the Morioris and they were conquered (for want of a better word) by the Maori. They still would have had common ancestry with Maori and other Polynesians. Their history is often left out - thank you for bringing it up. I believe there is still some debate over what happened to them.
There are a lot of things that are either glossed over or denied in NZ history. Some Maori totally refute that they killed off the Moa before Europeans arrived or that cannabalism ever existed for example.
RE: "Not in Anger - Maori had no navigation equipment either
Tapioca - thank you for not treating me like an idiot"
I never was trying to seem like I was treating you like an idiot. I assumed you have a perfectly valid reason for asking an apparently stupid question. I ask stupid questions all the time, christ knows what idle by-standers think about that - haha. Yeah Maoris were awesome ocean-goers. But they weren’t originally situated in, like, Norway?
Evidence for cannibalism has to be on very, very solid ground before it will accepted by mainstream archaeologists/anthropologists. A good example is the Anasazi people, from Arizona/New Mexico. Despite finding human DNA in fossilized human poop, plenty of professional scientists refuse to accept the cannibalism explanation.
There is no evidence of this quality from New Zealand.
So the references in Capt. Cook’s journals are deemed false?
The Polynesian colonisation of New Zealand took place around 1300 AD, according to the most recent research (see Nature, April '03 [I think]).
As far as I know, current thinking is that a kind of ‘proto-Maori/Moriori’ population, coming from a central or east-Polynesian ‘homeland’, were the original colonists. Following this, a group of people that were to become the Moriori migrated to the Chathams (a few small islands east of NZ), and from then until European contact, the proto-Maori and the proto-Moriori developed their cultures essentially independantly.
So the idea that ‘Moa-hunters’ were a distinct population who were wiped out or absorbed by arriving Maori isn’t currently favoured. Rather, internal cultural development and change over time is the favoured theory.
And Polynesians did construct wood and shell ‘charts’ of currents, tides and island locations, to assist their inter-island navigation. They also employed other techniques to help them find small islands in a huge ocean, and to minimise the risk of drifting away, never to return.
I’ve seen a bit of the evidence for non-Polyneisan contacts with NZ, for example at this site: Celtic New Zealand. As far as I can tell, it’s purely pseudoarchaeology - flimsy physical evidence over-interpreted to fit a preconcieved theory. Real archaeologists would be all over this if there was a remote chance it was true, and yes, I imagine certain Maori might make a political issue of it. But that’s all moot, since it appears to not be true at all.
There are still genuine mysteries about New Zealand’s past, though. For example, there’s proxy evidence, in the form of rat bones, that humans may have had contact with New Zealand around 2000 years ago. That would certainly be pre-Polynesian, although it seems that Melanesians, rather than Vikings, would be the most probable culprits.
(re. cites for all of this - most of it comes from what I remember from researching an essay I had to write for uni earlier this year. Off the top of my head, On the Road of the Winds by Patrick Kirch is a very good, recent overview of Pacific prehistory.
Can you point me to a source which I can look at? If there is evidence, can you present it?
RE: The only way to get to NZ from the Viking’s homeland would be
a) Leap frogging through South East Asian, which would have left a truckload of archaeological evidence
b) Going across the Pacific Ocean.
Um. How would they GET to the Pacific Ocean, let alone cross it? There’s an allegation they reached Minnesota, which I find incredible in the sense of ridiculous and unbelievable. If “they” continued 3,000 miles west of that (why are the Vkings doing this now?), they’d hit said ocean. And, sea-wondering adventurers that they were (what?) they wouls immediately build an ocean going ship (what?) and sail southwest for 25,000 miles of uninterrupted ocean, just cuz.
I love weird theories.
Can I reply to myself? The actual historical Norse in Greenland did actual annual hunts in the (very) far north, to obtain goods for export/trade unavailable anywhere else on earth, til the Inuit stopped them. On one occasional, they captured a baby polar bear, took it home to their tiny villge, raised it to adulthood, then transported it across the ocean in a tiny boat in order to present it to the King of Norway.
But they were more concerned, in general, with finding firewood on an island that, notoriously, lacks trees of any sort. Heh. For the last 200-300 years of the history of the GL Norse, they had no, um, boats.