83 comments:

1. Charlie Gao, 19. November 2008, 10:35
   

   Thanks for this. Beautifully written and argued, and a pleasure to read. It’s somewhat hard to believe that anyone could actually take such ridiculous claims seriously, but I guess that’s how nasty rumours start. The false claim that the Maori wiped out the Moriori people is still circulated as some sort of justification for the crimes against the Maori. Good on you Scott for taking the time to demolish the crazy article in question. What was the editor thinking??

    
2. Duncan Lithgow, 19. November 2008, 11:26
   

   Thanks for that letter Scott. It’s great to see an open letter which cites it’s sources so I can check up on them if I don’t believe you. As it happens you’re an old friend, so that’s not so relevant.

    
3. crusader, 19. November 2008, 13:40
   

   Scott Hamilton is just a self-hating white. He’s writen a series of things for the Scoop Review of Books and they’re all just about attacking whites and white civilisation. His attack on the rgeat Austrian pioneer Ferdinand von Hochstetter was a disgrace. His blog Reading the Maps is all about undermining Christianity and our nation’s European heritage. Oh well this is just another lefty PC site.

    
4. Skyler, 19. November 2008, 14:27
   

   Crusader, you appear to be a person who is filled with hate and fear – it’s sad and I don’t think anything I could say would change your mind. Scott is an academic and is able to look at the facts and present the truth unlike the people he is writing about in the above article. His blog Reading the Maps is NOT about undermining Christianity and in fact he has good friends who are Christians. The blog is about culture and history, poetry and music and he also has an interest in politics – and he is the opposite of a right wing racist which is the impression that you and your blog portrays.

    
5. crusader, 19. November 2008, 16:13
   

   Skyler you don’t understand that we are at war with enemies of Western civilisation like radical Muslims communists and black radicals like Tame Iti and Obama. Scott Hamilton is part of the forces working to destroy Western civilisation part of the conspiracy. Enemies are everywhere and we are at the Gates of Vienna. People who want to open the gates and let the enemy in are appeasers and traitors. Scott Hamilton is by his own admission on readingthemaps.blogspot.com and apepaser and a traitor. Every day he calls for the downfall of Christian civilisation. If your serious and want to do something about changing yore sick mind you should come and visit crusader-rabbit.blogspot.com, which is the blog where the patriots who want to defeat the barabrians are gathering. Thats why I haver posted the website here no I’m not a member but I do believe in defending my birth right. When will we stand up to multiculturalism and Islam and anti-Christian Marxists?

    
6. Don Oorst, 20. November 2008, 14:34
   

   The VAST LEFT WING CONSPIRACY! lol

   Heres a fun exercise for you right wing nuts that accuse Boltons detractors of being “Anti-christian”. Go look up “kerry bolton left hand path”.

   Yeah thats right. The guy started his own Satanist Sect. Neo-Nazis are good nice ‘white folk’ huh?

    
7. Martin Doutré, 21. November 2008, 12:55
   

   Predictably, sociologist Scott Hamilton has evaded the real issues raised in the E-Local Magazine series of articles and has opted instead to “shoot the messengers”. His emotive, vitriolic diatribe homes in on me personally and he tries to convince the public that I’m nothing but a conspiracy nut working in cahoots with people he deems to be social misfits, Nazis or “unapproved” historians worthy of contempt … whatever-whoever.

   As it turns out, it doesn’t matter a damn if I’m a two-headed, scaly-skinned reptilian from Draco. The only thing that’s of any importance is the evidence presented. All Scott Hamilton actually has to do is research Maori oral traditions related to the urukehu – kiri puwhero (light complexion skin – reddish, golden tinged hair) people that Maori found living all over New Zealand when they arrived.

   Go on Scott – I dare you! Go and ask the old learned elders of any and every iwi in New Zealand and, if they consider you worth talking to, they’ll tell you about the white tribes that used to live around the districts. While you’re at it, go and talk to “old-timers”, many of whom can tell you about the large pockets of red-headed, freckle-faced, blue-eyed Maoris that were commonly seen all around the country and mostly in isolated areas like the Ureweras, etc. These were the well-known “waka blonds” of colonial folklore.
   Then of course there’s the skeletal and forensic evidence that no-one’s allowed to test.

   Scott, you could also pour over a few hundred old history books written since the beginning of the colonial era, wherein Tohungas and learned elders throughout New Zealand, spoke in common agreement about the pre-Maori inhabitants. One good resource for in-depth history is the Maori Land Court Minute Books. This huge body or historical resources will give you many references and testimonies concerning the Patu-paiarehe, Turehu or whatever the local names were for the ancient white tribes. They will also give you many whakapapas that link back into the pre-Maori tribes.

   If you were actually allowed to believe these hundreds of accounts from early-colonial Maori resources and accept that the elders weren’t deluded or just chronic liars, then you might feel some inclination to look further at the copious assortment of anomalous structural and artifact evidence scattered across our New Zealand landscape.
   As one small example, do you know what bullauns are, as well as their pedigree back to places like ancient Ireland? Why do we have bullauns all over New Zealand? Can you trace the origins of Maori gods back to the homelands from whence they originated? What about peculiarities of language, anciently introduced flora, moko, haka, cultural symbolism, measurement standards, etc., etc?

   Have you ever raised your derriere out of the office chair and gone exploring to see the many purpose-built standing stone arrangements, the large obelisk markers, the overland alignment systems, mound marker humps, cairns, sighting pits, trig stones, solar observatories for taking finite fixes on the equinox or solstice days during the calendar year, remnant canal systems, collapsed beehive house hovel dome villages, multiples of laboriously built stone walls, terraces and massive excavations, etc., etc., all over New Zealand?
   Obviously there’s a big lump of essential knowledge missing from your very PC education. There are, nowadays, many “unmentionables” that sociologists like yourself have deemed unsuitable for general public consumption … like how so many huge structures and excavations could have been built since 1300 AD or so

   You flash your credentials like you’re some kind of authority on something, then pontificate with righteous indignation and slander at any who dare to dissent from your entrenched views. You contribute nothing by way of a counter-argument related to the oral traditions or landscape evidence of pre-Maori occupation.
   None of this works on me, Scott, as I’ve been called a neo-diffusionist, revisionist, racist or many other things by the likes of Kerry Howe, Paul Moon or a raft of other modern social-historians. Moon, to his credit, is finally acting like an actual historian and managing to allow some truth to bypass the PC filters.

   The label “revisionist” amuses me the most. How ironic this is when I still hold to the accepted historical views of the 1960’s or before. I still gravitate towards the impeccably researched accounts proffered by Edward Tregear, Elsdon Best, James Cowan, Takiwa Tauarua, George Grey, Hoani Nahe, Rev. John Grace, Rev. Richard Taylor, Sir Peter Buck, Thor Heyerdahl and many, many others from the early to mid colonial era. So who is the revisionist?

   My question is: Why should I believe you and your ilk Scott, or why are you so desperate that you have to resort to stupid, cheap-shot, “shame & guilt by association” tactics, hoping to force unquestioning, cowardly compliance to your hollow views? If you truly wish to win the hearts and minds of increasingly aware New Zealanders, do it with unadulterated, “warts & all” facts. Give us real evidence based upon something called “the scientific approach”. We’ve had enough of social-engineers, social-historians, social-archaeologists or social-anthropologists and spin-doctors, who continuously fudge the results for political-expediency.

   Seeing as you’re “in with the in-crowd” at Auckland Institute and Museum, please head off to the storeroom and procure the ancient, pre-colonial hair samples of fine, braided red hair and other colours that used to be on display at the Museum. You’ll remember these as the samples located at the Waitakere Rock Shelter. Sir Peter Buck mentioned them when referring to the Maori proverb about white ancestors. Please have forensic analysis done on the hair inasmuch, as you know that Caucasoid-European hair is very distinct and unique in terms of pigmentation channels, cross-sectional diameter and shape to that of other racial groups. Being the honest seeker after truth that you are, I’m sure you’ll get right on to this, “toute de suite”… right?

   As for my views on things generally, they range through a wide spectrum of interests, whether it be: history-archaeology, the way control-freaks managed to distort our benign Treaty of Waitangi from 1975 onwards and turn it into a document of apartheid, or my skepticism concerning what actual forces were at play on September 11th 2001. Whereas you taunt those who express heretical views unapproved by your academic-political handlers and don’t seem to have the gumption to say anything out of turn lest it lead to career suicide, I am not encumbered with any such impositions or restraints. I welcome anyone reading anything I have placed on the Internet. That’s why I put it all there in the first place, in hopes of getting some useful dialogue going about the unmentioned anomalies.

   I intend to answer Scott Hamilton’s hate-laced diatribe point-by-point on my website at http://www.celticnz.co.nz .
   Martin Doutré.

    
8. Sam, 24. November 2008, 0:52
   

   The question of the origins of the indigenous people of the South Pacific is too large and important a question to be treated in a partisan fashion, in a way that ignores clear evidence of a more complex story than academics would lead us to believe.

   People all over Oceania deserve to have their true histories researched, without fear or prejudice.

   An unhealthy sociological or political prejudice that treats all whites as being of one origin (ie, European), that refuses to consider the diversity of “fair-skinned” ethnic groupings evident throughout Oceania, North and South America prior to the arrival of European explorers from the 16th century onwards, is a nuisance to any authentic truth seeker.

   The idea that “fair-skinned” people were only ever invaders to Oceania or the Americas is clearly not supported by all of the information available (eg, red-haired mummies in North and South America).

   Matters of land rights and social justice should not be allowed to lead to prejudices within history or the sciences. No truly authentic historian of substance should allow prejudices of any type to affect their research, to exclude any evidence that leads to conclusions contrary to their own ideological prejudices.

   History and research should not be allowed to become the hostage of academics whose findings are prejudiced and compromised as a result of an overriding political or ideological agenda or vendetta.

    
9. Scott, 24. November 2008, 15:52
   

   Martin Doutre caims that I only need to talk to any Maori of sufficient age to receive confirmation that Celts were the original residents of Aotearoa. I rather doubt whether any Maori of any age would endorse the writings of Doutre and the Celtic New Zealand circle, given that these texts are studded with racist abuse of the tangata whenua of these islands.

   The E Franklin article which I’ve discussd characterises Maori as a ’savage’ people, who have Europeans to thank for whatever happiness they today enjoy. In his rambling tome Ancient Celtic New Zealand, Martin Doutre calls Maori an ‘inbred’ (pg 284) people whose culture was characterised by ‘uncompromising cruelty’ (ibid.).

   Doutre complains about my discussion of his racism and his conspiracy theories, claiming that they are irrelevant to a consideration of his historical ‘research’. But the man’s own writings, and the texts of the Celtic New Zealand circle in general, are inextricably connected to a racist and a conspiracy theory view of the world. Talking about the Celtic New Zealand thesis without talking about racist conspiracy theories would be like trying to talk about the All Blacks without mentioning rugby.

   Like Doutre’s book, the Celtic New Zealand website continually segues from pseudo-scholarly discussions of history and archaeology into racist rants about conspiracies of indigenous peoples and ‘politically correct’ academics. It is not only Maori that Doutre and his friends attack: the Celtic New Zealand site also finds time to inveigh against the evils of contemporary South Africa, where whites are apparently facing ‘genocide’ at the hands of uppity Africans. (Oh for the salad days of apartheid!) ‘Red Indians’ are another group to incur the rancour of Doutre and his comrades, for having the insolence to claim to be the indigenous peoples of the Americas, when white peope were really there first.

   Doutre and his friends maintain, in the face of all the available historical, archaeological, biological and genetic evidence, that Celts settled much of the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the Americas. All of the impressive features of the traditional cultures of these regions – the pyramids of the Maya, the fantastic cities of the Inca, the extraordinary sculptures of Rapa-Nui, the wood and greenstone carvings of Maori – were the work of white people. In Ancient Celtic New Zealand, Doutre calls features of Maori material culture like the hei tiki and the carved meeting house ‘inexplicable’, and argues that they were the work of white people who had travelled all the way from Western Europe. After these people were usurped, the ’savage’ and backward Maori ‘had no need to build, carve, or create anything’, Doutre insists (pg 276, Ancient Celtic New Zealand).

   Doutre finds the most absurdly circuitous explanations for the most straightforwardly explicable features of Maori material culture. Gazing at the beautiful carved storehouse in the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s Maori Court, for instance, he is struck by the structure’s very small doorway. According to oral tradition and the findings of ethnographers, the small doorway was designed to prevent the easy theft of the contents of the storehouse. Doutre, though, insists that the small door is proof that the storehouse was created by a Celtic subtribe of leprechauns who voyaged from Ireland to Aotearoa in ancient times (pg 274, Ancient Celtic New Zealand).

   Absurdities of this nature can only be explained by reference to the racism which saturates the worldview of Doutre and his friends. If non-white peoples are by their very nature incapable of creating works of wonder and beauty, like the exhibits in the Maori Court of Ackland’s museum, or the sculptures on Rapa-Nui, or the Mayan pyramids in Guatemala, then white people must ipso facto be found responsible.

   And if generation after generation of scholars have disregarded the notion that white people were responsible for the wonders of indigenous cultures, then a global conspiracy must be operating to obscure the truth. In Ancient Celtic New Zealand, Doutre uncovers a truly antique conspiracy, beginning with the Romans, involving the Catholic church and the Jews, and culminating today with Maori activists and politically correct academics, to denigrate the achivements of the Celts of olden days.

   Some readers may wish to try to follow Doutre’s dizzying leaps of logic and elucidate his paranoid, racist worldview. Others may wish to laugh at him. Still others will find the fact that such irrational views have made the pages of a provinical magazine with a not inconsiderable readership disturbing. Whatever response we make to Doutre’s writings, though, let us squarely face the fact that these texts are the work of a racist with a conspiracy theory view of the world.

    
10. Martin Doutré, 25. November 2008, 14:51
    

    As usual, Scott Hamilton immediately evades the issue and attempts to lead us off the scent with a red herring.

    Scott, I didn’t tell you to go and ask the Maori elders about the ancient “CELTS” in their districts. I asked you to enquire after the pre-Maori tribes, described in Maori oral traditions throughout New Zealand as URUKEHU – KIRI PUWHERO ((light complexion skin – reddish, golden tinged hair).

    When I wrote a book called Ancient Celtic New Zealand almost a decade ago I had to find some kind of umbrella term to call these people, such that prospective readers would understand who I was talking about. I could have, perhaps, called my book Ancient Firbolg New Zealand or maybe Ancient Tuatha De Danann New Zealand, etc., but who would have understood the title?
    I carefully noted in the “Contents” section of the book that the term “Celts” was not wholly correct and that the ancient white populations who occupied New Zealand were, for want of a better term, “pre-Celts”. Some of their cousin tribes who remained in Europe and the Mediterranean amalgamated to become the “Celts” by about 1000 BC. For clarity and simplicity, many historians use this generalization or the term “Proto-Celts”.

    So, I take it you haven’t gone to talk to the Maori elders yet about the ancient white tribes in their districts? Why am I not surprised?

    You also forgot to include the rest of the text around “inbred” when you mischievously quoted from pg. 284 of my book and attempted to put a negative slant on my use of a word. The actual sentence reads: ‘By British colonial times Maoridom was an inbred mix of Polynesian and more ancient elements combined…’
    This was the condition observed and noted by early New Zealand anthropologists and historians, who could visually detect the considerable physiological differences in Maori tribes from district to district. For some insights, I would suggest you read: The Maori, by Elsdon Best, 1924, Vol 1, Chpt. 1, which touches upon the significant Melanesian admixture especially.

    The fact of the matter is that, up until the 1960’s or so, an astute, experienced observer could pretty-much tell which district a Maori individual was from by the physiology they exhibited. Within the wider variety of distinct physical types were the tall Maoris, with the very angular, sharp features and straight hair or the freckle-faced Maoris with the red hair, etc.

    You could also consider such works as, Grammar of the New Zealand Language, by Rev. Robert Maunsell, enlarged edition, 1862, which maps the seven major dialects and many sub-dialects of the Maori language throughout New Zealand. In some regions the dialects were so different, with so many foreign words, as to be virtually incomprehensible to more geographically distant iwis. A lot of this had less to do with long-term isolation in the country and more to do with off-shore lands of origin, whether in Micronesia, Melanesia, Polynesia or elsewhere, including India, South America and the Mediterranean, etc. The term “Polynesia” means “many islands”, but it also infers many blood admixtures.

    The rest of Scott Hamilton’s post is little more than a ramble, laced with the usual “conspiracy” and “guilt by association” jibes.

    Scott, there’s a big lump of history missing from the current discussion. The fact that it presently goes unmentioned in modern, sanitized history books or within the classrooms of our institutions of higher learning is not the fault of the Maori Tohungas of New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, including Rapa Nui, or the American Shamans extending from Bolivia and Peru, through to North America. All of these oral histories give very clear-cut accounts of the racial groups who preceded present-day “indigenous” populations, and the elders of these far-flung regions have traditionally been very clear, open and generous in recounting their profound knowledge of such things.

    North American Indian historian, Vine Deloria jr. stated: ‘There’s no effort to ask the tribes what they remember of things that happened.
    He goes on to say, ‘numerous tribes do say that strange people doing this or that came through our land, visited us, and so on. Or they remember that we came across the Atlantic as refugees from some struggle, then came down the St. Lawrence River and so forth. There’s a great reluctance among archaeologists and anthropologists to break centuries-old tradition and to take a look at something new…As for the history of this hemisphere from say, five thousand B.C. forward to our time, the mainstream scholars just don’t want to deal with that at all. Let me give you an example. Years ago I spoke at an academic archaeological conference, and at the end of my speech I asked, ‘Why don’t you guys just drop the blinders and get into this diffusionist stuff?’ My host, David Hurst Thomas, just about lost it and said, ‘Do you know how long and hard we’ve fought to get members of this profession to admit that Indians could have done some of these things? And now you’re saying it was Europeans!”’.

    Unfortunately, the meticulously memorized oral traditions are conveniently dismissed as “unreliable” by modern-day, politically-aligned, social engineers who don’t want these “inconvenient truths” to be included in the discussion. Because these significant histories have been deceitfully stripped from our history books in recent decades and are never raised in our classrooms for serious discussion, I and others like me continuously remind our academics and the research community that these “other” anomalies exist and have to be dealt with.

    My main focus is to trace the movements of the ancient European tribes, across several continents and oceans by the measurement & angle standards incorporated into their edifices or within their landscape geometries marked by standing stones, cairns, etc.

    From Peru – Bolivia and extending all the way to Mexico, upwards of 10,000 beautifully preserved ancient mummies have been exhumed. In fact, to this day, there’s a thriving illegal trade in mummy artifacts, including ornate tapestries, pots, tools, etc., and even body parts of the mummies themselves. These ancient inhabitants of the Americas have blond, red, auburn, chestnut brown through to black hair. The hair is very thin in cross-sectional diameter and mostly wavy, consistent with Caucasoid hair, as opposed to the very thick, mostly-black, straight fibres of Mongoloid hair or the kinked Negroid hair type (See: Hair of the Paracus Mummies, by Mildred Trotter, 1943).

    The stature of these mummies is, on average, considerably taller than the Inca inhabitants of today, who are classified as “Mongoloid” in physical type. The blood groups of the mummies are consistent with those of Caucasoid Europeans, as opposed to the predominant blood types of the present-day “indigenous” populations (Incas are 92% “O”). See: ABO blood groups in Peruvian mummies: An evaluation of techniques, by Marvin J. Allison, Ali A. Hossaini, Nora Castro, Juan Munizaga, Alejandro Pezzia. Stewart and others did similar studies in the 1940’s and achieved the same results.

    I’m really in awe of this very successful academic campaign of keeping the physical-anthropology of these mummies secret. In consideration of the visual, tangible and forensic evidence available, it’s comparable to looking into the face of the sun, feeling its heat and being blinded by its light, then saying with total conviction: There is no Sun!
    See: http://www.celticnz.co.nz/Nazca/Nazca1.htm and especially: http://www.celticnz.co.nz/Nazca/Nazca2.htm

    The resident populations of South America seem to have no deep-set reverence for these ancient people and plunder the graves without hesitation or any sign of remorse. Their attitude is very similar to what Edward Tregear observed concerning Maori indifference towards the pre-Maori dead:

    “The Maoris used to pay great respect to the bones of their dead, yet here and there may be found among sandhills, etc., human remains uncovered by the wind, and of these no tradition remains, as there would certainly be if the relics were those of ancestors. The natives say, “These are the bones of strangers.” So also mortuary-caves are found concerning the contents of which the Maoris make the same remark, and regard them with indifference” (See: The Maori Race, pp. 562-563).

    And so Scott, we have to address a problem here, and you, in your great wisdom and empathy, might be able to provide a workable solution. The question is: how do white people like me get access to our true history and do research concerning our world-traveling cousins without incurring the scathing wrath of people like you?

    Under the socio-political philosophies of the ever-ranting and militant Marxist-left organizations that you have long been a disciple of and mouth-piece for, Europeans have to be totally self-effacing or they’re immediately labeled white-supremacists and racists, etc. Whereas Europeans must be seen to be lauding and applauding the great accomplishments of all other races, there’s no provision, in your imposed, stringently controlled and enforced, academic-political environment, for Europeans to have any self-pride. As a consequence, our histories of long occupation on several continents and countries ranging all across the ancient world have to go totally unmentioned and receive no acknowledgement or recognition in the classroom or social-history books. Moreover, anything that Europeans put in place on those continents has to be attributed to their conquerors and the original builders erased from historical memory.

    Seemingly, all around us there are ever-vigilant, barking-mad, watch-dogs like you, poised and ever ready to threaten and intimidate anyone who dares to ask inappropriate questions about history. It was people like you who ran the inquisition.

     
11. Richard, 25. November 2008, 16:25
    

    Sheesh! Is a pure Celt allowed a look-in here?

    Maori didn’t conquer and enslave us.

    My great-great-great grandfather, Patrick Fenooer, told me the story.

    When the Maori came, we simply used the power implicit in ley lines and ancient nostrums and made ourselves invisible. (Maori later accidentally stumbled on the secret and were trapped in invisibility for many years).

    We did leave clues, though. The secret to the ley lines and nostrums is found – probably obviously enough – in the song ‘Sweet Leilani’ (So what did you think ‘heavenly flower’ really meant? Man, that stuff is strong!. Talk about ‘out of sight, out of mind’!

    As to our right to be here, Maori still say:

    ‘Never poke a-tongue-at-a-Fenoor’.

    End of story.

     
12. Scott, 26. November 2008, 10:38
    

    Once again, I find myself doubting Martin Doutre’s claims about his affinity for Maori culture. Slapping the letter ’s’ on the end of nouns like tohunga makes him sound more like a backwoods redneck than someone who has spent time talking with kaumatua (or should that be ‘kaumatuas’, Martin?) up and down the land.

    When he isn’t invoking Maori elders to support his claims, Doutre is referring to the mighty dead. He tells us that Elsdon Best somehow endorsed the theory that whites settled New Zealand thousands of years ago because Best believed that a Melanesian people populated New Zealand hundreds of years before Maori. How exactly does this follow? The last time I checked, the peoples of places like Vanuatu and the Solomons didn’t look a great deal like folks from Ireland and Brittany.

    Best’s claim that Melanesians got to New Zealand first, and were then driven to remote regions of the North Island and to the Chathams, was based upon a misunderstanding of Maori oral history and physiology (unlike Doutre, Best had the excuse of being a pioneer in New Zealand ethnology; we shouldn’t treat his failures in the way we treat the wilful ignorance of the Celtic New Zealand circle).

    Best mistakenly thought that the the ‘Maruiwi’ tribe, which existed hundreds of years ago in the North Island but later morphed into other groups (Maori social organisation could be quite fluid) was the same thing as the ‘Moriori’ people who are the tchakat henu (tangata whenua) of the Chatham Islands (Rekohu and Rangiaora). In fact, Moriori were a group of early Maori who left the northern South Island around the fourteenth century and lived in isolation on the Chathams until 1791, when the first Europeans visited the island. In that time, they developed a distinct culture which both harks back to and extends the achievements of archaic Maori culture.

    David Simmons has dissected Best’s erroneous use of Maori oral tradition in his 1975 book The Great New Zealand Myth. Like Doutre and Kerry Bolton today, Best tended to select bits and pieces of oral tradition that suited his preconceptions and interpret them literally. Thus he accepted the part of the Maruiwi story that said the tribe were the first people in New Zealand, but ignored the part which said that the Maruiwi came from a homeland to the southwest of New Zealand, where there is nothing but water! Maori oral tradition is fascinating and rich in insights, but it should not be treated as a literal guide to the past, anymore than King Lear should be taken as a straightforward guide to ancient Britain.

    Today, Doutre and Bolton are happy to trumpet some aspects of some oral traditions as literal truth, but ignore others that obviously don’t fit their absurd theory of a white tangata whenua. For example, they refer to legends of a pale-skinned fairy folk as literal truth, but ignore the legends which say that Maori were preceded in parts of New Zealand by hairy half-men! If Doutre and Bolton were consistent, they would have to argue that bigfoot, as well as Celts, inhabited New Zealand in ancient times.

    There’s also the inconvenient fact that some iwi have traditions which say they emerged straight from the earth in their rohe, and are therefore autochthonous as well as indigenous! It’s hard to square such stories with claims that Maori arrived a few hundred years ago to find an advanced Celtic civilisation which had been flourishing for millenia!

    We know that Best was wrong about the Melanesian origins of groups like the Moriori and the Tuhoe because of a mass of material evidence -skeletal evidence, which shows each group as fully Polynesian, artefacts, and linguistic evidence, which shows the close connections between the Tuhoe and Moriori dialects and Maori (Doutre’s claims that Maori could not understand each other in the nineteenthc entury are a nonsense – even the Ngati Tama and Ngati Mutunga iwi who invaded the Chathams in 1835 could understand the Moriori who had lived there in isolation for hundreds of years!)

    Doutre likes to rave on about a conspiracy by a bunch of PC academics, but the work which discredited Best was done in the 1920s by HD Skinner, who was the first trained anthropologist to visit the Chathams. It has been back up again and again by later scholars, and the advent of DNA testing has made the verdict definitive: last year, scholars from the University of Auckland found that the DNA of the kiore (Polynesian rat) which was found on the Chathams before 1791 matches the DNA of rat bones found in a particular part of the northen South Island. There were no kiore on the Chathams before the fourteenth century, and the kiore DNA range was not supplemented by new arrivals between the fourteen and nineteenth century, so the thesis that the Moriori were a group of early Maori who became isolated on the islands for hundreds of years stands strong.

    There is a great deal more nonsense in Doutre’s posts on this thread – silly claims about red hair somehow equalling Euroepan ancestry, ignorance about what happens to bodies when they decompose, misuse of the work of scholars like Peter Buck, laughable references to linguistics – but I’ll have to deal with them when I have more time.

    Scott

     
13. Edward, 27. November 2008, 19:30
    

    “Have you ever raised your derriere out of the office chair and gone exploring to see the many purpose-built standing stone arrangements, the large obelisk markers, the overland alignment systems, mound marker humps, cairns, sighting pits, trig stones, solar observatories for taking finite fixes on the equinox or solstice days during the calendar year, remnant canal systems, collapsed beehive house hovel dome villages, multiples of laboriously built stone walls, terraces and massive excavations, etc., etc., all over New Zealand?
    Obviously there’s a big lump of essential knowledge missing from your very PC education. There are, nowadays, many “unmentionables” that sociologists like yourself have deemed unsuitable for general public consumption … like how so many huge structures and excavations could have been built since 1300 AD or so”

    I’m not sure I understand this last part about stone walls, terraces, huge structures and excavations…that they are “unmentionables”? On the contrary, these very features have been researched time and again and are cited in most academic publications in New Zealand. Stone walls and terraces are comonly known throughout New Zealand and the Pacific as relating to horticultural practices, while massive earthworks are usually related to defensive systems. And, I might add, these structures are conventionally dated to c.1500 C.E., not 1300 as you state. These features were worked by various groups over time culminating in the present landscape, rather than a spate of single construction events. As i’ve said, there are numerous texts which address these features so i’m not sure how you could come to the conclusion that they are “unmentionables” other than that perhaps you have failed to look at any archaeological articles published over the last century.

    I also question “the copious assortment of anomalous structural and artifact evidence scattered across our New Zealand landscape” which you refer to earlier. I, my collegues, and my professors have excavated, surveyed, and analysed archaeological features and artefacts, and not once have I come across any material evidence which would support your theories. If the material culture of your ‘NZ Celts’ really had left such an indelible impression across the landscape both here and in the greater Pacific wouldn’t there be evidence brought to light by now rather than a mere handful of esoteric ethnographic texts which are much more biased and untestable than the archaeological record? It’s an epistomological issue, much of the ‘evidence’ you cite is incredibly subjective and untestable by scientific methodology, which in turn suggests what you base your opinion on is stoic belief rather than culmulative evidence. C14 dates for example point to earliest human occupation c.800 BP, not to mention the law of superimposition or stratigraphy, with evidence of human activity in many parts of the central North Island occuring only after a deposit of tuff material from volcanic activity, effectively being a chronological marker. You also cite ‘bullauns’ as evidence of a cultural connection. Have you ever stopped to consider functional aspects to features or artefacts (such as grinding stones for adze manufacture, food processing etc.) or does every single material remain have to be inherently ritualised? And, more importantly, how can you prove it? Furthermore, there is the issue of homologous vs analogous similarity in societies, the former being related to a common history, while the latter concerns similarities based upon environmental pressures producing functionally comparable solutions. It is always important to differentiate between the two and test your hypothesis before taking a leap of faith (whilst claiming ‘evidence’) to the conclusion that functionality and independant ingenuity had nothing to do with it.

    In sum, I think you have approached the issue of NZ prehistory with a remarkably porous grasp of the tons of evidence readily available and have continued on a tunnel-vision quest of self perpetuating denial. You ask Scott if he has ever gotten out of his seat and conducted research, well, I might ask you the same thing. Have you ever surveyed or excavated using scientific methodology, or, rather, have you merely walked around the landscape spouting rhetoric and deciding that your own incredibley subjective interpretations are the ‘true history of New Zealand’?

     
14. Martin Doutré, 28. November 2008, 10:27
    

    I just got back from Ngati-Hotu country and can now deal with Scott Hamilton’s latest load of nonsense.

    I see, Scott, that in your new rave, you’re now some kind of self-professed authority on the English language, lording over the great unwashed and correcting our uncouth use of words. This time, according to you, I’m showing my “backwoods” and “redneck” underbelly by using the word “Tohungas”, complete with the letter “S” to indicate the plural.

    I guess it doesn’t matter that authors like Maui Pomare (Legends of the Maori) or Tiaki Hikawera Mitira (Takitimu), etc., etc., used the plural form “Tohungas” throughout their works. Were they backwoods-rednecks too?
    From your lofty perspective, I guess use of the terms “Gurus” or “Shamans”, etc., to indicate plurality is also grammatically incorrect. Please alert the worldwide community immediately, so that all can fall into line with your new rules for the English language.

    This Xmas, someone please get “Great-Scott” Hamilton that “T” shirt with the slogan, “I’m sort of a big deal” emblazoned across it.

    Elsdon Best spent about 25-years living with Maori and undergoing training in the wharewaananga. He achieved the status of a Tohunga. If you wish to see his photographs and comparisons between the Melanesian and Polynesian Maori physical types, then go to:
    http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Bes01Maor-t1-body-d1.html

    For an excellent treatment of the wider subject of origins and migrations within and around the Pacific, go to Peter Marsh’s website at:
    http://users.on.net/~mkfenn/page6.htm

    The jury is still out on all manner of things, including some of Best’s theories, inasmuch as the much-shackled academic community has been continuously disallowed and blockaded from dealing with the wider body of evidence.

    Scott, you’re free to embrace whatever limited concepts you like and live forever in your self-imposed delusionary world. Others of us will weigh all of the evidence available in the balance and draw our own conclusions, without any bullying from control freaks like you. I earnestly hope that you never change and that you continue through life with your head stuck firmly up in a place “where the sun don’t shine”.

    I’ve had a few sessions with David Simmons, who you mention. One time over lunch at Auckland Institute & Museum I asked David about the multi-coloured hair samples from the Waitakere Rock shelter. His response was, ‘they’re around here somewhere, but you’ll never get to see them’. Another time, after a lengthy discussion about the history, periodic renovations and design-architecture of the Crosshouse of Miringa te Kakara, David looked me squarely in the eye and in stern, paternalistic fashion admonished, ‘let Maori history be anything Maori want it to be’.
    David was obviously working from your same post-modernist, sociological philosophy, whereas I’m only interested in “warts & all” history and none of the touchy-feely, new-age or PC embellishments that idiots and non-scientists have introduced into the mix.

    While on the subject of the “red hair” so often seen on human remains in our burial caves or on living specimens of Maori, you pretend to know something on the subject and call attention to my:
    “silly claims about red hair somehow equalling Euroepan (sic) ancestry, ignorance about what happens to bodies when they decompose” (see quote above).

    Dr. Thor Heyerdahl investigated the subject of changes to hair colouration post-mortem and solicited the opinions of experts Trotter* and Dawson*. Here is a quote from Heyerdahl:
    “Before I was kindly furnished with this interesting information by Trotter, the British Museum had suggested W. R. Dawson as a leading British authority to consult on the question of possible change in mummy hair. Dawson (1928, p. 127) who is earlier quoted as examining on the Pacific coast of North Chile an embalmed adult woman with “abundant light-brown hair”, was kind enough to send me his opinion as follows:
    * “From the examination of a large number of mummies both from Egypt and other countries including South America, my opinion is that hair does not undergo any marked change post-mortem. The hair of a wavy or curly individual remains curly or wavy, and that of a straight-haired person remains straight. In mummies and desiccated bodies the hair has a tendency to be crisp and brittle, but this id the natural result of the drying-up of the selacetes glands, which during life, feed fatty matter into the hairfollicles which keeps the hair supple and flexible … it seems to me very unlikely that any change in colour would take place in a body which had never been exposed to the light, …To sum up then, all the evidence I have indicates that the nature of hair does not alter after death except in becoming dry and brittle.”
    * M. Trotter, Professor of Gross Anatomy, Washington University School of Medicine: letter dated June 22, 1951
    * Dawson’s Letter dated May 21 1951.
    http://www.celticnz.co.nz/Nazca/Heyerdahl%27s%20conclusions.htm

    Scott, you really, really don’t want this inconvenient “red hair” to exist and feature in the discussion, so in deceptive fashion hope against hope that you can convince us with guile that it’s really just black hair that went red post-mortem. How about you and your ignorant cronies having a look at the FBI site, then getting back to us on the pre-colonial, multi-coloured hair from the ancient, NZ burial caves?
    http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/backissu/july2000/deedric1.htm#HumanHairs

    For true information related to the Kiore Rat and its presence in NZ for over 1000-years or more before Maori arrived, go to: http://www.onenzfoundation.co.nz/Rats.htm

     
15. Martin Doutré, 28. November 2008, 16:29
    

    Hi Edward, here are some coordinates: 35 44 58 S, 173 33 10.9 E.

    If you’d care to take your team of seasoned archaeologists to this Northland, NZ position, you’ll find the southern hubstone of a very sophisticated, dual circle, standing stone arrangement (now tumbled and under encroaching bracken), made up of very carefully placed markers.

    Some serious observations, measurements and precise work will show you had all components have been purpose-placed and that special little terraces and platforms have even been built to accommodate some standing stones on the eastern side of the site. None of the stones encountered here, whether very large to medium small, occurred naturally and all were placed for tutorials within an ancient “open air university”.

    What used to happen at this site duplicates what was happening on “standing stone circles” (which were rarely circles) all over Britain and Continental Europe, inasmuch as the ancestors of the people who put this stone arrangement in place came from that part of the world and brought many cultural idiosyncrasies with them.

    You could attempt to decipher the numerical and angle information in each component position (in relation to where it’s situated out from the hubstone), but you’d first have to learn the special parcel of factorable, scientific numbers contained in all “cousin” weights, measures & volumes of the ancient Mediterranean and Europe. Some values relate to the duration of astronomical cycles (solar and lunar). Other values relate to navigation and the equatorial circumference of the Earth (for positional plotting at sea). Once you know the system, sites like this are very readable, whether in Europe, North & South America, Easter Island or all over New Zealand.

    This valley and its high points are littered with surveying markers associated with the ancient school and so is the next valley north.
    See: http://www.celticnz.co.nz/Waitapu_Valley/Waitapu1.htm

    As for your 1500 AD kick-off date for the building of, maybe, 10-20,000 defensive enclosures (many huge), canal systems (massive excavations) and everything else across the length and breadth of the country, see if you can come up with a workable computer model. It is utterly impossible under the laughable academic scenario of 200 people, including 50 women arriving here in 1300 AD or later to have built even a minuscule percentage of this stuff.

    Also, please have the sign removed from the entrance of huge and laboriously built Koru PA in Taranaki (the stone PA), which says it was built in 1000 AD. Heck! … according to you and your learned PC professors, that’s 500-years before there were any signs of human impacts upon the New Zealand landscape.
    See: http://www.celticnz.co.nz/Koru%20PA.htm

     
16. Edward, 28. November 2008, 22:45
    

    Martin,
    Thanks for the directions, will be working in Northland in a few months so perhaps i’ll have a quick look. As for the logic behind your construction scenario, i’m afraid I dissagree. Pouerua pa for example, is at the extreme scale of earthworks and has been laboriously researched over the last decade by Doug Sutton et. al. (1993,1994,2003). This included spatial analysis of features in a materialist type framework (i.e. social organisation and change through time can only be seen by patterning generated in the archaeological record over time, an issue which you seem to often overlook by assuming social units as static). The temporal and spatial patterning of kainga and the larger landscape as a whole (utilising various kinds of analytical tools) points towards dynamic social organisation where different construction events were carried out by smaller groups sporatically over time, rather than a large scale and single combined effort. Other large settlements are known to have been built relatively late by Maroi, such as Kohika, a lake village in the Bay of Plenty (Geoffrey Irwin 2004). Add to this a large number of other examples (i.e. Volcanic cone pa and headland pa in Auckland Isthmus) and you have plenty of well documented evidence of landscape use and settlement pattern which conforms to the ‘orthodox’ dates. Note also, moreoften than not earthwork modifications are situated on strategic and workable topograhies (again, volcanic cones, headlands etc.). I just don’t get you’re logic about this…I think its quite feasable (all the evidence aside) that Maori have affected the landscape in a matter of a few hundred years.

    You speak of ‘astro-archaeology’ and measuring the distribution of items across a site/landscape, yet make no attempt whatsoever to first establish if the ‘features’ are the result of cultural or natural phenomenon, and if the former, whether they have been subject to cultural or natural post-depositional transforms. Likewise you throw around dates based upon nothing but analogy with a culture far removed in terms of temporality, material culture, genetics, language (yes i’ve seen your discussions on your website), and geography…where are you’re C14/thermoluminescence/etc. dates and the corrosponding calibrations? Where are your stratigraphic/excavation records? I’m afraid I have no choice but to take what you say with the hugest grain of salt as you seem to skip over methodology, depositional and post-depositional issues, and every other aspect of archaeological or anthropological current practice. I cannot grasp how you can claim to be an ‘archaeologist’ of sorts without conducting research using scientific methodologies. Perhaps if you did, you might be taken a little more seriously.

    Lastly, with regard to my “learned PC professors” and I, I do wish you would stop accusing us all of conspiracy. You do not know me or how hard I work to understand the past. One of the most important things to me is the pursuit of knowledge and truth through the evidence, that is why I became an archaeologist. Theories and disciplines themselves evolve over time as new evidence and analytical breakthroughs come to light. I do not claim to know the absolute truth of anything, but I know what the evidence points to and i’m afraid in its current state your version of the past just isn’t backed up by enough strong and varied evidence. You cannot possibly expect me to throw out the window the evidence arrived at over the last half century or more which makes the ‘orthodox’ view pretty damned compelling, not to mention my own personal experience. That is why it is the ‘orthodox’ view, there is culmulative and irrefutable evidence. I am open to new evidence, and new interpretations IF they can be backed up with sound PRIMARY evidence (not subjective ethnographies alone). I also think different perspectives help keep academia from stagnating, but like i’ve said it must be compelling evidence to effect a paradigm shift. I am afraid that, while entertaining, your approach is lacking in scientific method, critical thinking, and even any consistent argument; you tend to swing from linguistics (which on your website you admit to knowing very little about) to human biology and physiology (which I likewise doubt you have a solid grasp of) and from Egyptians to Celts to Native Americans and so on…its a little hard to pin down who exactly you are talking about and thus makes your theory very unstable. Rather than a thematic or methodological appraoch you just try to ‘fit’ as much in as you possibly can in a questionable attempt to make a compelling argument.

    I sincerely suggest you do you’re homework before spouting more rhetoric about archaeologists conspiring against you, as you seem to be VERY selective in what you read, I suggest journal articles like those in American Antiquity, Archaeological Science, Current Anthropology etc. although you may well see them as part of the conspiracy as well. At the very least you should research what your ‘academic enimies’ are up to so as to construct a more educated argument. It is a constant annoyance when people claim to be open minded, then resort to notions of “they’re out to cover it all up” when someone does not agree with them. It seems very egotistical and aggressive when all one really needs to do is weigh up the evidence. As i’ve said, I am open to new perspectives IF they are backed up by compelling evidence. If the evidence was strong enough to back up your theory, and thus effect a paradigm shift, I would be happy to admit that I was wrong, as whatever the consequences the pursuit of knowledge (truth) would have been advanced. The difference then between you and I is that my position is based on whatever the evidence points to, while your position is based on stoic belief and rejection of any conflicting evidence, no matter how compelling.

    Again, thank you for your directions, and I have not meant to attack you personally, I just don’t agree with your conclusions or your methods.

    Regards,
    Edward

     
17. Martin Doutré, 29. November 2008, 15:34
    

    Hi Edward, you complain about my methodology. I don’t dig on archaeological sites, as I don’t want to disturb anything. I only take measurements and do angle work using a theodolite. Most of the time I’m studying overseas sites, like those throughout Britain, which were very precisely surveyed by individuals like Prof. Alexander Thom. I use AutoCAD and a raft of very useful electronic surveying tools that have recently become available to measure distances and angles within standing stone sites or geometric earth-mound complexes, etc., or to track surveying related structures (in straight lines) for many miles across the terrain.

    I do comparative analysis in an effort to detect any use of the selfsame distance and angle values on similar sites in countries separated by the vast oceans. I trace the movements of a highly mobile group of interrelated cousin peoples across the world by the mathematics that they very deliberately and precisely left in the landscapes on several continents and landmasses. Wherever they settled long-term, they invariably set up standing stone arrangements or other types of land marked geometries that preserved their sciences of navigation, astronomical cycles, the lunisolar calendar, etc. Finding and decoding those sites is my primary focus.

    As it turns out, the kind of research I do is more in the field of surveying and an archaeologist probably wouldn’t know what to look for unless he or she had a surveying background. That’s probably why members of your profession can’t see what’s so vividly on our landscape.

    For other types of constructions, like defensive enclosures, I visit them when possible and compare their features to similarly styled structures overseas. For sites like Koru PA (the stone PA) in Taranaki I’m more interested in the standing stone circle that sits beside it and the overland alignment system that begins at the hubstone, then marches over several hillocks and valleys precisely towards the highest pinnacle peak of Mt. Taranaki.

    Unlike yourself or Scott, I take the oral histories of the Maori elders very seriously. If they say that the urukehu & kiri-puwhero tribes lived here or there and taught them this or that, then I’m very inclined towards believing them and look for traces of those earlier “strangers” accordingly.

    I would suggest that most modern archaeologists can’t see the forest for the trees. To find the evidence of pre-Maori occupation you have to look into, what you consider to be, exclusively, Maori culture itself. The pre-Maori sites and artefacts were all absorbed by the Maori conquerors. Some anomalous sites, like the standing stone marker arrangements and surveying related structures, tend to stand conspicuously apart from the general array, but predominantly, when you’re looking at Maori culture, structures and artefacts you’re actually looking at Patu-paiarehe and Turehu culture.

    When your carbon 14 dates derived from testing show up as too old, the results, traditionally, get fudged to bring the dates into the acceptable Maori era. Anything older has to be discarded as untrue and this approach to so-called science in New Zealand has been employed for years, with numerous examples that could be cited.

    I’ve seen incised or hollowed out stone structures that were exposed from underground only recently, which formerly sat undisturbed beneath tephra ash layering from the 186 AD explosion of Taupo. But according to you, there was no-one in the country in 186 AD.

    The initial carbon dating results out of the Waipoua Forest dig were “adjusted” forwards many hundreds of years to bring them into line with the acceptable Maori era of occupation. Ned Nathan of the Waipoua Forest Archaeological Trust exclaimed, within earshot of all, including Noel Hilliam of the Dargaville Maritime Museum, ‘that’s 500-years before we got here’, as he saw the carbon dating results for the first time. Noel also got to read many of the original dates mentioned within the otherwise secret report by looking over the shoulder of an archaeologist scrutinising it.

    One of the greatest archaeological travesties relates to the years of careful, by the book, work undertaken by Russell Price and his teams on the Buddo farm at Poukawa, Hawkes Bay. At this site “slowly accumulated” evidence showed clear signs of human occupation of New Zealand below the undisturbed ash layer of the Waimihia volcanic eruption of 1350 BC. Here’s an excerpt from a “Statement of Belief” signed off by four of New Zealand’s top scientists:
    ‘W A Pullar of Soil Bureau, Whakatane, visited the site earlier this year, examined ash layers contained within peat and collected radiocarbon samples from above and below the ash layers. The dates from these confirm his identification of the Taupo and Wamihia pumice ashes’

    ‘The controversy over ‘water-laid and air-laid ash was settled in a few sentences…’

    ‘Within the peat are two pumice layers; the lower about 1½ inches thick, has a sand-size lower half and a fine silt-size upper. In the exposure we saw it was entirely air-laid. About a foot above the rhyolite ash horizon is a second layer of course grit-sized rhyolite pumice lapilli; this is only about ¼ inch thick in the higher parts of the wedge, but is irregularly thickened lower down. In these lower parts the bulk of the lapilli are rounded and the thickening is clearly due to transport of lapilli by water, perhaps lake water. In the higher parts the lapilli are angular and occur with sand and dust grade particles and is clearly air-laid although continuous with the water-laid part’.

    ‘A series of post holes at all levels also spoke eloquently to the scientists. Speaking of one such hole the Statement says that…’

    ‘The post was ca 4″ in diameter, had rotted off and the hole then infilled before the Taupo ash-fall…Similar post holes are reported below the Waimihia ash with the ash continuous across the top…The post hole we saw has every appearance of being undisturbed, and convincingly demonstrates human occupation of the site prior to the Taupo shower…The discoveries of artefacts and ovens…below one or other of the ash showers give a similar demonstration’.

    ‘After discussing a likely geological history of the area the Statement gets straight into conclusions…’

    ‘Occupation of this site has continued over a long period. The older occupation appears to have commenced prior to the commencement of the peat formation and hence also before the water level of ancient Lake Poukawa had reached its highest level. If the rate of peat formation has been substantially uniform peats commenced forming at about ‘post’-glacial sea level maximum, say 4,500 years ago. The stratigraphically lowest discoveries lie below this peat and may conceivably pre-date ca 4,500 years ago’. ‘The site demonstrates human occupation of this area of much greater antiquity than anything previously anticipated’.

    ‘It does not yet, however, demonstrate anything about the ethnological relationships of the earlier inhabitants and the later Maoris. Although the stratigraphically lowest material is all of a flaked nature, artefacts of this type are cosmopolitan and persisted in the Neolithic cultures, so do not necessarily indicate a Paleaeolithic culture…’

    Because the results obtained were unacceptable to the powers that be, they sent in hatchet man, Bruce McFadgen to utterly discredit Price’s work and the carefully arrived at conclusions of the leading scientists of the day:

    ‘Thus all Price’s post holes became ‘root channels of old trees’. Disking of the area in the past mixed introduced snails and pig bones with extinct heron and notornis remains, fooling everyone in the process. Tree roots made the ‘file marks’ noted on some old bones. After the land was raised by the 1931 earthquake and the peat began to dry out, it cracked, and allowed surface material to fall down to sub-ash levels – in every case. The shrinking ground was also responsible for all broken bird bones as well. It was all too pat’.

    ‘Mc Fadgen’s conclusion was that ‘because the peat is cracked, and things have fallen down the cracks, and because the site has been bulldozed and disked, and artefacts have been disturbed, the Poukawa site does not provide evidence for the antiquity of man in New Zealand, and is extremely misleading’.

    He further stated that the site ‘was probably occupied between 150 and 300 years ago’ and ‘there is no evidence for human occupation before the Taupo pumice eruption’. (see Chain of Evidence, by John Tasker).

    Thanks for the suggestion that I do more reading. I have McFadgen’s report and many others in my collection.

    Similar hatchet jobs have recently been attempted on Holdaway’s dating research on the Kiore rat. The public have been lulled into the false-belief that Janet Wimhurst’s research was based upon redating Holdaway’s samples, which was a lie. Holdaway complained:

    “My data indicate some kind of visit by transients about AD 200… during which Pacific rats were introduced. The persistent miscitation of my data and views is rather annoying. She [Wilmshurst] cannot have been referring to the SAME rat remains (the term “re-dating” is completely misleading because the rat bones are totally consumed in the dating process: dating another rat bone does NOT re-date the first one. That would seem to be common logic)…” (Email to Kerry Bolton 5/6/08).

    A few years ago a Northland, researcher, Shaun Reilly, raised a lot of this evidence about pre-Maori settlement before the Northland Conservation Board (Department of Conservation). In a newspaper article by journalist Leighton Keith it was reported that, ‘Northland Conservation Board Chairman, Lew Ritchie said most board members were aware this evidence existed, but the board was too busy to investigate further’.

    Sorry Edward, but many members of the public, including myself, have long-since lost all confidence in ever hearing the truth from mainstream archaeologists or associated, politically-aligned professional bodies, so we’ll do the work ourselves that you can’t or won’t do. If your profession, regionally, ever decides to do the real stuff, then we’ll go back to being beer-swilling couch potatoes and let you get on with it.

    Best wishes,

    Martin.

     
18. Edward, 30. November 2008, 13:31
    

    Martin,
    As I said, I think you need to read a little more widely (especially articles within the last 20 years both here and offshore). If you did you would realise that archaeologists do infact survey, it is the way in which we locate and record the context of the archaeological record, so I think, as i’ve said, you obviously just refuse to read anything which does not fit with your worldview. Try reading a book called ‘archaeological reseach’ by P.N. Peregrine (2001) which is an American book (as you prob wont read anything published in NZ anyway unless its 60+ years old). In archaeological practice (and i’ll go through the basics of it since apparently you don’t know what we do) in any research there are basic stages. The first involves a desktop study or lterary review including CRITIQUE (including source, context, how strong the argument is, bias etc.), followed by field work survey (which can be the basis of analysis in and of itself), and then followed sometimes by excavation, although this is rarer than the first two. This is a very basic synopsis but it will have to do. There are many different analytical techniques which can be used and different questions are often asked of the data (scientific methodology often involves trying to disprove your own theory, rather than merely targeting the data you want to try and make it fit your hypothesis as you do).

    Another point I want to make on methodology is you cite the use of autocad and other types of spatial software (perhaps if your read a bit more widely you would be aware of the fact that archaeologists increasingly use GIS (geographical information systems) and other programmes and tools such as autocad, in fact there is a type of archaeology now called landscape archaeology which focuses on GIS analysis (try looking up ‘landscape archaeology and GIS’ (Chapman 2006), which is printed in the UK (seen as you wont read anything published here)).
    Your methods are merely tools used to collect and arrange a type of data, and you have not stated explicity what data and how you collected it, just that you ‘put it in’ autocad. I’m afraid there are major issues to do with data collection (which have come from outside the discipline of archaeology) and interpretation. Have you tested your data in different ways, or have you just made it fit with your hypothesis? (an activity which is incredibly un-scientific). Again there is an epistomological issue; are data there waiting to be collected (an essentialist philosophy) or are they generated by arbitrary human measurements? It is important to think CRITICALLY about data and test it in various ways to mitigate the risk of bias. (for a treatment on this issue see ‘Archaeological Theory: Who sets the Agenda?’ by Wylie1993). There are entire volumes directed at data collection and analysis (‘Unit Issues in Archaeology: Measuring time, space, and material’ by Ramenofsky and Steffen (eds) 1998). Have you done your homework on ANY of this, or do you merely keep refering to the same old outdated resources which have since been proven to have major problematic issues?

    You say that archaeologists cannot see the forest from the trees, yet you cannot even understand the most basic principals of archaeological enquiry such as depositional and post-depositional issues, you have no idea what I was talking about when I asked you if you had taken into account cultural versus natural phenomena or cultural vesrus natural post-depositional transforms-an issue pretty damned important when addressing anthropological questions concerning material remains!! You claim you are some kind of ‘expert’ yet you don’t even understand archaeological methodologies and analytical techniques, you fail to think critically about any source (classical students likewise are trained to think critically about sources i.e. Homer, Plato etc.), your theory is backed up only by your own approach rather than a holistic approach (archaeology, paleoecology, linguistics, biology, geography, geology, chemistry etc etc.), and, worst of all, when you don’t understand proffessional practices or ‘believe’ the tons of evidence arrived at, you grasp at straws by saying ‘every expert is wrong, they are all conspiring, and I know better than anyone’…an incredibly egotistical viewpoint. Can you not understand that sometimes (specialist) education can only be taught by experts, or, using your logic, I suppose you could be a self educated and self proffessed psychologist, physicist, brain surgeon, genetisist, chemist, linguist, engineer, the list goes on…., as well as an archaeologist? It takes FIVE years of intensive study in method and theory in archaeology and other disciplines before you can even start to practice archaeology in the real world, and yet you proclaim that we’re all lumbering fools and that you, in your superior ‘knowledge’, know everything. I have not meant to get as heated in this discussion as I have, but it is incredibly insulting for an untrained know-it-all to accuse me and all of my colleagues of conspiracy. Your self righteous indignation to anything academia has to offer is appalling, at the very least you could try going to university yourself and taking classes in archaeology so that you have at least some clue of what I have been talking about. It could only make your arguments stronger (in that you would stop making invalid and simply untrue comments about archaeological practice), or as I asked in the previous post, at least read a little more widely and get an understanding or context of both sides of the ‘argument’ (for lack of a better word), rather than citing the same old outdated sources and references to ’secret reports’ (funny how if they are secret you can write so much about them, perhaps you are omnipotent?). It is very disturbing how you are transmitting fallacies and misinformation to the public and dressing them up as ’science’ and ‘truth’, if you have set out to uneducate some memebers of the public than well done, you’re up there with pseudo-psychologists and the rest of those who have effectively damaged society.

    Regards,
    Edward

     
19. Jim, 30. November 2008, 23:58
    

    Edward,

    I have been following this debate since I stumbled upon it early this week and in my humble oponion Scott and Yourself have elevated Martin to cult status.

    Congratulations.

    No one in there right mind would advocate celts peopled New Zealand prior to the Maori. But you two seem to be so preoccupied by this idea, well, there now seems to be a DOUBT.

    Logically New Zealand would have to have been occupied prior to 1AD but not by celts, I dont think . It’s nearest neighbours Australia yes, New Caledonia Lapita, yes, and Tonga lapita pottery. The Tongans dont have a problem and they have a wonderful culture and were once the the center of a polyniaian empire.

    Jim

     
20. Edward, 1. December 2008, 8:03
    

    Jim,

    I don’t have a doubt, but there is a following behind this work and its upsetting as the fallacies of it fuel the kind of subtle racism and lack of understanding I run into every day. Its amazing how many people will suddenly become overnight archaeologists and tell me of the ‘proof’ they’ve stumbled across. I only responded because education is important to me, and works like Doutre’s undermine education. One reason is that pseudo-science books are increasingly popular, people are often more inclined to read them than actual archaeological papers as the real thing is much less sensationalized. Besides, I think i’m done with this thread, it will just go on forever.

    Edward

     
21. Martin Doutré, 2. December 2008, 16:00
    

    Hi Edward,
    You seem to be spiralling more and more out of control in your somewhat vain, assumptions and off-subject illusions about, what you consider to be, my approach to research work. Instead of doing your Don Quixote impression and attacking windmills that exist in your own mind only and no-where else, why not come back down to Earth and deal with the real subject matter? Here’s a list of questions where all you have to do is answer a simple Yes or No.
    1. In 1894, when Haoni Nahe recounted his oral history knowledge concerning Rotorua’s white (urukehu) tribes, was he lying and just making it all up? … Yes / No.
    2. Was Takiwa Tauarua lying when he gave a full account of the defeat of the white Ngati Hotu tribe at Pukekaikiore (Hill of the feast of rats) and hanging the legs of the defeated urukehu people from poles? … Yes / No.
    3. Was John Te H. Grace lying or deluded when he wrote full physical descriptions of the white Ngati Hotu people in his book Tuwharetoa? … Yes / No.
    4. Are all of those testimony references to the white Turehu or Patu-paiarehe, as found in the Minute Books of the Native Land Court, just “big porkies” and perjury? Yes / No.
    5. Did early maritime explorers to New Zealand write about the light-skinned, red-headed Maori people that they often saw? Yes / No.
    6. Does the term “Waka Blonds” refer to the lineage and recurring incidence of “living specimens” of light-skinned, red-headed, non-colonial European people found amongst the Maori iwis of the 19th & 20th centuries? Yes / No.
    7. Have the bodies of these red-headed people been continuously observed in burial caves since the beginning of the colonial era? Yes / No.
    8. Were braided samples of this multi-coloured hair, taken from the Waitakere Rock Shelter, once on display at Auckland Museum? Yes / No.
    9. Was Sir Peter Buck lying when he recounted the Maori proverb about the white ancestors? Yes / No.
    10. Do the moai statues of Easter Island display Caucasoid facial features and were they crowned with bright red lava top-knots to represent the hair colour of the builders? Yes / No.
    11. Do the Moai statues of Easter Island show the downwards curved Polynesian “rocker jaw”, which is the most prominent identifying feature of Polynesian physiology? Yes / No.
    12. Was Tuakau contractor, Maurice Tyson, lying when he said that a burial cavern, containing skeletons in excess of 7-feet tall was found at Waikaretu in recent years when excavations were being done for a road extension? Yes / No.
    13. Was Maurice Tyson further lying when he said that mainstream professionals, arriving in from Waikato & Auckland Universities, slapped a moratorium over the find, requiring that it be kept secret from the New Zealand public (to the disgust of the whole roading gang and many others in the community)? Yes / No.
    14. Was a Caucasian women’s skull, carbon dated to be about 350-years, old found in the Wairarapa recently? Yes / No.
    15. Is there a Pohutukawa tree that is more than 300-years old at La Corunna, Spain? Yes / No.
    16. Was a Roman coin dating to 7 BC found during excavations on the banks of the Taylor River, near Blenheim, NZ, in December 2003? Yes / No.
    17. Is the Maori Hei-Tiki found from Egypt to Mexico-Peru to New Zealand? Yes / No.
    18. Was a Spanish helmet dredged up out of Wellington Harbour in about 1904 and is it presently in the collection of Te Papa Museum? Yes / No.
    19. Are there official records to indicate that other Spanish helmets and goods have been discovered at Levin, the Kapiti Coast, the Bay of Plenty and Poutu Peninsula? Yes / No.
    20. In 1840, did Reverend William Colenso find Maori women cooking potatoes in a bronze, Tamil ship’s bell and did the women tell Colenso that the bell had been in their tribe’s possession for many generations? Yes / No.
    21. Is the New Zealand semi-flightless bird, the Pukeko, found in the Mediterranean and South America and is one depicted climbing on papyrus stems in ancient wall paintings at Medum, Egypt? Yes / No.
    22. Do ancient “string knot” calculation or counting devices exist as artefacts in both Peru and New Zealand and are they called by the same recognisable name in both far-flung regions on opposite ends of the Pacific? Yes / No.
    23. Does the Maori myth of Mataora & Niwareka have the same origins as the Greek myth of Orpheus & Euredike? Yes / No (see: http://www.geocities.com/acgyles/myth.html ).
    24. Does the New Zealand Kumara (sweet potato) come from South America and was it anciently called the same recognisable name in regions of the Americas? Yes / No.
    25. Are ancient New Zealand bottle gourd artefacts of the same African species as found in South America? Yes / No.
    26. Do we have a great many species of anciently introduced South American flora in New Zealand? Yes / No.
    27. Are there any identical ancient words in the Maori language to words of the Egyptian or Indo-European languages? Yes / No.
    28. Is there any similarity between Maori gods and Egyptian-Mediterranean-European & Indo-Aryan gods? Yes / No.
    29. Are there any examples of old world scripts incised into New Zealand boulders? Yes / No.
    Etc., etc., ad infinitum.

     
22. Matthew, 2. December 2008, 17:50
    

    Martin.

    A large number of your questions don’t actually relate to the Celtic New Zealand Thesis (for example, number 24 has been the subject of considerable research and supports the wildly accepted thesis that the Polynesian peoples were excellent navigators and traders; you might want to investigate how the chicken got to South America…). Would you kindly prune back the questions to the more salient ones, the ones where a ‘Yes’ answer actually pertains to the Celtic New Zealand Thesis rather than the ones which pertain to interesting but explicable `anomalies’ in the historical and archaeological record.

    Cher.

    Matthew

    PS. You do know, don’t you, that the Patu-paiarehe are the local equivalent of the fey people and stories about them don’t necessarily refer to existent peoples (in the same way that stories of leprechauns and fairies in Ireland don’t refer to real creatures)?

     
23. Francis, 2. December 2008, 22:03
    

    6. Yes, but given post-contact (post Cook)miscegenation that is to be expected.
    10. No.
    14. Yes. But given that the assemblage (no other skeletal remains) is incomplete we can’t assume anything from its discovery.
    15. No. That’s a debunked urban myth. See Robyn Gosset’s book ‘Mysterious New Zealand.’
    17. No.
    18. Yes. Probably dropped ballast from a ship.
    20. No (mostly because it is not clear that the bell is Tamil in origin; once again, see Robyn Gosset’s book).
    21. No.
    22. Yes. Common language group in the Pacific.
    23. No.
    24. Yes. Matthew’s reply above deals with that one, though.
    26. No.
    27. Yes, but if you knew anything about linguistics you’d know that this occurs by accident. Nearly every language accidentally shares at least one word with the same meaning as an unrelated language group.
    28. Similarity yes, but no causal connection, so ultimately no.
    29. No.

     
24. Edward, 3. December 2008, 9:54
    

    Martin,
    I wasn’t going off-subject, I maintained that your methods and analysis of data has major issues/flaws. I think the ethnographic sources you refer to are much more compelling than your dismal attempts at ’science’. But the yes and no questions you ask are very loaded. For instance, someones ‘account’ of fair skinned people does not necessarily mean that they are lying any more than, as Matthew put, people in other cultures refer to fairies. There are traditions and myths which are passed down but don’t necessarily refer to reality. Or, do you believe in Zeus of the Greeks, and every other myth or tradition found in any given culture? As for the rest of your questions, most are based on early ethnographic sources, and i’ve already discussed the problems with that. I’m through sitting here typing tick-for-tack with you as I already know you are just going to continue on your self-righteous molestation of education and the evidence. Your #14 question for example refers to the recent reporting on Campbell Live and other media sources which have alot to answer for in way of ‘jumping on the public hysteria bandwagon’. It was funny how the skull was identified not only to be Caucasian, but also female, given a specific age, and also carbon dated with what can only be described as the most accurate C14 (by way of calibrated margin or error)date this country has ever seen…all based upon a partial cranium found in a high energy stream bed without any depositional context, and assessed by whom…’an expert’…I know human paleo specialists, and they didn’t examine it, so perhaps it was done by forensic personnel who were also expert C14 technicians, and could reconstruct all of the above without teeth, jaw, context of any kind etc.? You shouldn’t swallow everything you see on the news.

    As for the rest, Matthew and Francis have good point which you should think over.

    Edward

     
25. Scott, 3. December 2008, 10:42
    

    Presumably Martin Doutre wants to cry ‘Gotcha!’ when he finally forces participants in the gigantic anti-Celt conspiracy to answer ‘Yes’ to the questions he shouts from the prosecutor’s bench.

    Really, though, answering ‘Yes’ to many of Doutre’s questions proves nothing, unless one also accepts a series of premises which Doutre holds.

    Take, for instance, Doutre’s question about whether the Auckland War Memorial Museum holds red hairs found in rock shelters in the Waitakeres. A ‘Yes’ answer to this question doesn’t have to support the Celtic New Zealand thesis, simply because a) it is not only Europeans who can have red hair and b) the colour of an individual’s hair can change after death. (I would point out to Martin that the hair of a lot of the Egyptian mummies is red, but I fear that he would simply reply to by asserting that the ancient Egyptians were Celts.)

    Another pointless Doutre question concerns the possibly non-Maori skull recently discovered in the Wairarapa and dated at three hundred and fifty years old. It’s possible, though not probable, that this skull came from a European who arrived in the North Island before Cook – I’ve blogged about the subject at:
    http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2008/08/rongotute-more-than-story.html

    But how exactly does the fact that a European woman might have been knocking round in the North Island in the 1600s prove that Celts arrived here in massive numbers five thousand years ago and built a huge advanced cilivisation, complete with universities and observatories? It’s an immense leap of faith from the first assertion to the second.

    It’s interesting to reflect on the case of the Wairarapa skull, because it actually undermines Doutre’s claims about a gigantic conspiracy to suppress New Zealand history. The skull was discovered, scrutinised by a coroner, and sent off for radiocarbon dating and examination by three specialists. It is now being looked after by a museum curator in the Wairarapa, who is consulting with local iwi, and further tests are likely.

    The curator who is holding on to the skull is quite open-minded about its origins – he has cited the legend of Rongotute, a European ship which is supposed to have been wrecked somewhere on the south coast of the North Island a few decades before the arrival of Cook, as possible support for the idea that the skull really did belong to a white woman who lived here three hundred and fifty years ago. On the other hand he acknowledges that radiocarbon dating does not deal well with the relatively recent past, that the experts were divided on whether the skull is Maori or non-Maori, and that even if the tests were accurate and the skull is European that doesn’t prove the European was living here in the 1600s – after all, it was reasonably common for better-off nineteenth century European settlers to keep old skulls in their lounges and studies as curios.

    All in all, we don’t have a very effective conspiracy here, do we? If Martin Doutre’s allegations were correct, then a crack team from the United Nations/Ministry of Maori Affairs would have turned up at Masterton Museum in the ninja suits, confiscated the skull, and buried it in some obscure place. Radiocarbon tests would never have been allowed, and craniologists would never have been allowed to inspect the skull.

    There are numerous other examples of controversies about Kiwi prehistory which would never have been allowed to happen, if Doutre’s grand conspiracy to suppress the truth about the past existed. In an irrelevant reply to my discussion of the evidence from kiore DNA for the settlement of the Chathams from the South Island Doutre points readers towards a rambling piece on the One New Zealand Foundation website written by his mate, ‘Dr’ Kerry Bolton.

    Bolton’s piece is supposed to be a discussion of the controversy which has raged since the radiocarbon test Richard Holdaway did back in the ’90s on some kiore bones found in the Hawkes Bay. Holdaway’s bones were found to be about 1800 years old, upsetting the idea that New Zealand was not settled until about one thousand years ago. Many interesting discussions of Holdaway’s findings have been written – I’ve dicussed some of them here:
    http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2008/01/dem-bones.html

    If Doutre and Kerry Bolton were right about a huge conspiracy to suppress history, then the debate about Holdaway’s findings would never have occurred. The reason why Holdaway’s tests have proved controversial is not because they challenge a politically correct team of control freaks, but because they contradict a lot of the hard evidence we have that shows humans made little or no impact on the environment of these islands before about a thousand years ago (I discussed some of this evidence in the Open Letter which started this debate).

    Kerry Bolton is keen to associate himself with Richard Holdaway, but he doesn’t seem to realise that Holdaway actually accepts the evidence that no significant population of humans existed here until about a thousand years ago. From the time he first published his test results, Holdaway has said that he thinks that the people who brought kiore here around 200 AD either died off quickly, or else (to use his fine phrase) ‘dropped their rats off and left’. Holdaway’s writings on the rat bone controversy give no support at all to Bolton and Doutre’s thesis that white people arrived here thosuands of years ago in large numbers and constructed an advanced civilisation.

    There is a certain pathos in the way that Bolton and Doutre on the one hand condemn academics and museum workers, and insist that these people are part of an enormous conspiracy, and on the other hand try desperately to associate themselves with any scholar whom they can convince themselves might be halfway sympathetic to the Celtic NZ thesis. In my Open Letter I pointed out the way that Bolton and Doutre misused the writing of Paul Moon and the archaeological work of Michael Taylor to suggest that both these people are in some way supportive of the notion that Celts are the tangata whenua of New Zealand. Bolton’s attempt to associate himself with Holdaway is no less pathetic.

    Perhaps the most bizarre expression of this ‘love-hate’ attitude to serious scholarship, though, comes in Bolton’s booklet ‘Ngati Hotu: the White Warrior Tribe’. This text repeats all the usual stories about a conspiracy to suppress white history by PC academics and troublemaking Maoris, and then segues seamlessly into a celebration of the fact that the Waitangi Tribunal’s Pouakani Report has supposedly acknowledged that white people lived in the central North Island first! At one moment the scholars who make up the Tribunal’s research team are anti-white racists, and in the next they are revealing the hidden history of the white race to the world!

    What the Pouakani Report actually does is discuss Ngati Hotu as an early Maori tribal grouping in the central North Island. The Tribunal does not offer one word of support for Bolton and Doutre’s belief that the Ngati Hotu were a remnant of a Celtic people who sailed to New Zealand thousands of years ago, invented the hei tiki and the carved meeting house, built observatories and established universities, and were eventually driven into the hinterlands of the country by a few wakaloads of new arrivals.

    In my interview with Matthew Dentith on Sunday (http://95bfm.co.nz/default,189745.sm) I talked about the Celtic NZ thesis as a sort of ironic unconscious homage to the cultural achievements of Maori and the political achievements of the Maori renaissance of recent decades. Bolton’s attempt to associate himself with the Waitangi Tribunal he despises shows how weird and ironic the homage really can be.

     
26. Martin Doutré, 7. December 2008, 10:16
    

    Hi Scott,

    You continue to excel in your role as a loose-mouthed rabble-rouser and have made some amazing accusations and faux-pas in the last week or two, while pushing your own agenda. Your Marxist handlers or associates must surely be ready to ditch you by now, in consideration of the ridicule you’re attracting to yourself.

    I found the 95 bfm interview particularly telling, in consideration of your embarrassing lack of scholarship. While trying to pass yourself as a good ol’ home town boy, endowed with a generous smattering of rural common sense, you told us all the story about your fencing mate, Steve. He’d told you he’d found the skeletons of very tall people in a cave further down country.

    Your exact words were: ‘… he’d been doing some work in the limestone country – a beautiful area south of Port Waikato … and he claimed to have found the bones of some ancient giant people. At the time I didn’t know THAT BONES STRETCH AS DECOMPOSITION TAKES PLACE AND AFTERWARDS, SO THAT YOU CAN FIND THE BONES, WHICH, IF YOU MEASURED THEM, CAN APPEAR TO BE FROM SOMEBODY WHO WAS TEN FOOT TALL’.

    Really? … what an amazing piece of scientific deduction, which means you don’t have to waste your time going to the cave with Steve to find out if he’s telling the truth or not!

    So, what you’re saying is that, after the heart stops pumping blood, and all circulation of renewable supplies ceases to feed the cells, the bones of an average stature dead person can, thereafter, stretch themselves out to produce a skeleton ten foot tall? Where in tarnation did you get this X-files stuff from? Please, please quote your source for our general elucidation.

    I doubt that Mikey Havoc would have given you such a free reign on 95 bfm, as he and Jeremy have visited a number of anomalous, ancient standing stone sites in Northland and even made an excellent little documentary about the sites, their design layout or astronomical attributes.

    Over the past week or two I’ve observed how you work as a “no holds barred”, smear merchant, continuously lying or distorting facts to score points by fair means or foul. Your deceitful tactics are too transparent to go unnoticed but, later, you can’t substantiate what you say or write.

    Please provide the quotes from the E-Local article which prove your following claim:
    “The article repeatedly suggests that Auckland University of Technology historian Paul Moon supports the view that Celts or another white people settled New Zealand before the Maori, who ate them.”

    While you’re at it, please substantiate your “notion” claim, as stated below.
    “In my Open Letter I pointed out the way that Bolton and Doutre misused the writing of Paul Moon and the archaeological work of Michael Taylor to suggest that both these people are in some way supportive of the notion that Celts are the tangata whenua of New Zealand”.

    Really? I’ve had a number of exchanges with Paul Moon since 2004, mostly over “treaty” issues and I know Paul’s stance on these things. I’d never be stupid enough to suggest that he entertained any such views, but I guess it’s you’re job to be creative in your slander.

    One of your big problems is that you start running off at the mouth before your brain’s in gear. So, now Paul Moon, (and Michael Taylor for that matter), has to needlessly back-peddle away from a public arena accusation concerning supposed beliefs in Celts or similar beings in New Zealand before Maori. The sole source of this comes from overly-imaginative irritant, Scott Hamilton and no-one else in all Christendom.

    Why don’t you see if you can tone down the diarrhoea of the mouth and constipation of the brain sufficiently to make statements that have some semblance of accuracy?

    You repeatedly employ the “guilt by association” tactic and use my friendship with researcher Kerry Bolton as your proof that I’m somehow a Nazi. I met Kerry for the first time last year while I was following the Treaty 2 U propaganda exhibit from city to city and he was very kind and supportive of our campaign.

    Being the lousy researcher that you are, you’ve obviously based your accusations about Kerry Bolton on a defunct and withdrawn doctoral thesis by Roel van Leeuwen of Waikato University called “Dreamer’s of the Dark”. You give yourself away fully by using the statement “New Zealand’s best known neo-Nazi”, which, is taken directly from Leeuwen’s thesis and has, to my knowledge, never been stated elsewhere except by you.

    The copious quantity of inaccuracies in this utterly discredited thesis has led to a major complaint (lodged with the Ombudsman) against Van Leeuwen, as well as senior lecturer and co-supervisor, Dov Bing (who was supposed to check it for accuracy before acceptance). Dr. Dennis Green is cited as having suggested the idea for the thesis. The defamatory content of the thesis caused Kerry Bolton and another individual (who had been interviewed and grossly misquoted) to threaten legal action against the university

    Part of Leeuwen’s “Nazi” accusation against Bolton was referenced to have come from the works of Paul Spoonley of Massey University. Spoonley is supposed to have written that Bolton joined the Nazi party at the age of 14. When confronted directly, however, Spoonley could provide no such reference or proof.

    Firstly, Kerry Bolton has never been a Nazi in his life, let alone, as you erroneously put it, New Zealand’s leading Neo Nazi. Amongst other irrelevant dribble, Van Leeuwen also said Bolton had been raised a Mormon, when in fact Bolton had only looked at the religion as a young man for about 3-months then moved on to other things. Bolton was also accused of being a Satanist by correspondent Don Oorst here in Scoop (see above). This also is based upon Van Leeuwen’s thesis and the fact that Kerry checked out a range of religious ideas, only to abandon them later, over an exploratory period of his life.

    As it turns out, Kerry is just a nice, quiet, articulate and down to earth bloke who is very friendly and approachable. I think he works as a librarian. Kerry has a developed conscience and, like so many other New Zealanders, detests the deliberate campaigns of social carnage that has been unleashed on New Zealand during the past 35-years or so.

    We’ve seen a drove of sociologist types and Marxist control freaks infiltrate all of our government departments and institutions of higher education. One of the greatest scams perpetrated by these activists upon the people of New Zealand was the utter bastardisation of our benign and friendly Treaty of Waitangi, wherein it was transformed from being a document of unification to a document of apartheid. Running alongside the distortion of our treaty was the distortion of our true history and a clampdown on freedoms to do proper archaeology, etc. To see how New Zealanders got screwed and progressively lost their treaty rights, see: http://www.celticnz.org/TreatyBook/Precis.htm

    Again Scott, you write mischievously and deceptively the following commentary:
    “Kerry Bolton is keen to associate himself with Richard Holdaway, but he doesn’t seem to realise that Holdaway actually accepts the evidence that no significant population of humans existed here until about a thousand years ago. From the time he first published his test results, Holdaway has said that he thinks that the people who brought kiore here around 200 AD either died off quickly, or else (to use his fine phrase) ‘dropped their rats off and left’.”

    Well, Scott if it wasn’t for the fact that you’re so crooked you can’t lie straight in bed, you would have admitted that Bolton displayed the entirety of Holdaway’s email response, which very clearly stated that:
    “As usual, Landcare misrepresented my research and results: I have never advocated a 200 BC colonization or even visitation. In fact, I was advocating an AD 1290 settlement before they were. That of course leaves open the question of TRANSIENT visits (think of Lieutenant James Cook). My data indicate some kind of visit by transients about AD 200… during which Pacific rats were introduced. The persistent miscitation of my data and views is rather annoying.
    “She [Wilmshurst] cannot have been referring to the SAME rat remains (the term “re-dating” is completely misleading because the rat bones are totally consumed in the dating process: dating another rat bone does NOT re-date the first one. That would seem to be common logic…).”

    Along with your “tall tales but true” revelations about skeletons growing over half as big again post mortem (thus dispelling the myth of the “tall ones of Port Waikato”), you’re still harping on about the red hair at Auckland Museum and intimating that it must’ve once been black. As stated, Sir Peter Buck used this multi-coloured hair as an example upon which to recount a Maori proverb. He stated:
    “In the Auckland Museum there is a hank of beautiful wavy red hair, obtained from a rock shelter near Waitakerei. That it belonged to pre-European days is proved by the root ends being plaited together and bound round with fine braid prepared from the same hair. Curiously enough, the only other specimen of hair in the same case is also bound round with fine hair braid and is dark brown in colour…As another example of the Maori belief in the inheritance of fair hair from certain ancestors, we have the proverb, ‘He aha te uru o to tamati? Kapatau he uru korito, he korako, he uru ariki no Pipi’. ‘What is the hair of your child? Were it flaxen hair or whitish, it would be the hair of high chieftainship from Pipi’. Pipi was a woman of the highest rank who flourished twenty-four generations ago and was the ancestress of the Ngati-Ira tribe” (see American Indians in the Pacific, by Thor Heyerdahl, pg. 190).

    Moreover, I’ve provided expert testimony that hair does not change colour to any significant degree post mortem if kept out of the light, nor does it deteriorate markedly in a dry environment that is conducive to preservation. It was always red, just like other samples found are white-golden, blond, auburn or hues of brown ranging to black.

    Your witch-hunt assault on the scientists who came up with a date of 350-years ago for the Caucasoid skull found in the Wairarapa is equally telling. You go into contortions to argue against the results and to cast cold water all over the find. Your reaction is one of immediate opposition to any such heresy. Personally, I consider that find to be reasonably unspectacular in consideration of the far more dynamic and complete skeletal evidence available around the country. Instead of getting your hackles up and raging like a Trotsky evangelist, why not tag along with your mate Steve and get educated by some real, tangible evidence? You could do that, of course, but any such participation would run counter to your Marxist religion, wherein “history” and its interpretation have to serve the needs of the official organs.

    I’m glad to see that some of our brave scientists are pushing the envelope and asserting their right to do proper work, despite the ever present impediment of corridor monitors like you keeping a wary eye on the passing parade and screaming blue-bloody–murder every time you see something you don’t approve of.

     
27. Scott, 8. December 2008, 12:15
    

    Martin,

    your attempts to argue that New Zealand was settled by leprechauns and giants appear credible in comparison to your attempts to deny Kerry Bolton’s oft-avowed and well-documented political beliefs.

    If Kerry Bolton has never been a Nazi, then Hitler was never a Nazi. I would be prepared to accept that Bolton is an ex-Nazi, if he or someone else showed me some proof he’d renounced his old beliefs, but there is no question at all that he has been a high-profile member of the neo-Nazi movement here for decades.

    I’ve never read the thesis you refer to, but I’ve read Spoonley’s copiously-referenced work, and what’s more I’ve read the publications produced by groups that Bolton has belonged to, like the Nationalist Workers Party, the Fascist League, and the National Front (hint: groups with names like that tend to be a little bit, you know, right wing). Bolton has also associated with fascist groups overseas, like the Adeliade Institute, which spends most of its time denying the Holocaust.

    The Waikato student magazine Nexus recently compiled a list of quotes from Bolton which gives you a fair idea of his beliefs:
    http://www.usu.co.nz/inunison/blog/kerry-bolton-the-man-the-myth-the-manmyth/

    Here’s one of the quotes Nexus uses:

    “Everyone is out for themselves, all dance around the golden calf. Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the Temple. The Pharisees had Him crucified. Hitler drove the moneychangers from the German nation. The descendants of the same Pharisees had him crucified, and are still doing so. In fact, the same criminal gang who thinks they’ve been ‘chosen’ to rule the world is crucifying our whole Western Civilisation.”

    These words come from a text Bolton wrote for the Adelaide Institute – they haven’t been concocted or misquoted by anybody. If you don’t trust them, why not take a look at the titles published by Bolton’s Renaissance press?
    http://members.fortunecity.com/nzantifa/renpress.htm

    You might like also like to note that the Renaissance Press catalogue is hosted by the National Socialist Movement of the United States. If you didn’t know, let me break it to you – ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation of ‘National Socialist’.

    As someone who writes admiring letters to David Irving, though, you ought to be familiar with the vocabulary of the fascist right.

    Your comments on hair colour and bone stretching are not worth replying to. I’m not an expert in those fields, and don’t claim to be – I am simply repeating what the experts say. These are not controversial topics. It appears that you have a couple more scholarly ‘orthodoxies’ to rail against.

    The reason I accuse you of trying to associate Paul Moon with your work is quite simple – you advise the readers of the Franklin E Local to read Moon’s new book for more information about the arguments you make for the Celtic discovery of New Zealand.

    In much the same way, you quote Michael Taylor’s report on an excavation in Taranaki in a manner which suggests that Taylor supports your belief that the bones found in that excavation belong to Celts.

    You and Bolton have been called on your attempts to associate yourselves with Moon, Taylor, Holdaway, and even the Waitangi Tribunal, and yet you can’t seem to help yourselves from invoking new imaginary allies. Now you’re suggesting that the scientists who examined the Wairarapa skull are heroically standing up for historical truth and being persecuted for their pains. It really is difficult to have a discussion with someone so utterly at odds with reality.

    You show how out of touch with reality you are when you call my post on the Wairarapa a ‘witch hunt’, rather than a summing-up of some of the implications of what is still a very enigmatic object. As I say in my post, I think the find is fascinating, and I look forward to learning more about the skull. I went to some trouble to dig up and discuss an old text on the Rongotute legend, because that legend might count as evidence for the thesis that the skull really belonged to a non-Maori women who lived in this country in the seventeenth century. If I was trying to quash the speculation about the skull’s implications, then I obviously went about it the wrong way!

    If this discussion shows nothing else, Martin, it shows how complete your own isolation from any serious scholar is. I hope that one day you’ll drop the far right buddies, the persecution complex, and the conspiracy theories, come into the real world, and start to explore the fascinating research that historians, archaeologists, curators, natural scientists, and – occasionally, believe it or not! – sociologists are doing into New Zealand history, inside and outside the academy.

     
28. Matthew, 8. December 2008, 13:48
    

    Martin Doutré has presented a list of twenty-nine questions, with the vague suggestion that these lead credence to the Celtic New Zealand thesis.

    Now, even the most casual glance reveals that a number of these questions have nothing to do with the Celtic New Zealand thesis; they merely suggest some anomalies in the historical or archaeological record. I am going to go through these one by one. I shouldn’t have to; the Burden of Proof in situations like these rest upon the holders of anomalous views; Doutré should be going out of his way to make a compelling case for his thesis rather than detracting from the received wisdom. I shouldn’t be indulging people like him, but, at the same time, lists of questions like these might be found to misrepresent and overstate the case of his wacky thesis. So, let me go through these and show that, when properly considered, the Celtic New Zealand thesis, as presented by Doutré in the comments thread of the Scoop Review of Books, is not just lacklustré, but also completely hollow.

    Question 6 refers to mixed-race (excuse the awkward and possibly inflammatory terminology; I don’t like the concept of race any more than you do but I’m also slightly wary of the term `miscegenation’ due to its pejorative use in our culture) Maori post-contact. Doutré wants us to infer that these are the result of Maori breeding with Celts long ago. I suspect such `Waka blonds’ are the result of Maori breeding with some of my ancestors, the Irish, in very recent history.

    Questions 7 & 8, 12 & 13 don’t really say anything about a Celtic pre-history to Aotearoa; we know a lot about what happens to bodies after death and both the find (assuming it is a true recollection) and the actions of the Department of Conservation fit established conventions. We don’t like to interfere with the dead in this country; it’s just good form (Also, if this suggests anything at all, it suggests Tongans. Tongans are tall. Celts really aren’t renown for their height… And Tongans are local and plausibly came over to visit. Celtics plausibly didn’t).

    Question 14 has already been covered by Scott.

    Question 15 is based on a popular urban myth; tests of the tree show it to be about two hundred years old, which makes it post-Cook.

    Questions 18 and 19 refer to the Spanish, not the Celts, so no hope for the thesis there. Question 20 refers to the Tamils, a group even more removed from the Celts than the Spanish.

    Questions 24 to 26 refer to South America. Now, a lot of interesting information has come out of both DNA and ethnographic studies to do with both the Polynesian migration around the Pacific and the Polynesians’ superior navigational technologies. We now know (due to work undertaken by people like Dr. Lisa Matisoo-Smith) that the Kumara is South American in origin and that the chicken in South America originated in South-east Asia. What this suggests is a series of trades, over a significant amount of time, that transferred the goods from one culture to the other. There is more research going in regard to this and it is all supporting the thesis that the Polynesian peoples really were excellent explorers, getting to both the coast of South America and to Madagascar.

    Okay, so that gets rid of thirteen of Doutré’s questions. What about the rest?

    Questions 1 to 4 (as well as 9) refer to the Patupaiarehe. The Patupaiarehe are the Maori fey people, fairy folk for you Celticly-inclined folk. These aren’t real peoples, even if they are treated as such by the mythology; the Irish talk about their fairies are real creatures even to this day but that doesn’t mean they have a physical existence; they, if they can be said to have some kind of existence, occupy a liminal space in the thoughts, actions and cultural activities of the people to which they belong.

    That being said, Doutré believes in leprechauns so he probably wouldn’t accept this answer to his question.

    So, with stories of the fey folk out of the way, that leaves us with ten `puzzling’ questions, which are 5, 9 to 11, 17, 21 to 23 & 27 to 29. Let’s go through them one by one.

    Doutré: 5. Did early maritime explorers to New Zealand write about the light-skinned, red-headed Maori people that they often saw?

    What does light-skinned mean? I mean really, what does it mean? The Thais, for example, think they are light-skinned compared to their neighbours. The Egyptians considered themselves light-skinned but the Romans and Greeks thought otherwise? In the absence of images it is a little hard to know what light-skinned is in reference to? The English? Other Polynesian peoples?

    As for red hair. Well, it’s not exactly an exclusively Celtic property.

    Doutré: 9. Was Sir Peter Buck lying when he recounted the Maori proverb about the white ancestors?

    I’m not going to accuse someone of lying. I don’t have the reference to hand but mere reporting of a proverb doesn’t mean the proverb is true. It’s also important to note here that Doutré has a complete double-standard here. He takes Elston Best at his word about the Moriori and ignores the fact that Sir Peter Buck disputes this thesis. Anyway, just because Buck reports a proverb it does not mean that he asserts the proverb to be an historical truth. It also shows a bewilderingly 19th Century view of morphology, making some claim that all peoples of a certain `race’ will all have the same features. I imagine Doutré thinks Maori all look the same and if they don’t, well, that probably proves to him that interbreeding has taken place.

    Doutré provides some further details about the Buck quote later in the comments thread of the Scoop Review. He writes:

    “In the Auckland Museum there is a hank of beautiful wavy red hair, obtained from a rock shelter near Waitakerei. That it belonged to pre-European days is proved by the root ends being plaited together and bound round with fine braid prepared from the same hair. Curiously enough, the only other specimen of hair in the same case is also bound round with fine hair braid and is dark brown in colour…As another example of the Maori belief in the inheritance of fair hair from certain ancestors, we have the proverb, ‘He aha te uru o to tamati? Kapatau he uru korito, he korako, he uru ariki no Pipi’. ‘What is the hair of your child? Were it flaxen hair or whitish, it would be the hair of high chieftainship from Pipi’. Pipi was a woman of the highest rank who flourished twenty-four generations ago and was the ancestress of the Ngati-Ira tribe”

    He then links to Thor Heyerdahl’s book `American Indians in the Pacific.’ Heyerdahl’s thesis, that the Pacific was settled by South Americans, is not generally accepted as a plausible model for two reasons. The first is technology; the South American peoples were not expert navigators or boat builders. Whilst Heyerdahl was, admittedly, able to get from South America to Rapanui/Easter Island he did it with the hindsight of knowing where Rapanui was. South American navigators did not have that advantage. Given a lack of South American material culture in the Pacific Islands it seems they did not get there (but, as previously expressed, contact was made by the Polynesians with South America).

    The second problem for Heyerdahl’s thesis is the archaeology of the Pacific; we have, with respect to DNA, climate, weather patterns and material culture, a fairly detailed reconstruction of the migration that lead to the colonisation of the Pacific. The overwhelming evidence that has been collected shows that the Pacific peoples came down out of South-east Asia into the Pacific archipelago. The oldest inhabited sites are located to the West and not to the East. Rapanui/Easter Island, was colonised around 500ACE. Two hundred years earlier they had struck the Cook Islands and Tahiti. The list goes on, going all the way back to the Lapita peoples whose origin is, eventually, the area around what is today known as Taiwan.

    Heyerdahl’s thesis is one that is vaguely plausible but fundamentally built on false assumptions. The South Americans could have got to Rapanui and colonised the Pacific, but `could have’ is not the same as `did.’ The evidence is with the Polynesian story, not the South American story. If Doutré is going to assert this thesis he needs to come up with new and innovative studies that discredit the wealth of DNA, climate, weather pattern and material cultural information that is currently available.

    Also, South Americans are not Celts. I’m sure most of both groups would be offended to have their unique cultures tarnished by the association.

    Doutré: 10. Do the moai statues of Easter Island display Caucasoid facial features and were they crowned with bright red lava top-knots to represent the hair colour of the builders?

    A conjoined set of propositions. No, the Moai do not display Caucasoid facial features. They are merely stylised faces. As for the pukao (the topknots), well, they represent some kind of headwear or hair, but the stone (a light red scoria) was probably chosen because it was easy to place on top of the Moai rather than purely because of its colour. If it was a colour choice it was probably to signify red feathered headdresses, although Doutré would likely claim that this was in emulation of some memory of their Celtic forebears.

    Doutré: 11. Do the Moai statues of Easter Island show the downwards curved Polynesian “rocker jaw”, which is the most prominent identifying feature of Polynesian physiology?

    Doutré seems to think that all Moai look the same. They do not. There has been significant aesthetic development of Moai over time and basing your argument on one style of Moai does not a good inference make.

    Also, what is this “rocker jaw” that he speaks of? It’s a jaw that, when pushed, in a skeleton, rocks just like a rocking chair. For sometime it was assumed to be a distinctly Polynesian characteristic, but that, it turns out, is a bit of a myth. This paper disputes the claim that it can be used to exclusively identify Polynesian peoples.

    Doutré gets the “rocker jaw” Moai thesis from Thor Heyerdahl, who theorised that the peoples of South America had travelled to Easter Island and settled the Pacific Islands. His work goes against the conventional wisdom of the Polynesian migration and has very little evidential support.

    Another nail in the coffin for this kind of argument from analogy (the Moai do not look Polynesian so this indicates a non-Polynesian origin for them) is that the analogy is bad. The Moai might have unusual jaws but they also have unusual bodies. It’s a little appreciated (perhaps not widely known) fact that the Moai are not just heads; they are full bodies. The bodies, until recently, have usually been covered by sediment and so only the head of the Moai were visible.

    The Moai bodies are very short; about a quarter or a third of the entire statue is the legs, arms and main body that supports the large head. Does this mean that the people they presumably represent (ala Doutré’s thesis) had small bodies and large heads? If Doutré is committed to the notion that the Moai represent Celts due to the unusual jawline of these statues why is he not citing the body proportions as being salient? Is it because he recognises that part of the statue as aesthetic in design? If so, why not the stylised jaw?

    Consider this. When Ankhaten was Pharoah of Egypt there was a brief flourishing of a very non-standard (for Egypt) artistic style. The resulting statues have over-developed cranial features, thin limbs and slouched, pronounced stomachs. Are we to think that, for a period of time, the Egyptians looked like typical Grays (we head now, for a time, into UFO territory) or that maybe art, despite what Objectivists think, is not a true and proper representation of reality?

    Doutré: 17. Is the Maori Hei-Tiki found from Egypt to Mexico-Peru to New Zealand?

    Simple answer; no. Long answer; there are similar statues and carvings, yes, but that tells us nothing important. Decorative figures similar to the hei-tiki occur in many cultures, but this suggests a common aesthetic taste rather than a common artist. The examples Doutré uses to show that the hei-tiki is found elsewhere tend to be small figures worn around the neck. This somewhat suggests that those enamel broaches my grandmother used to wear are a related decoration. Indeed, any culture that wears such figures must, by Doutré’s logic, be related to the Celts (Actually, I think he buys into that).

    It’s interesting to note that Doutré’s question makes it look like the Maori invented the decorative figure and spread it to other cultures. Maybe Doutré is suggesting some Maori Egypt thesis here…

    Doutré: 21. Is the New Zealand semi-flightless bird, the Pukeko, found in the Mediterranean and South America and is one depicted climbing on papyrus stems in ancient wall paintings at Medum, Egypt?

    This question is a conjunct and so we can say `No’ to it merely because the proposition `The Pukeko is depicted climbing on papyrus stems in ancient wall paintings at Medum, Egypt’ is false. However the bigger issue is whether the Pukeko is found in the Mediterranean and South America, because that might be true.

    Except it isn’t. Similar looking birds exist in these regions (nature has a curious tendency to evolve similar structures in similar circumstances) but they are not Pukeko (they are genetically distinct from them).

    Doutré: 22. Do ancient “string knot” calculation or counting devices exist as artefacts in both Peru and New Zealand and are they called by the same recognisable name in both far-flung regions on opposite ends of the Pacific?

    I could have put this into my section of questions we can dismiss due to the known trading between the Polynesian peoples and South America, but I haven’t because Doutré is hinting at something else here, some cousin measurement system he claims exists around the world and is widely known about. This measurement system is meant to prove that there was some pan-culture or cultural group that spread the measurement system. It’s not clear where he gets this from; it seems to be based upon finding common ratios between buildings; the British-Israel Society used to do something similar to show that the Great Pyramid of Giza had within its proportions hidden and secret knowledge.

    Doutré: 23. Does the Maori myth of Mataora & Niwareka have the same origins as the Greek myth of Orpheus & Euredike?

    Doutré points towards this source on the matter. Now, I know a little Ancient Greek and I made use of the services of a Maori speaker to look over the page in question. The Greek translations were inaccurate and so were the Maori, robbing the page of some of its (admittedly little) credibility. For example, Eurydike gets translated as `wide-custom’ when it means `broad-judging.’ That’s no mere small error. A lot of the Maori translations ignore the accepted wisdom that compound words have different meanings to their constituent parts. Very sloppy.

    Even if the names are a little off, what about the similarities in the actual stories? Given that there are a lot of stories in Maori mythology about journeys to the Underworld you would need to compare the corpus to the Greek equivalents. In this case there seems to be some structural similarity, but, to sound a little like Jung for a minute, Underworld narratives are common to most cultures. Still, once again, Doutré probably thinks this shows stronger evidence for his Celtic thesis.

    Doutré: 27. Are there any identical ancient words in the Maori language to words of the Egyptian or Indo-European languages?

    Yes, yes there are. However to show that there is anything more to that than coincidence operating here you’d have to show salient common features of both languages, and studies in Comparative Linguistics say `No.’

    Doutré: 28. Is there any similarity between Maori gods and Egyptian-Mediterranean-European & Indo-Aryan gods?

    Yes, but what does that mean? There is similarity in that there are gods of things and creation stories, but the similarities aren’t exactly striking. Given that all three cited cultures had pantheons there is bound to be some overlap, but that does not entail a common cause.

    Doutré: 29. Are there any examples of old world scripts incised into New Zealand boulders?

    Once again, no. Doutré refers to examples of a supposed old script, Ogham, to which no dictionary exists and is mostly suspected to be natural striation and old, weather examples of carvings that look vaguely like writing. None of these texts exist, however, outside the eye of the observer; they are artefacts of looking for evidence rather than evidence waiting to be seen.

    So, ten questions, all of which, when properly understood, provide little to no support for a Celtic New Zealand thesis.

    Doutré is trying to do a William Corliss (and, indeed, uses some of his data). Corliss collects historical and archaeological anomalies that challenge the accepted or conventional (can I say `consensus’ here? I can? Thanks) wisdom. The problem for Doutré (not so for Corliss, who takes a conservative Fortean approach and rarely speculates as to what the anomalies he accounts might infer) is that he gets the notion of theory and evidence back to front. Your underlying theory determines what is evidence and what is not. Doutré assumes that the Celts must have got here first and so looks for evidence that will back his assumptions. He then finds things that can be interpreted as evidence for the theory and, like most Conspiracy Theorists, finds the evidence against the theory to be Disinformation, data specifically designed to throw `real’ researchers (like himself) off the track. However, the burden of proof is not on holders of the conventional view of the colonisation of New Zealand or the Polynesia migration; it is on `researchers’ such as Doutré. It is they who must prove that their thesis is credible and plausible, a task they have failed miserably at.

     
29. Jim, 9. December 2008, 1:26
    

    Hi matthew,
    Give Thor Heyerdahl a break.

    He put his body where his mouth was.

    On Christmas Eve 1936 Liv Torp and Thor Heyerdahl were married, she was 20 , and he was 22 and the next day they left for the island of Fatu Hiva. Now this was 1936 or 72 years ago.

    I don’t have to tell the story of Fatu Hiva as you must have read it.

    Thor came to believe in a twin theory and at its heart was a conviction that two quite differeht waves of migration infulenced Eastern Ploynesia. In May 1940 he published in a New York magazine “International Science’

    ‘After a year of research along the British Columbian coast, I believe that I possess sufficient material to trace two separate migrations from the American mainland to the Polynesian island world. (a) A pre-Incan civilization, with its centre near Lake Titicaca, and along the Peruvian coast below, seems to have swept the islands at a comparatively early period; while (b) a later migration, the descendants of which dominate the present Polynesian race, reached the islands via Hawaii, from the Bella Coola area of British Columbia, about AD 1000. ”

    Thor liked the idea of ocean currents carying people around the pacific. From the ‘The Kon Tiki Man’ (p81)’ One such was the Urdarneta Route which takes a wide sweep up past the coasts of China and Japan, before curving round below the Artic waters kept at bay by the Aleutian Islands to the south of Siberia and Alaska. This was the current which caught Thor Heyerdahl’s imagination’

    From Kon Tiki came Easter Island .

    Thor thought about our past and wasn’t put off by politics.

    Jim

     
30. Matthew, 9. December 2008, 8:54
    

    Jim.

    We can respect Thor Heyerdahl the man for being willing to test his hypothesis and put his money where his mouth is, but that does not mean we have to respect the theories of Thor Heyerdahl the researcher. His theory, whilst novel and interesting, has not withstood repeated testing, given that the genetic, material cultural, linguistic, archaeological, oral historical and the like evidence not only not supports Heyerdahl’s thesis; it falsifies it.

    Don’t get me wrong; Thor’s theory is interesting and it makes for a good read (my father had all his books so I had a very early introduction to it) but, unfortunately, its a bold conjecture that just didn’t pay off. Had he been right he would have been celebrated in the academic world (despite what people like Doutré think academics are constantly looking to undermine existing theories, when there is good and plausible evidence to do so). He wasn’t right, but that doesn’t detract from the story of the Kon-Tiki expedition. It just didn’t prove what he thought it did.

    Matthew

     
31. Jim, 10. December 2008, 12:15
    

    Matthew,

    Heyerdahl believed there may have been several waves of migration into the pacific, from different directions and in different centuries. He formed the view that one was from South America, and as you know he embarked on his Kon-Tiki expedition and ended up ship-wrecked on the Raroia coral reef.

    Many think balsa raft expeditions ended right then and there but in the following years there have been many attempts to cross the Pacific by balsa raft.

    November 21, 2008 was the 35th anniversary of the 1973 Las Balsas expedition , the longest raft voyage in modern history, 8,600 miles. Three balsa rafts made the journey in 178 days beginning in Equador and ending at Ballina on the north coast of New South Wales.

    In 1527 the Spanish encountered their first balsa raft. Bartolomeo Ruiz the pilot of Francisco Pizarro’s expedition to Peru encountered ‘a large balsa trading raft with a huge triangular cotton sail. On board were twenty crew and passengers. Such ocean-going rafts, with a cabin, and deck space for cargo, were still used in these waters up to the early nineteenth century.’ ‘Conquistadors, Michael Wood p.108′

    I travelled to Easter Island some years ago and marvelled at the sheer size of some of the statues. I dont believe they represent anyone other than the Easter Islanders themselves and I must say a couple of locals who claim descendency have, to my mind, features similar to the statues. I found the same thing in Mexico when speaking to the present decendents of the Maya people, their features are much like the statues and drawings seem of the Maya which is after all just common sense..
    .
    The other monuments on Easter Island however are straight from South America. The kneeling statue from Raraku, the towers similar to the funeral towers of Peru and the Ahau with their particular irregular joined corner stones .

    I think a young archaeologist should take another look.

    Jim

     
32. Martin Doutré, 10. December 2008, 13:05
    

    Hi Scott

    As you well know, I’ve never advocated that there were any “leprechauns” in New Zealand, although you keep repeating this in these letters within Scoop or on radio. Misattributing this “title” to me, as somehow representative of my description for one of the former groups in New Zealand is merely Scott Hamilton “ridicule-speak”, designed to evade the truth while heaping unfair derision on an adversary. But that’s the dirty way you work and the only way you can score any points, not as a legitimate scholar, but as Diablo (the slanderer). While you’re at it why not throw some screaming “banshees”, like you, into the mix as well.

    When reporting about this physically small stature group, I rely solely on Maori oral traditions, such as:

    “Generally speaking, Ngati Hotu were of medium height and of light colouring. In the majority of cases they had reddish hair. They were referred to as urukehu. It is said that during the early stages of their occupation of Taupo they did not practice tattooing as later generations did, and were spoken of as te whanau a Rangi [the children of heaven] because of their fair skin. There were two distinct types. One had reddish skin, a round face, small eyes and thick protruding eyebrows. The other was the Turehu. They had white hair and blue green eyes. They were fair-skinned, much smaller in stature, with larger and very handsome features.” (Tuwharetoa, Chpt. 7, pg. 115, by Rev. John Grace).

    Also, your attempts to squirm out of your misquotes of E-Local or of me, regarding what we were purported to have said regarding Dr. Paul Moon or Archaeologist, Michael Taylor, were pathetic in the extreme. In any paper on critical-analysis, your version of A + B = C would gain you nothing less than a failing grade.

    The September 2004 newspaper report regarding the discovery of 12 strangely enshrouded, ancient bog-burial bodies at Manutahi Farm in Taranaki homed in solely on the anomalous nature of the find, coupled with the fact that no photography of the remains or forensic testing was allowed. There was no suggestion, whatsoever, by me or anyone else for that matter, that Michael Taylor thought they were “Celts”. His presence at the site had no bearing on the final outcome, which resulted in the specimens being destroyed untested. You are truly ridiculous.

    The same holds true of your very stupid A + B = C conclusions about Paul Moon and our purported misattribution related to his beliefs. Your logic is so twisted it’s laughable and you must be really desperate to resort to such underhanded tactics. In reality, you owe an apology and retraction to E-Local, me, Dr. Paul Moon and Archaeologist Michael Taylor.

    Also, I didn’t actually write the articles for E-Local. These were written by their journalists and I was used as a background resource, commenting on certain things or donating photographs as requested. I’ve never held any candles for Paul Moon nor recommended his book to anyone. I haven’t even read it.

    I also noted that you refused to supply the quote from a reputable scientific journal in support of your contention that skeletal remains “stretch” markedly post mortem. You used this alleged “fact”, known to you, to demonstrate that some of the overly large stature skeletons found by your friend Steve at Port Waikato (and representative of remains seen by numerous others in the district or often spoken of in Maori oral traditions) had actually been normal stature people in life, who could now be measured to be ten foot tall.

    Firstly, I’ve never heard of Te Roroa (“the tall ones”) achieving a stature of 10-foot, which I believe would be a gross exaggeration. I’ve heard of a female skeleton found in the vicinity of the huge Tameana and Hineana cavern systems of Port Waikato being measured at around 7-foot tall, with the males being taller still. Some are probably in the mid-range between 7 & 8-foot, consistent with the many ancient skeletons found in the mounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the United States during the 19th century especially. See: http://www.geocities.com/TheTropics/Lagoon/1345/giants.html

    Some day, when the embargos are lifted, we might be allowed to have this regional knowledge flow into the public sector and feature as a part of our New Zealand history. In the meantime Scott, clamber down off your high horse and accept Steve’s offer to go and assess the skeletal evidence at Port Waikato. Who knows, you might learn something!

    While you’re screaming abuse at Kerry Bolton for views “right of centre”, you might consider your own, radical “left of centre track record. W. F. Mandel wrote the following in his book “Fascism”:

    “First, in what respects, if any does Fascism differ from that other totalitarian system, Communism? Secondly, is there today a resurgence of Fascism? Thirdly, can we deliver a moral judgement on Fascism? An historian must from time to time make moral judgements and indicate on what grounds he makes them. If you know something about the operation of Communist societies you will have been struck by the similarities between say, Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany. In addition, a great deal of Communist ideology and practice resembles Fascism. There is the same emphasis on the single party and on the infiltration and control of groups, the same sort of censorship, the same use of Secret Police. So numerous are the similarities, in fact, that some political scientists have treated totalitarianism, whether it calls itself Fascism or Communism, as a single entity” (See: Fascism, by W.F. Mandle, pg. 27, Heineman Educational Books, London – Auckland, 1968.

    In my view, Scott, you’re a bellowing Fascist. You see, it doesn’t really matter a damn for those of us, stuck in the middle between ranting idiots, barking their extreme political philosophies, whether our testicles are being crushed under the jack-boot of a “Fascist” fanatic or a “Communist” fanatic. I’d have to admit that the Marxist element definitely hold the strategic high ground in this country at the moment and that’s how our Treaty of Waitangi and history got so thoroughly bastardised in the past 35-years or so, along with other oppressive censorship or distortions running rife in many fields.

    You mention Holocaust denial. Since the end of WWII countless scholars have been stifled and vilified in their attempts to cut through the propaganda and get a real insight into what truly happened. One of the best, balanced appraisals on the subject that I’ve ever read was the Master’s thesis by Jewish Historian, Dr. Joel Hayward of Canterbury &, later, Massey University.
    Like so many others he got crucified by extremist elements, was witch-hunted and harassed into a nervous breakdown and subsequently lost his career for a few years. I understand he’s now a highly respected WWII historian in Britain, but will probably never work in New Zealand again (See: http://www.fpp.co.uk/BoD/origins/Hayward/NZHerald220703a.html

    But there’s also the “Black Holocaust” that you don’t mention and you can read the exhaustively documented African-American study regarding that huge blight on history by Louis Farrakhan called, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (regarding who owned the slaves ships and ran the trade). Then of course there’s the Soviet Holocaust where over 60 million people lost their lives and for that I’d suggest: Two Hundred Years Together, by Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn (banned in English … my copy is in French, but you can also get it in German or Russian).
    There are of course several more Holocausts, like the one where about 5-million German and Austrian nationals were murdered by the allies and reprisal groups after the end of hostilities of WWII or the large number of Germans murdered in the Danzig Corridor by the Polish Communists especially, between 1918 and 1939, which caused WWII to happen. Then of course there’s the Chinese Holocaust under Mao or the Fascist repression of Palestinians going on today, etc., etc.

    I hope you’ll give all of these horrible, murderous Holocausts your equal, unbiased and humanitarian attention.

    As for David Irving, it was generally accepted worldwide that he was the most astute, prolific, all-round scholar and historian on the subject of WWII, at least up until May, 1988, when he made a very bad career choice. At that time he was called upon to give expert testimony, under oath, in a court case and stated that he could find no documented evidence of “Hitler’s Final Solution”. For this unforgivable admission, he fell foul of the Zionists who, thereafter, focused their hatred on him and have been unrelenting in trying to destroy his credibility ever since.

    To me, David Irving is simply the leading expert in his field, who has been very unfairly maligned (not unlike Joel Hayward) for being clinically honest about what he can glean from the documented evidence. For his many books he conducted direct interviews with leading players like Albert Speer, etc., and did not rely on the speculations of other historians. Irving always did original research, based upon documents and is a fluent speaker of German, including all of the military jargon, abbreviations and techno-Deutsch that went with his subject matter.
    I’m given to understand that he spent years as a young historian compiling information on Hitler’s movements and is able to state, with full documented evidence, where Hitler was, virtually hour by hour, spanning the entirety of WWII.

    I feel very sorry for both Irving and Hayward, as well as a raft of others thrown into prison by the “thought police” and can readily see, by their ill-treatment, that we’re still in the throes of the inquisition, which seems to be getting worse, not better. Moreover, others of us trying to make some sense out of the disjointed, nonsensical history pushed by mainstream academics have to contend with the abusive threats of control-freaks like you, telling us who we can and can’t talk to. Who the hell are you anyway … Mother Superior?

    But back to the real stuff:

    Edward, again you try to corral me by stating that the 29 question I rattled off the top of my head fall outside the so-called “Celtic thesis”. As I have stated so often, the use of “Celtic” was merely an umbrella term to give some semblance of meaning to the “uru-kehu and kiri puwhero” (reddish, golden tinged hair-reddish light complexion skin) people of Maori oral tradition.
    In reality, we don’t know with any degree of certainty from which white tribes these people descended or how long they languished in places like Peru, before migrating to New Zealand.

    As Scott Hamilton has, somewhat mockingly, pointed out, many Egyptian mummies have red hair. He could also have added markedly to that observation by mentioning how all the other hues or colours of thin European-Caucasoid hair are also present on the mummies or represented pictorially on murals, busts and statues, etc., of Egypt (where the blue eye colours are depicted and the physiology is European, like the mummies themselves).
    This becomes more and more prevalent the further back one goes and these earliest Egyptians, as well as cousins in surrounding countries, were the seed-stock for Europe … thousands of years before there were any Celts.
    The migrating Egyptians took every aspect of their high civilisation with them to Europe and remnants of their “out of Egypt” waymark trails along the top of North Africa to the Pillars of Hercules and beyond exist to this day.

    A Hungarian correspondent, Zoltan Simon, wrote the following to me several years ago about the “dictionary of Sir E.A. Wallis Budge” (circa 1900), which contained thousands of old Egyptian words:

    “The hieroglyphs and the corresponding words are listed side by side, only not in English alphabetic order. I made at least 10 pages of notes, marking down hundreds of words. (I still have them here in Brazil). Dozens of words like “mortar” or “marsh” or “sadness” have Hungarian counterparts (the latter is “buban” in Egyptian and “búbánat” in Hungarian). You can identify a surprisingly high number of English, German or Spanish word roots in that ancient Egyptian vocabulary.”

    That these “Egyptians” sailed to places like Peru & Bolivia is proven by an avalanche of evidence, including cocaine found to have been ingested by ancient Egyptians or “anti-microbe” tobacco solutions used for soaking body wrappings during the mummification process. These Egyptians also sailed to places like the Philippines, evidenced by the widespread use of Elemi oil, distilled from the gum like resin found in a tree indigenous to the Philippines and its widespread use in embalming the ancient Egyptian dead.

    These Egyptians left their mark on New Zealand via the pre-Maori Turehu or Patu-paiarehe people and one of the prominent gods that stands guarding the gates of Maori villages or the portals of meeting houses is very recognisable as Bes, the dwarf god of Southern Egypt, who along with others guarded the gates to the underworld. (See my article in the latest issue of Uncensored Magazine).

    Edward, you haven’t even come close to answering the list of spontaneous questions, which could be added to as fast as I could write them for the next hour or so. I’m actually in awe of you mainstream academic types who “strain at a gnat but swallow a camel”.

    Isn’t it amazing! The Pacific is littered with ancient, laboriously built, cut-stone stepped-pyramids, very similar to what one would find in South America or even Egypt (with those of the Canary Islands in between). The squat carved stone or wooden totem gods are the same or similar enough to intimate the selfsame pedigree or relationship ranging through North and South America to New Zealand. The language roots, artefacts, cultural symbolism or flora and some fauna show a direct relationship and linking pedigree.

    Despite all of this, all it proves to you is that “the great Polynesian navigators” went to South America, got the stuff and either brought it home or introduced it over there while on their big OE.

    Scott mentions Occam’s razor in his Rongotutu article, which, as you know, infers that the simplest, most practical or plausible scenario-approach is probably going to provide the true solution to the outstanding problem or:

    “One should not increase, beyond what is necessary, the number of entities required to explain anything”.

    In the Supe Valley of Peru are several cut stone city settlements that date to, conceivably, 3000 BC. One of these is Caral, where quippu string knot devices for sophisticated counting and encoding of numbers were found amongst the artefacts. The excavations at Caral showed a high degree of civilisation at a very ancient epoch that pre-dated the “Polynesians” by thousands of years. These South Americans went on to build huge, cut stone truncated pyramids and sprawling, highly ornate city complexes that stretched from Mexico to Bolivia and further afield.

    Added to that are the grand boulevards and thousands of miles of roads or mountain traversing track ways, etc. etc., j’en passe.
    We can barely get a glimpse of how vast this array of inter-related, American civilisations was and now whole new areas of research are opening up in areas like the Amazon. We can decipher the maths, measurement and angle standards encoded into their edifices.

    We have countless, well preserved mummies showing the physiology of the people who built the complexes (although that aspect of the scientific record is kept as a well guarded, deep, dark secret). We know that these ancient South Americans could range in trading missions across the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean to Egypt, as evidenced by the South American substances found in Egypt or the copious assortment of Egyptian, Phoenician or Scandinavian, etc., writing or cultural idiosyncrasies found throughout the Americas. See: http://www.celticnz.co.nz/Nazca/American%20Drugs%20in%20Egyptian%20Mummies.htm

    But hold on! According to you and your politically-aligned colleagues, despite all of the high civilisation exhibited by these South Americans or their extraordinary, proven abilities in astronomy (celestial navigation) or numerical computations (positional plotting), over a period spanning 5000-years or more, the poor, sorry, landlocked twerps never gained the ability to do far-ranging, exploratory sailing.

    Consequently, these landlubbers had to languish ashore for thousands of years until “the great Polynesian navigators”, sailing against the currents, visited them, grabbed all of the flora, cultural symbolism or whatever other useful loot they needed and shot through back to Polynesia to plant or distribute the goods over countless islands.

    This “great Polynesian navigator” slogan that we keep hearing these days almost sounds like a Marxist affirmation straight out of “The Peoples Voice” Communist newspaper. Apart from the pre-Polynesian Lapita People, who seemed to have the capacity to range very far afield, there doesn’t seem to be a lot to suggest the same capability was shared by the much later Polynesians.

    We know that around island groups like the Cooks the Polynesians would plant out one island then migrate around in an extensive loop, over several years and many subsequent islands, before returning to harvest the first (island-hopping), but far-ranging back & forth over the vastness of the Pacific for trading, etc., doesn’t appear to have been practiced by them to any significant degree.

    Edward, perhaps you need to apply “Occam’s razor” to such things as “kupu” (Maori)-“quippu” (Inca), string knot devices, the Pukeko (which is, without doubt, the same species as the Egyptian purple swamp hen), as well as all of the flora and cultural symbolism, etc.

    In this set of responses I haven’t really touched upon the mathematical, measurement and angle standard evidence that stretches from Egypt to New Zealand, which provides some of the most clinically-compelling evidence of all.

    As correspondent to Scoop, Jim correctly points out, Thor Heyerdahl provides a fully rational explanation for what’s happened regionally. His tome, “American Indians in the Pacific”, 1952, stands out as the most exhaustive and impressive overall study to date on this movement of migratory groups, east to west, through the Pacific. It’s a very in-depth body of research and sometimes a hard read, due to the multiple layers of indisputable evidence being presented.

    The works of Thor Heyerdahl were blockaded by the controlling faction of Isolationist historians, who considered the concept of Diffusionism to be heresy, thus Heyerdahl never got the recognition he deserved during his lifetime. As a consequence, we’ve been burdened by social-historians and their PC-history, as well as social-archaeology and social-anthropology for years, which doesn’t even come close to providing plausible answers to the many lingering enigmas.

    Jim’s explanation of a migration fanning out from British Columbia makes perfect sense in relation to the cultural symbolism and physiology exhibited by the Moriori of the Chatham’s. Moriori were linked to the Marquesas Islanders and before that, quite obviously, to the Chehalis Indians (Coast Salish) of North America.

    Editor’s Note:

    Having given Martin Doutré the final word, I’m declaring the correspondence closed. Scott’s original article pointed out the marked similarities between the E-Local article and the ideas of neo-Nazis and other apologists for fascism. I found his arguments compelling when I read his original article and nothing that has been written in the subsequent correspondence has changed my mind on that score. Correspondence Closed.

     
33. Jim, 10. December 2008, 22:31
    

    Editor

    As this last article by Martin mentions myself I wish to make something clear. In the last paragraph Martin writes “Jim’s explanation of a migration fanning out from Brittish Columbia etc”.

    Thor Heyerdahl made those comments after he researched the subject and I quoted him..

    I do believe this may be a legitimate theory yet it may be completly incorrect.

    In my opinion free speach and a free press is the cornerstone on which a free society is built and as one very famous person wrote ‘Cannot be limited without being lost’.

    Best wishes

    Jim

    Editor’s Note:

    I have no desire to limit anyone’s right to free speech but equally I’m not interested in providing a platform for apologists for the likes of Irving and other deniers of the Holocaust. The Internet is a big place and I’m confident you’ll have no problem finding somewhere else to continue the argument.

     
34. Jim, 12. December 2008, 9:03
    

    Editor,
    You know I have not read any of Irvings books or seen his dvd’s. I have read of him in the local media and was lucky enough to see an interview with him on the ABC I think, many years ago when he was in Australia.

    When you see or hear a person speak in an unrehearsed manner most people can quickly form an opinion.

    My impression was that the man was mentally ill.

    In the comments and correspondence on these pages my interest has been in the history of the Pacific.

    Jim
    
    I wasn’t suggesting that you had voiced support for David Irving simply giving an explanation for why I had decided to call a close to the correspondence. I took your comment about freedom of speech as a criticism of that decision and felt some clarification was called for. Jeremy Rose

    Thanks Jeremy

    If Anyone wants to see an interesting shadow that falls upon the trillithon in Tonga at the time of the equinox I would be happy to post a pic.

    Jim Wakefield

     
35. Keri Hulme, 14. December 2008, 19:05
    

    I’ve bookmarked this correspondence because it wonderfully encapsulates the pseudoarchaeologist’s views with the working scientist’s-Martin Doutre being a sterling example of the former.
    Thanks to Scott & Matthew for a truly positive series of exchanges attempting (but how can anyone suceed against determined insult-riddled
    prejudice?) to clarify matters.

    And yes, Jim, I’d be interested to see the pic-

     
36. Richard, 14. December 2008, 21:06
    

    The Martin Doutres of the world must live terribly unchallenging lives to have the time to come up with such unmitigated drivel – as insulting to Celts as it is to Maori, by the way.

    Perhaps we should call them the bored-to-the-bone people?

    More seriously, Jeremy, I’m sure you’re aware of the dangers of censorship and, though you were clearly trying to be fair and reasonable, there is alway a danger in stifling a debate. Especially one where one ’side’ is composed of conspiracy nuts. Censorship merely feeds their fervid imaginations and incipient paranoia.

    Maybe it’s one of those cases where, whatever you do, you lose?

    I don’t see closing a correspondence after three or four thousand words have been written as censorship. It goes without saying that no print publication would be in a position to allow the debate to have run as long as I did. Jeremy

    Fair comment, though I think you know what I meant, Jeremy

    You’ve given them further ‘proof’ of society’s unwillingness to think in different ways. The great conspiracy of silence and suppression continues, etc.

    Unlike their rants, science will admit it’s wrong, test theories, incorporate new data that proves sound, and not deny earlier mistakes. The MD’s of the world make no mistakes – at least in their own fevered imaginations.

     
37. Richard, 14. December 2008, 22:48
    

    Fair comment, though I think you know what I meant, Jeremy

    You’ve given them further ‘proof’ of society’s unwillingness to think in different ways. The great conspiracy of silence and suppression continues, etc.

    Unlike their rants, science will admit it’s wrong, test theories, incorporate new data that proves sound, and not deny earlier mistakes. The MD’s of the world make no mistakes – at least in their own fevered imaginations.

     
38. Mykeljon Winckel, 15. December 2008, 21:29
    

    To the Editor:

    I refer to your comment earlier:

    “Scott’s original article pointed out the marked similarities between the E-Local article and the ideas of neo-Nazis and other apologists for fascism. I found his arguments compelling when I read his original article and nothing that has been written in the subsequent correspondence has changed my mind on that score.”

    Scott has misquoted my article in a multitude of areas. I fail to see any marked similarities to articles published in eLocal and ideas of neo-Nazis and other apologists for fascism.

    Please enlighten me. Have you read the articles? I have another series commencing January.

    Mykeljon Winckel
    Editor – eLocal

    Hi Mykeljon,

    I suggest you re-read Scott’s article. As Scott points out the eLocal article – which I take from the final sentence of your letter is your work? – instructs readers to visit the Celtic New Zealand site. A site owned by Martin Doutre – who is an unapologetic supporter of Holocaust denier David Irving. Doutre also leapt to the defence of his friend Kerry Bolton in the correspondence that flowed on from Scott’s open letter. Kerry Bolton may object to the term Neo-Nazi being applied to him but in my view it is justified by his well documented association with far-right groups in New Zealand and his writings which are readily available on the Internet.

    A sample from a letter he wrote to a woman offended by his ideas:

    You say I didn’t see the rounding up of German Jews. Experience the aerial bombardments, the deaths of many heroic airmen etc. Please spare me the moral double standard. German Jews were rounded up as enemy aliens, since their own leaders publicly declared “war” on Hitler the very year he achieved Government, 1933, at a time when there were few restrictions put on Jews. The Jews, under Samuel Untermeyer organised a world economic boycott to try and wreck Germany economically. Jews and their communist allies organised boycotts of shops that sold Germany goods. People were beaten up by Jewish-communist thugs if they tried to resist. You must have seen that in England at the time?

    I’m not suggesting that the eLocal article and its fanciful claims that Celts arrived here before the ancestors of the Maori is inherently fascistic but as Scott points out the idea that the original inhabitants of Aotearoa were actually Europeans is, for obvious reasons, appealing to White Supremacists.

     
39. Mykeljon Winckel, 16. December 2008, 9:51
    

    Editor:

    You obviously did not read and still have not read the eLocal articles. NO where in the article does it suggest the arrival of Celts or white Europeans. You are misguided at your own admission.

    Once again I suggest you read the articles. eLocal is in NO way attached to any neo-nazi far right of left think tank – Instead you make an insipid reference to my editor’s note where I refer people to Martin Doutre’s website along with Paul Moon’s Book and other articles of interest which I read and researched. You have not read my editor’s note either as you have taken it out of context. Scott Hamilton has done the exact same thing. Scott has misquoted me in this area as well. In particular Paul Moon’s reference.

    Again you make derogitory comments of my articles ‘fanciful claims’ as you put it. The articles are well developed and NOT pointed toward to any socialistic collective idealogy as has been suggested. You as editor need to get off your high horse and research the source before you put your foot in your mouth as you have done here. You are the one that is fanciful about neo nazi celtic right wing collectivism.

    Speaking of offended. What are tyou or Scott trying to point out? That I am a supporter of the holocaust by association? Where did I mention Bolton or Irving, Celts? Talk about misquoted! Look at the title of Scott’s piece “No to Nazi Pseudo-history: an Open Letter”. You guys are on LSD! I have lost family members through war fighting for freedom, murdered by the S.S. My mother was interned in a POW camp for 4 years. My Father a WWII veteran and a decorated officer. I to have a military background. I find your bulshit down right insulting as I do Scott Hamilton who has cleverly associated me in this way as well. What have YOU done for your country and for the gift of freedom of speach that we now enjoy? I say you are abusing your position as editor.

    If you bold enough to comment then get off your couch and go get the facts and write your own articles.

    Dear Mykeljon,

    If you send me a copy of your article in electronic form I’ll post it on-line and SRB readers will then be able to decide for themselves whether Scott’s claim that the article suggests: “that a series of European peoples, most notably the Celts, settled New Zealand thousands of years ago” is accurate.

    You’re right that I haven’t read the article. I’ve attempted to read it on-line but without success. The said, in my experience Scott is a careful scholar and wouldn’t make a claim like that without foundation.

    If you re-read Scott’s original article, I think you’ll find it’s quite clear what he’s trying to point out. Quirky, ahistorical and unscientific claims of pre-Maori settlers in New Zealand are superficially plausible if you take random bits of information and combine them to fit the story you want to tell. And on the surface that speculation is harmless enough. But when some of those spinning the yarn are the same people who now try and paint the Nazi regime that killed your relatives (and many of mine) as a victim of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy [see earlier comment] it’s legitimate to ask whether baseless speculation about the existence of pre-Polynesian settlers in New Zealand really is harmless.

    Jeremy – editor Scoop Review of Books

     
40. Scott, 16. December 2008, 13:09
    

    Mykeljon,

    it’s good that you are at least taking for responsibility for the articles in Franklin E Local.

    You are quite right when you say I’m trying to associate the articles with neo-Nazism, Holocaust denial and other irrational and dangerous ideas.

    I’m making what’s known as a ‘justified ad hominem argument’ when I point at the credentials of the sources your articles you used and the person who helped you write them.

    I’m saying that a person like Martin Doutre, who by his own admission denies the Holocaust, believes the convicted neo-Nazi David Irving is a great historian, and believes 9/11 was an ‘inside job’, is unlikely to have anything useful to say about history. Getting Doutre to help you write an article about history is a bit like getting Brian Tamaki to help you write about evolutionary biology.

    As this thread has again shown, Doutre has absolutely no support for his theories amongst New Zealand’s scholarly community. There is no historian, archaeologist, or museum curator who believes that white people became the tangata whenua of Aotearoa thousands of years ago.

    The question, then, is who does one believe – a man who can’t even recognise blatant historical facts like the Holocaust and Al Qaeda’s role in 9/11, or a community of hundreds of dedicated scholars? It’s a pity, Mykeljon, that you’ve made a fool of yourself by believeing Doutre.

    I don’t just make an ad hominem argument, of course – I also point out the reasons why Doutre’s claims that whites settled these islands thousands of years ago make no sense. Matthew and Edward others have expanded upon my points with considerable skill. You ought to try to reply to them rather than complaining of misrepresentation.

     
41. Edward, 16. December 2008, 13:40
    

    Editor,

    I would like to offer a brief statement in reply to Mykeljon as I am trained as an archaeologist. Politics aside, I can sincerely disagree with Mykeljon’s assertion that the article was well developed. If it had been, it would have referenced the tomes of work carried out by professional archaeologists, rather than merely demonstrating a one-sided approach to New Zealand’s prehistory being carried out by untrained individuals lacking in scientific understanding and methodology. I have read the article and one such example concerns the discovery of a cache of bones in Kaipara District where “investigations were handed over to Noel Hilliam … and his team of researchers”. It goes on to state that the skeletons were assessed by Hilliam and his ‘researchers’ where no less than three “distinct physical types of pre-Maori” were identified. Forgive me if I am mistaken but I am fairly certain Hilliam and his ‘researchers’ have no training in forensic anthropology or biological anthropology so it seems incredible that they could or even should ‘assess’ human remains, let alone come to the overly detailed conclusions they arrived at. It seems to me merely the tale of grave robbers and ‘treasure hunters’ trying to play scientist and destroying and misinterpreting (by jumping from a premise over a chasm of lack of evidence to a conclusion) the archaeological record in the process. This kind of amateur treasure hunting dressed up as though it is scientific (while lacking even the most fundamental and basic principals) belongs with the ‘cultural foragers’ of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I did not read a single thing in the article where an attempt at critical thinking and a balanced representation of the evidence was undertaken. That in itself is indeed a measure by which a ‘well developed’ article is assessed, a quality this e-local article is lacking.

    Regards,
    Edward

     
42. Matthew, 16. December 2008, 14:15
    

    Mykeljon, allow me to help you. Here are some references to your article which suggest the Celtic thesis (as Doutré himself has admitted, the use of the term `Celt’ here is merely meant to reference a population of European extraction that pre-date the Maori in Aotearoa).

    September 2008, p. 20. “We can even track one of the main migratory routes of these ancient travellers from their Mediterranean homelands, coming through the Canary Islands to Mexico, Costa Rica and Peru, etc., then to Easter Island and ultimately to New Zealand.”

    October 2008, p. 18. “We know that there was at least one race of people in New Zealand before the arrival of the Maori because of what they left behind. The antiquity of the Bombay and Silverdale standing stones and their ancient incised markings can be dated as pre the Taupo eruption in 186AD, which covered the stones in tephra ash – over 1000 years before the arrival of Maori. The intricate, hand carved bas relief incising and the bullauns (hand hewn ‘wells’ in the stones) are identical to those found all over Europe. The cultural origin of these
    many types of Proto-Celtic, purpose-built structures can be traced back to even more remote sites like those found in Egypt and Babylon,”

    p. 22. “ “A large dossier of compelling evidence now exists to show that a highly-mobilised group of cousin European nations, ranging from the Mediterranean Basin, Continental Europe and the British Isles thousands of years ago, set up civilisations or mining colonies all over the world. To traverse the vast, featureless oceans safely they had to have advanced mathematical knowledge for accurate positional plotting at sea, which knowledge needed to be supported by intricate familiarity with zodiacal-patterns, constellation signposts, as well as stellar or planetary rises and sets at the sea horizon for accurate celestial navigation.
    “In every location where these ancient globetrotters settled long term, including New Zealand,”

    November 2008, p. 18. “A specialist who examined some of the skeletons in the cave likened them to a race of people living in Wales 3000 years ago.”

    p 20. “These days, when ancient, pre-colonial European Caucasoid skeletons are located, they are handed over to the local iwi and no scientific investigation is permitted.”

    p. 22. “Are these pathetic remains Maori or pre-Maori European?”

    So, when you say `NO where in the article does it suggest the arrival of Celts or white Europeans’ are you hoping that we won’t go back to your writing to check or are you really ignorant of what you wrote?

    Matthew

     
43. Mykeljon Winckel, 16. December 2008, 18:48
    

    Scott – You talk of resposibility? You are a joke. How about you take resposibility for the mis quotes.

     
44. Matthew, 16. December 2008, 22:49
    

    Links to the Franklin E Local articles (so that those quotes can be checked):

    a href=”Article 1 (October)

    Article 2 (September)

    Article 3 (November)

     
45. Richard Taylor, 17. December 2008, 2:11
    

    Mykeljon – do you support Nazism? Do you agree that the Maori came by sea and that they were great navigators and sailors and had a very advanced society before Europeans ever arrived in NZ? Do you support Peter Buck’s assertion that they were “The Vikings of the Pacific”?

    Or do you think that Maori are inferior to Europeans? Germans?
    The Master Race?

    What are your qualifications in history or archeology and in research?
    (This may not matter as your ideas maybe very good – academics are often very wrong and often quite arrogant. I’m not an academic myself.)

    What is your view of black people? Are they inherently evil?

    If another Hitler arose would you try to stop him exterminating Jews and gypsies etc? Do you agree with Irving the Holocaust denier?

    Or are you not associated with any of these ideas and woudlbe prepared to take part in a debate on the subject say with Scott etc on TV or radio? There you uoocld enlighten us on how the Celts came to NZ etc – or you could explain that your view is more complex…

    Some might argue that the Holocaust etc were good things hat reduced the number of Jews in the world etc and that blacks are inferior – if you do -you could justify it in a public debate …. Or explain that these are not at all your ideas and that your views are favourable towards Jews etc

    Political correctness annoys me also BTW

    I feel if you have a good argument s you have a right to be heard – Scott sometimes gets things wrong. You could be right – Scott may be misinterpreting your ideas (HE might be quite wrong on many things) – so an open debate on this would be great.

    Richard

     
46. Scott, 17. December 2008, 8:46
    

    Mykeljon,

    how about you identify a misquote in my open letter?

    And how about trying to square your new claim that the articles in Franklin e Local don’t say that white people arrived here before Maori with the quotes that Matthew has supplied? I had a look at the first in your series of three articles and found three claims that whites settled New Zealand before Maori in your first two pages!

    Here’s one:

    ‘There is ample evidence that branches of the selfsame family tree of nations that built the great megalithic sites of Britain…were also living for many thousands of years in New Zealand’

    It would be good if you acknowledged your mistakes and withdrew the absurd claim that white people lived in New Zealand thousands of years ago, Mykeljon. But you should do so openly and honestly, instead of trying to pretend that you never said such a thing.

     
47. Mykeljon Winckel, 17. December 2008, 17:15
    

    Scott – You must be on the benefit as I do not have enough time in the day. Paul Moon will be contacting you with regard to your misquote in your open letter. As for the other misquotes you have delivered? (including your latest example above) – The links are above to the published elocal articles. You can see for yourself. If you are in the area drop in and we will discuss – I would like to meet you. Your constant denials make a mockery of Maori aural history. You are answerable to them… not me. You talk of honesty and openess – Who are you to talk down to me? You don’t know those words let alone understand integrity.

    Richard – If you are in the area drop in and meet me also. You will find that my staff are from all over the world, my friends are all nationalities, color, creed, religions, last I do not need to justify myself to you or to anyone. Your questions are just over the top and not worth answering. Re Scott getting things wrong? Well he thinks bones grow upto 40% after death making people over 10ft tall! He may be better at commedy.

    I have more material for you all soon that will give you more to think about. TO argue over, to debate, postulate, name call, reference – and it comes from Maori not me.

    That’s all from me – I am now closing off from this blog as I have work to do. Merry xmas – Now in wishing you all well I may well have offended at least one of you :-)

     
48. Edward, 17. December 2008, 19:57
    

    RE: Mykeljion’s last word.

    I really don’t see how one can claim that everything in those articles came from Maori, the quote I referred to certainly didn’t – it concerned Hilliam and his ‘researchers’. It seems as though when push comes to shove Mykeljion just sticks his head in the sand and denies anything in the article which he receives criticism for. Further, when criticised he hides behind Maori oral history and wipes his hands of any agenda. On top of all of this he states “I do not need to justify myself to you or anyone”. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but when someone publishes something as fact for public dissemination, well, they actually are answerable to public and scholarly criticism. Anyone who publishes articles in scholarly journals is subject to criticism – its called peer review and is a part of any serious publishing process. The alternative is for anything from bigfoot sightings to flying pirate ships and every other completely subjective topic which is not backed up by compelling evidence to be dressed up as fact. As an archaeologist in New Zealand, I feel that Mykeljon’s statements do need to be justified, or at least portrayed as fiction rather than fact. But instead of listening to the criticism which might help him learn, he merely reacts with irrelevant rhetoric such as “what have you done for your country”? It seems that Mykeljon thinks that by having a military background he is exempt from ever being proved wrong or even having his articles critiqued -a pretty appallingly egotistical view. In science (as opposed to conjecture ala the elocal articles) one sets out primarily to test things. Many scientists including archaeologists might pursue a theory, but ultimately if it does not work and the theory is wrong they will (if they are good scientists) move on and learn from their mistakes (i.e. if a given theory ‘A’ does not explain the problem ‘B’ it is still adding to the knowledge-base via deductive reasoning in that ‘A’ does not work so therefore we know what ‘B’ is not). Mjkeljon however rejects ANY criticism and even lashes out at those who were at least partially sympathetic (Richard) with him. At the end of the day the elocal article was beyond weak – it was simply biased, unscientific, and false. Lastly, if Scott’s “constant denials” make a mockery of Maori oral history (I disagree), then it is only fitting that I can state that Mykeljon’s arguments make a mockery of Maori prehistory as well as a mockery of science. A dismal attempt to play scientist/historian with a dizzying abitility to think uncritically.

    Edward

     
49. Keri Hulme, 17. December 2008, 21:58
    

    I am a Kai Tahu. I also have Scots (Orkney Islands) and English (Lancashire) ancestry. I have been interested in the Maori/Kai Tahu side of my whanau since I was a small child (7, actually.) Part of my family are urukehu – redheads. THIS WAS NEVER REGUARDED BY THE OLDS OF MY TRIBE AS AN OUTSIDE INFLUENCE. Sorry for the screaming emphasis! Red-haired – and blond/es- were part of us, Maori, normal people. But they were – rare. So -with our fey folk, our supernaturals -and why do the nutcases like Doutre *never* mention our other supernaturals?
    e.g.Taniwha? Nukumaitore?Maeroero? And half a dozen Others?Which/who also have maori/normal attributes?
    are given a special *though normal* attribute -e.g. dwarfism for leprechauns et al.
    I find it especially abhorent that Pakeha – and foreigners like Doutre – bring in unknown unnamed ‘kaumatua’ as their authoriative sources.
    Mykeljon – name your sources. All my Kai Tahu sources are known historically, or proud to be named as of today-

     
50. Scott, 18. December 2008, 10:01
    

    Mykeljon – it really doesn’t take long to post a coment on a board like this, if one has basic reading and writing skills. Your tendency to mispell ‘oral’ as ‘aural’ and ’speech’ and ’speach’ and your ungrammatical sentences make you a strange sort of journalist.

    I asked you for evidence that I have misquoted you; you referred me to this quote, in my last post:

    ‘There is ample evidence that branches of the selfsame family tree of nations that built the great megalithic sites of Britain…were also living for many thousands of years in New Zealand’

    I was quoting the first in your series of articles, to show that, despite your denial the other day, the articles do in fact argue that white people settled NZ long before Maori. Was I misquoting you? Here’s the passage my quote was excerpted from:

    ‘There is ample evidence that branches of the selfsame family
    tree of nations that built the great megalithic sites of
    Britain, Continental Europe or earlier edifices around the
    Mediterranean Basin, were also living for many thousands
    of years in New Zealand.’

    All I did when I quoted this passage was remove the following words and replace them with three dots:

    ‘Continental Europe or earlier edifices around the Mediterranean Basin’

    In no way does this exclusion distort the meaning of Mykeljon’s words. He is arguing that European people settled New Zealand long before Maori. Such an argument contradicts his claim to Jeremy earlier in this thread that:

    ‘You obviously did not read and still have not read the eLocal articles. NO where in the article does it suggest the arrival of Celts or white Europeans. You are misguided at your own admission.’

    It’s not surprising Mykeljon has fled with his tail between his legs after
    so blatantly contradicting himself. He either doesn’t know the central premise of the articles he claims to have written, or else is being deliberately dishonest.

    If Mykeljon and his Holocaust-denying friend Doutre want to persist with printing their racist pseudo-scholarship in E Franklin, then there are various coruses of action their critics can take. Complaints to the Press Council and the Race Relations Conciliator are in order, and local iwi should be contacted and made aware that this nonsense is being perpetrated in the name of ‘Maori aural history’. A few of the advertisers in Franklin E local would surely be interested to know they were supporting a publication that publishes the ‘research’ results of Holocaust deniers like Doutre and neo-Nazis like Bolton.

     
51. Matthew, 18. December 2008, 11:46
    

    Well, Myklejon, thank you for your astonishing non-contribution to this discussion of the articles you wrote. Aside from making patently false claims like `NO where in the article does it suggest the arrival of Celts or white Europeans’ despite references from the articles backing up the fact that you have asserted on numerous occasions that Celts or white Europeans arrived prior to the Maori in this country you have also failed to address any of the concerns raised here. Instead you fall back upon the fallacious claim that as you are the child of a decorated war hero and POW, and that you have friends of all colours and creeds and thus your articles cannot be advancing some sinister agenda. It is, of course, quite possible to be the child of a war hero and a POW, have many friends from many places and still end up supporting a disturbing worldview which seeks to denigrate the indigenous culture of this place. And by ‘quite possible’ I mean that you do. You may not want to acknowledge that your articles promote a distorted and false view of New Zealand’s pre-history. You may not want to acknowledge that what you advocate in your articles goes against the best learning of our day. That is your choice.

    But your denials do not make you right.

    It certainly gives you no moral high ground. I await your new series of articles with some interest. I still hope you might come to realise your folly in this endeavour.

     
52. Richard Taylor, 18. December 2008, 22:59
    

    I was just watching a documentary on the IIWW – it was terrible – it was awful – millions of soldiers – mostly young – of many nations died millions more civilians died. My uncle was in the RAF – he said that it was terrible.

    It – this hell of carnage – was created by ideas like those advocated by Doutre etc

    And in a longer time frame – there were the many injustices done to indigenous peoples throughout the world – including Maori. Many of these people are still psychologically scarred – Doutre and Mykeljon Winckel continues the wrongs done to Maori and others.

    “Never unremember”

     
53. Jim, 19. December 2008, 22:24
    

    Hi Keri
    I hope you found the pics interesting.

    Jim

     
54. Keri Hulme, 22. December 2008, 12:59
    

    Kia ora Jim- yes, thank you.
    I know of 3 places in the south where my ancestors(Kati Mamoe rather than Kai Tahu in these instances ) were using shadows
    (as in placed or altered rock & wood) and there are doubtless many more throughout this archipelago…nice to learn other Polynesians did it too- cheers n/n Keri

     
55. Jim, 23. December 2008, 20:09
    

    Hi Keri,
    I would like to document the sites you mentioned. If this is not possible then please have someone you know do it.

    Sometimes when a person is able to sit and look at somthing then, for whatever reason, they are able to see something interesting..

    On a slightly different subject, some years ago I visited an exposition of Maori culture. I asked a young woman working there where she believed the immigration originated.

    She replied ‘I think it was Hawaii because the name is so similiar but we have been told not to say that by ’some Prof in Christchurch who I will not name’ we are told to say Maori left either Rarotonga or Tahiti.

    What do you think?.

    Jim

     
56. anon, 5. January 2009, 15:07
    

    It goes on. Here’s the latest issue of Franklin E Local’s article about how Maori are really South American:
    http://www.elocal.co.nz/pdfs/Franklin/2009_01_January/12.pdf

     
57. anon, 5. January 2009, 15:10
    

    It turns out, though, that the South Americans were actually taught everything they knew by ‘white Gods’:

    The Incas described these “white gods” as wise, peaceful instructors
    who had originally come from the north in the “morning of time”
    and taught the Incas’ primitive forefathers architecture as well as
    manners and customs. They were unlike other Native Americans
    in that they had “white skins and long beards”Murals on ancient South American temples depict the fate of white captives being led to sacrifi cial altars’

    More racist crap, in other words.

     
58. Keri Hulme, 11. January 2009, 17:00
    

    Kia ora Jim – I think it fairly well established that “Hawaiki nui Hawaiki roa Hawaiki pamamao’ is a series of places – the original homeland, and places thereafter settled before the heke continued. It is certain that some waka did set out from Rarotoka – the history of Takitimu/Takitumu waka (which was a name given to several voyaging waka) is evidence of that.

    Two of the shadow-places are on privately-owned farms, and the other is difficult of access. However, I now have a niece who is an experienced rockclimber,of whom I’ll ask for help, and invest in a good single malt to approach one of the fermers – the other was a truely racist shit who wasnt aware of the long Maori traverse of “his” property (it’s on one of the old trade trails.) Incidentally, at the time I was looking into these things, digital cameras were undreamt of, and I couldnt afford a good camera (we are talking nearly 4 decades ago.)

    And, Anon., thanks for the link. What a tired regurgitation of the worst parts of Heyerdahl (and Brailsford.) The Franklin e-local fits right in there with CONSPIRACY and “Investigate” eh? (And “Nexus” and another more local short-lived rag whose name -thankfully- escapes me now…)

     
59. Keri Hulme, 11. January 2009, 17:03
    

    O, – there’s also evidence Jim, that Rakiatea in the Tahiti group was a relatively departure place. Cook’s Tahitian interpreter was a Rai’atean and he was easily understood when he switched to his own dialect.

     
60. Jim Wakefield, 13. January 2009, 23:46
    

    Hi Keri,
    I enjoyed your comments very much.

    Mr. Tevita H. Fale has published an interesting book ‘Tongan Astronomy’ and in it he relates the travels of Maui (p20) ‘He travelled and discovered Fisi (Fiji) and Ha’a-Moa (Samoa) group of islands. Then he discovered Tahisi (Tahiti) group of islands and later the Ha’a-Vaihi (Hawaii) group. The word Vaihi means far, far away, and the Tongans still use this word today. Maui’s last discovery was ‘Atealoa, which is New Zealand.’

    Isn’t it interesting how these names just keep comming?

    Jim

    PS Tell your niece I will throw in a bottle of Bundy.

     
61. Yank, 27. February 2009, 19:24
    

    Clearly Doutre is wrong that there were ancient white people in New Zealand.

    Why? Because Doutre knows a couple of racists; and everyone knows that racists are bad. Furthermore, he has unorthodox opinions about current events in America. Duh!

    I have a PhD in sociology – a science that has nothing to do with archaeology – and I even work at a museum – as director of sales, so you can trust my authoritative expert opinion that there were never ever white people in New Zealand!

    Stop looking at the man behind the curtain!

     
62. Richard Quinn, 1. March 2009, 2:13
    

    Yank, for some reason, your comment above immediately brought an anecdote from Mahatma Gandhi’s life to mind.

    Asked what he thought about Western civilisation, he replied

    “I think it would be a good idea.”

     
63. Mariana, 5. May 2009, 11:52
    

    Excellent rebuff of Doutre’s crackpot theories. I didn’t read the original article but am familiar with Doutre’s nonsense.
    I enjoyed reading this

     
64. David, 10. May 2009, 23:24
    

    Kiaora,
    I don’t know who the Pre Maori actually were but they did exist.

    For example…go to any written centennial historical account of your district and you will find a chapter on Tangata Whenua…The people before…the first inhabitants etc. (Many of these books were written in the 1970s).
    These stories have been passed down by Maori historians.
    The next chapter often describes Maori migrations into the area who ALL STATE that Tangata Whenua lived there before them and subsequently showed them how to live from the land.
    Often Maori state that these were their ancestors and often are described as having fair or red hair.
    Then when your done reading those…you might read any Maori legend which all state the same stories of Tangata Whenua living in this land before the ‘Fleet Maori’ arrived…welcoming the new comers.
    Many other legends speak of Turehu and Patupaiarehe etc etc etc.
    Or maybe gain the courage to approach a true and humble Maori Kaumatua and get the facts from the Maori themselves.

    Wake up all of you arm chair critics…get off of your arses and check it out.
    If your really keen you might even get outside and do a bit of archaeological investigations yourself…who knows just what you might find!

     
65. nick lyons, 15. May 2009, 16:14
    

    hi scott, i have written a short reply to the thread you created on indymedia about martin doutre and nz history cheers
    nick lyons

    and for the record – at this point from reading the above exchanges- i feeling martins perspective and ideas more so,
    cheers

     
66. Edward, 25. May 2009, 18:37
    

    David’s assertion that we critics should “get off of your arses and check it out. If your really keen you might even get outside and do a bit of archaeological investigations yourself” seems rather ironic seen as it is archaeologists who are the largest critics of works by amateurs such as Doutre. We regularly conduct surveys and excavations so who, in David’s opinion, is better suited to critique Doutre’s work? It seems yet another case of someone outlining their own ignorance – are you an archaeologist David? have you carried out archaeological investigations David? No? then by your own logic you must be pushing your own bias and beliefs.
    Oh, but of course, when someone such as David screams for an archaeologist’s opinion to back up his belief, and instead gets one in conflict with his beliefs, then something must be wrong with the archaeologist right? Because years of careful study and research count for nothing compared to the views of someone who merely read a tabloid?
    Again, by his own logic he should believe every myth ever recorded by every culture and take it as literal truth. But what would I know? I’m just another “PC” archaeologist right? Hmm, here’s an idea David, next time you wish to leave a comment, why don’t you try reading through the entire argument so that we don’t have to repeat ourselves and you don’t end up looking like an egg.

    As for Nick Lyons,
    I had a quick look at your discussion with Scott. You seem to be arguing for some form of relativism insofar as you oppose the idea that science should have “first pick” so to speak on explanations of prehistory. I personally don’t see how your relativist framework works if you cannot test anything because you have no way of examining evidence. How can you take the position where you give credence to anomalous views when you have not seen the evidence. How do you weigh your interpretations and assumptions? Science is self-correcting, while the only logical conclusion to take from your relativist framework is that ‘truth’ depends on your subjective feelings and beliefs. Which ultimately mean what? Nothing. Take for example the ‘brain in the jar’ argument. It really is just a useless musing which doesn’t help anyone in reality.

    I am becoming more and more disenchanted with NZ’s public. Why is it that of all of the natural and human sciences, it is archaeology which is the most abused and misused discipline in this country? Why is it that everyone assumes they can become experts in archaeology over night by reading some bizzare and poorly executed piece of writing by someone who can’t even grasp the basics of methodology? Why is it that while I would never claim expertise in a field I had no training whatsoever in, so many people continue to arrogantly assume they can with archaeology? When you have no training, experience, knowledge of the literature (how many people read the shit Doutre produces over real archaeological publications?) or haven’t even seen the evidence let alone even know what the archaeological record is, how then can you take a position where you just “know” you are right and reject all that the experts and specialists have to say to the contrary? I’m sick to bloody death of trying to educate people who just don’t want to listen because they are too busy with heads full of racist rhetoric and pseudo-science. Your opinions are based on faith and misguided belief alone, that is why your views are ignored by scholars. Is it really any wonder that academics refuse to engage in dialogue with people like Doutre when there is such a pack of drooling, ignorant fools ready to pounce without knowledge or evidence or reason? How many of you know-it-alls even bothered to read what I wrote about Doutres lack of methodology? Hmmm? Doesn’t matter though does it.
    I’ve had enough of this frickin joke of a backwater country. I’m embarrassed to be a NZ’er right now. Nothing but a bunch of racist, ignorant, psuedo-science loving rednecks.

    Here’s a link to a resource which tackles some of these anomalous views. I don’t really expect any of you to bother to actually read it though but I thought i’d give it one last go. Good luck to those of you with a working, questioning, and skeptical brain inside your head.

    here’s the link: http://archaeologyaeoteoroa.blogspot.com/

     
67. Keri Hulme, 27. May 2009, 1:44
    

    Kia ora Edward – many thanks for the link to this excellent resource!

    The intolerant & ignorant, the racist nasties, the cynical exploitationists, will, aue, always be with us – but I delight in the scholarly ripostes of a trained mind like your’s – and the privilege of learning from the experience of a working archaeologist like you- kia kaha! And, thank you! N/n Keri

     
68. jim, 31. May 2009, 9:42
    

    David, To challenge accepted views is not a crime.
    My son recently gave me a book:; ‘Sea of Dangers’ by Geoffrey Blainey in which he charts the progress of 2 ships : the St Jean-Baptiste, a French merchant ship commanded by Jean de Surville, and the Endeavour captained by James Cook.

    In December 1779 they passed, going in opposite directions and without seeing each other, near the north cape of New Zealand. One intriguing theory he gives as a purpose for the French voyage and I quote. ‘The Riddle of the Jewish Colony– The theory that a colony or enclave of Jewish traders flourished somewhere in the South Pacific probably arose from errors of eys and ear and a leap of the imagination during the last hectic evening spent by the Dolphin and her British crew in Tahiti in 1767; but the theory was bouyed by the inescapable fact that the Jew were probably the most enterprising and most scattered merchants in the world;”(p.311)

    Blainey inserts a painting by William Hodges, who painted a remarkable picture of the north coast of Tahiti, called ‘View of the Province of Oparee’ It depicts a canoe carrying two men; a paddler and a passenger. Both are wearing white turbans or turban-like headgear and both have beards and moustaches.

    In the preceeding pages Blainey explores the many theories behind this and finally ‘ The more likely conclusion, however, is that no Jewish merchants lived in this balmy corner of the South Pacific’ (p. 312).

     
69. Edward, 31. May 2009, 22:57
    

    Jim, you’re right in stating views should be challenged, but a meaningful challenge requires a thorough understanding and background of the subject in question. This is acomplished by peer-review, the process whereby others with an academic grasp of the subject matter, techniques and methodologies openly critique hypotheses.

    Your assertion equates to laymen being qualified to challenge thoroughly researched (and peer-reviewed) archaeological considerations and proofs. This should also then be extended to medicine (don’t listen to your doctor, listen to me etc.), history (holocaust denial springs to mind – do you support these so called “legitimate” challenges to well established history?), and any other field which requires extensive background knowledge.

     
70. Ben, 12. June 2009, 22:11
    

    The problem with the ‘celtic nz’ idea, is there is no consideration of other explanations. Ever heard of occams razor? I think there is a far simpler explanation that isn’t being considered.

    what are the celtic nz people so afraid of? how can such a huge body of peer reviewed evidence be so wrong?

    the biggest problem I have is that the celtic nz explanation is seen as a final answer, whereas the legitimate theories still have aspects that can be investigated, they can still be tested

     
71. Nick, 13. June 2009, 11:59
    

    The ONLY reason that DNA and C14 can’t be done without iwi permission is because there is more to NZ history that we are told. OK … MAKE US ALL LOOK LIKE DICKHEADS AND REMOVE THIS FROM THE RULE BOOK …. PROVE US WRONG !!! But oh no, you can’t go around testing human remains , that not PC.

     
72. Edward, 17. June 2009, 11:10
    

    Nick, we do test human remains, that’s kind of what archaeologists do sometimes. And the burden of proof doesn’t lie with us, it lies with you. Or would you have us devote time and money of which we are already always short of on research projects to quickly ring you up on the phone and let you know the results of archaeological digs and skeletal analysis of a group’s ancestors which has nothing to do with you? Who the fuck are you to demand anything!? And I don’t need to make you celtic believers look like dickheads, you are already doing a fine job of that yoursleves.

     
73. James, 21. June 2009, 4:37
    

    Just to correct a few errors from the angry lefties:

    1. We will say “Tohungas” and “Maoris” in English for as long as Maoris insist on saying “Hikareti” instead of “Cigarettes”, and “Aporo” instead of “Apples”. People often say “Formulas” instead of “Formulae”, etc. Its not a big deal, and calling people rednecks over their use of the standard English plural convention on a borrowed word is pathetic.

    2. The Pharoah Ramses II had red hair. Modern-day Egypt has many people with red hair among its population. The mummys’ hair is red because the dead guy had red hair. Ignore the lies about Egyptians being black. See? Worldwide, our history is being systematically erased, so Martin may have a point.

    3. If there is a lock of red hair in the Auckland Museum, why can’t we see it?

    4. There IS a conspiracy to de-whitify Europe and the west. It derives in part from the pan-European movement and practical idealism, which is about 80 years old. The book “Practical Idealism”, by Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi is so banned in Germany (for example) its not even on the banned book list (otherwise people might be alerted to its existence). In contrast, Mein Kampf is veritibly promoted. From the book: “Europe is to be peopled with a Eurasian-Negroid mixture” in the future. That is what multiculturalism is for. (Not all races are to be mixed into oblivion, one special master race is to be kept apart as rulers over the dumbed-down mongrelised rabble).

    If whitey gets a past, he might have a future. This is why any and all specifically white history or pro-white ideas are viciously slandered and suppressed, whether they are true or not.

    6. When are the hundreds of preserved “Maori” heads held in overseas museums going to be tested for age and DNA? Ever?

    7. Why didn’t Tau Henere test the red-haired head he retrieved from the British museum? What’s going on there?

    8. Why don’t all these archeologists on this page help Martin get access to all the artifacts and relics he wants to see, in order to shut him up? Why does Martin have so many problems getting access to these things?

     
74. Edward, 21. June 2009, 12:33
    

    Why can’t ‘angry righties’ read through previous statements correctly or do some research to educate themselves before they make retarded comments?

     
75. James, 21. June 2009, 21:56
    

    Which of my comments were retarded?

    I’d like to know as I thought I was quite intelligent, and am trying to be honest here.

     
76. Edward, 22. June 2009, 10:44
    

    I’m not saying you are retarded, just your comments. I’m usually not so harsh but I am tired of battling agenda ridden people like you who refuse to read through the literature.
    -The first question is pointless as the English plural convention doesn’t apply to these words any more than it does to other languages. You’re simply being ethnocentric and avoiding the issues at hand.
    -Your Egyptian question likewise has nothing to do with the issue at hand. And who ever said Egyptians were “Black” anyway?
    -Your third question about red hair – why should you see it, who are you and even if you did what difference does it make. The period of late prehistory to early history would have had examples of red hair due to interaction with whalers etc. but you are unlikely to accept this anyway so again, what is the point in showing you a random red hair when you already have accepted half a dozen premises from that?
    - your fourth question is again irrelevant to the issue at hand and appears nothing more than paranoid ramblings – sorry, but i’m being honest.
    - your fifth question comes to me out of left field and i’m not sure of any connection you are making. The Maori heads held in overseas museums are the heads of Maori which were collected in early history to supply the macabre European market for ‘exotic artefacts’. Sometimes ‘collectors’ would even go so far as to tattoo slaves before decapitating them and shipping them overseas to Europe. This is a well documented activity. The age and provenance and market are known, so why would you run any tests – its just pointless.
    - your seventh question I know nothing about. But again, why would he?
    - your last question is the one that pissed me off the most. As I and others have said again and again and bloody again, the burden of proof lies not with archaeologists or historians but with those who hold anomalous views. If you had bothered to read through this open letter properly or even my last post before you posted you questions you would have seen me state this yet again. Do you have any idea just how many nut jobs there are out there who consider themselves archaeologists despite not bothering with any training or even really knowing the first thing about archaeology? Why should scholars who are busy and underfunded as it is researching real issues have to dedicate their resources to trying to “disprove” quacks like Doutre? Especially when all of the evidence is out there and well documented in the literature! Furthermore, why should Doutre have access to anything? Who the hell does he think he is? He and his like refuse to acknowledge anything any real scholar has to say and show incredible disrespect for indigenous peoples. To reassert for the millionth time it is like a neuro surgeon or astro physicist having to devote all their time to “disproving” someone who claims expertise in their filed but has no training or even understanding of the discipline. Why should Doutre be humored when he doesn’t even understand the most basic principals of archaeological methodology!!?? If you had bothered to read this open letter in its entirety as I had suggested before you posted your worthless questions, you might have come across my asking Doutre about data collection and analysis and depositional transforms among other things to which he had no idea of what I was talking about. These are the basics and he knew nothing! So if he can’t even jump the first hurdle why go any further?

    You might like to think your question were intelligent, but i’m afraid in reality the situation is somewhat different. Instead of mimicking Doutre’s arrogant assumptions of multidisciplinary knowledge and expertise, perhaps you might be humble and accept that, like me, you don’t know everything about things you have no training or background in. I hope you will take the time to research the wealth of peer-reviewed work out there.

     
77. Scott, 22. June 2009, 12:42
    

    Hi James,

    I agree that ‘retarded’ is unfair, but ‘ill-informed and irrelevant’ might be a reasonable description of your post. A lot of the points you raised have been discussed earlier in the thread, and the new ones you raised don’t appear to have much relevance to the discussion.

    Take the point about red hair: even if it wasn’t true that the hair on corpses can turn red, the fact that red hair is found on someone doesn’t indicate that that person has Caucasoid ancestry. Red hair is found in a wide range of human groups – in Berbers, Japanese, Melanesians, and Polynesians, for example. Your argument that red hair on an ancient skeleton indicates Caucasoid ancestry therefore doesn’t follow.

    You also ask about whether smoked heads kept in overseas museums have been DNA tested, and suggest that they haven’t, presumably because the French and British are in on the global plot to suppress the history of the Celts and prevent the disclosure of evidence that they got to NZ thousands of years ago. You seem to think that if one of the smoked heads was shown to belong to someone with some Caucasoid ancestry, then this would count as evidence for the argument that Celts were in New Zealand thousands of years ago, or at least before the arrival of Cook. You’re simply mistaken on this score: the trade in smoked heads began after contact with Europeans, and the collections still held in museums in New Zealand and overseas include heads that belonged to Moriori (ie the indigenous people of the Chathams) and Europeans, as well as Maori. In other words, what you’re claiming the experts are afraid that DNA testing might expose is already freely available information.

    As for all this stuff about a global anti-white conspiracy: what is exactly is a white, and which sinister international body is in charge of the conspiracy? Are Jews white, for instance, or are they part of the anti-white conspiracy, as Martin Doutre seems to think?

     
78. Scott, 22. June 2009, 13:05
    

    I did a google search and found a website which contains translations from the book which James recommedned to us all:
    http://balder.org/judea/Richard-Coudenhove-Kalergi-Practical-Idealism-Vienna-1925.php

    It’s nakedly anti-semitic and racist stuff.

     
79. James, 23. June 2009, 2:12
    

    Edward, thank you for taking some time to answer my questions. I want to point out that I am undecided. I’m not in Martin’s camp (yet).

    I know you never said I was retarded. I never said you did. That’s OK.
    I’m not agenda ridden, and refusing to read the lit. I have read Martin’s site, and this page and a few other little things and that’s it. I just want to know the answers, and I’ve seen the likes of Scott Hamilton before and don’t like them. He’s too nasty to be honest, and accuses others of not knowing facts, and then he blatently lies. A cultural marxist, very loud, very nasty, looking down his nose at anyone who disagrees. It must be genetic I think.

    Re the plurals: I’ll drop the s.

    Re the Eqyptians: I was just trying to set the record straight that many Egyptians did have red hair, contrary to Scott Hamilton’s assertion that they don’t. Forget it, not important.

    Question 4: If you can, please tell me what else massive levels of forced multiculturalism in the west would actually be for. It honestly escapes me. (And it is forced, you know full well what happens to people who resist it.)

    Re the head:
    The URL to the page with the head is http://www.celticnz.co.nz/mnz_pt1.html, have a look and tell me what you think.

    Re Q3, the lock of red hair. Why did they display it in the first place, if it is of no interest whatsoever? Really, what is the story behind it?

    If Maori heads are so sacred, why did they get sold to Europeans years ago. Were they just slaves? How do you know some of them weren’t ancient and dug up by Maori? Why aren’t DNA tests used to return them to their correct descendents, or at least correct area/tribe? Can you direct me to any info on this subject that would clear up all these questions about what actually happened to them?

    On a related note a similar thing is happening with the caucasian mummies found in China. The Chinese tried to hide them from the West for some time, because they were white. I watched the discovery channel episode about some of them. They were over 3000 years old and definitely white. Do you believe in them? If so, you might be intrigued by the tattoos on their faces. They had spirals on the sides of their noses, and the woman had moko-like tattoos on her chin, upper nose, and forehead. They were faded and simpler than Maori tattoos, but they would catch the eye of many NZers because of the spirals. The tattoos were completely ignored by the narrator, but they were there alright. Maybe there is no connection, but maybe there is somewhere back in the mists of time. Is it possible?
    Go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ovltesj0gY&feature=related, and fast forward to 5:55 or so. Tell me what you think of it.

    Also, Kennewick man in USA caused a lot of controversy, but was regarded as a definite 9000 year old caucasian skeleton, was it not? There was a lot of pressure on the archeologists to lie, and then tread carefully later on, but the truth came out, sort of. Indians wanted to claim it as an ancestor and bury it. It isn’t their ancestor though. Is it so hard to believe that the same corruption could occur here? There is a page on the net with a statement in carefully worded terms from the archaeologists.

    Finally, have you seen or read Martin’s book or his website?

    Also, humble yourself too. Sometimes entire fields of experts are wrong in spectacular fashion. You always learn something teaching novices. Calling their questions retarded is a sign of someone who isn’t confident in their own knowledge, and is struggling to dismiss the questions. I sense that you have not read Martin’s material properly, just as you berate him for not reading everything else. He’s seen things that he thinks mean something. I think these things should be investigated. If its found that Maori made all the stone things, then isn’t that a cause for pride amongst the Maori. How does that benefit nazis?
    I could just as easily call you racist for asserting that stone observatories couldn’t possibly exist in NZ because Maori are too dumb to make them. Maybe Martin has discovered something real, but his conclusions are wrong? Maybe you should get off YOUR high horse and check it out?
    I don’t mean the following questions to be accusations or anything like that, I just wonder what the story is with these things. Martin reckons they line up with the sun and stuff, so is there anything to it?
    Have you, personally, gone to have a look at any of these alleged observatories, or do you refuse to because Martin found them first?
    Or do you believe they are just random piles of rocks, not worth looking at? If so, is there statistical analysis that proves this beyond doubt? Is it a concensus among all archaeologists that they are just random rocks? Or do you agree that they exist, but think they are just Maori in origin? Have any digs been made of these things? Are they just in Martin’s imagination? Has anyone but Martin’s crew looked at them?
    What’s the verdict?
    Don’t make the mistake that because you don’t like Martin’s work you throw the baby out with the bathwater. Has he found nothing of interest at all, after all those field trips? Is he a retard?

     
80. Keri Hulme, 23. June 2009, 22:21
    

    Tautoko, to Edward’s last remarks-

    dealing with Doutre believers is like trying to make sense of Menzies’ believers – they are cultists, not people trying to understand what science has established (or is looking at new factual info, and trying to establish.)

     
81. Edward, 25. June 2009, 10:40
    

    Kia ora Keri, and thank you for your support. Yours is a voice of reason and it’s always an enjoyment to read your thoughts. You are quite right about these pseudo-supporters, they do not want to gain understanding but rather wish to push thier own ideologies and agendas. Along with the use of pseudo-science, one can also see the continual citing of supposed Maori traditions and sentiment from these people, which while misunderstood, misquoted, and taken out of context is still ironic seeing as they are obviously anti-Maori to some extent and appear to like to try and speak for Maori despite having little knowledge.
    Cheers again.

     
82. James, 26. June 2009, 20:55
    

    Keri, have any DNA tests been done to figure out where those indigenous red hair and blonde genes in your family come from? You say they have always been there. Have they been traced back to their origin? It should be possible to figure out where they are from, because thousands of years ago they weren’t in the asian gene pool, were they? Pure asians don’t even have body hair at all. But Maori did, even before Europeans got here, didn’t they?

     
83. Edward, 29. June 2009, 13:34
    

    James,

    I don’t have much time, and i’ll try to prevent myself from sounding too nasty (but I am very very frustrated so forgive me of my short tone).

    RE: Q4 “If you can, please tell me what else massive levels of forced multiculturalism in the west would actually be for”
    I would have thought it plainly obvious. Tolerance and understanding. People fear what they do not understand. The opposite is ethnocentricism and xenophobia and who wants that?

    RE: the head. I looked at the site (as I have done before). Nothing special. A head with spirals. Spirals being a common motif in many places. Martin seems to think this can only be due to diffusion. It isn’t. Other than that it is just a typical example of someone who has not learned to think critically about data making interpretations fit his hypothesis rather than testing or trying to disprove his own hypothesis.

    RE Q3: I don’t get the fascination with it. But from a conservation and relevance point of view I can understand why not. Maybe they should set up a ’supposed anomalous artefacts pertaining to ancient NZ Celts’ display in the Museum for the half a dozen people who would actually believe it? Or maybe not. Museums are serious institutions which follow recent research. Displaying such baseless nonsense would be ridiculous.

    RE: heads (again?). Who said it was necessarily Maori who were selling preserved heads to Europeans? I’m sure quite a few early settlers would have been quite happy to do the deed themselves. Again, DNA tests are not done because they are not needed. It would be a waste of time and money for what is already largely known. It is only the handful of Doutre cultists who demand such so where is the justification? Plus you are talking about peoples ancestors, not stone tools. You can’t just go around doing what you like to human remains (and this applies to any human remains Maori or otherwise). Also, many European museums refuse to return them as they classify them as ‘art’.

    RE: the Caucasians in China. I would take this with a grain of salt. It is always better to er on the side of caution/skepticism than to leap in the air with false enlightenment. Even if this is the case, it should not necessarily be that surprising that Caucasians might have made it to Asia as recently as 3000 BP (and this is very recent in archaeological terms) as Asia is land linked to Europe and especially the Caucasus area (northwest of china). All one would have to do is walk. As for the tatoos, again refer to the above. Spirals aren’t exactly unique to Maori. They only seem so to those who wish it so.

    Kennwick man isn’t that interesting, anomalous perhaps, but not that interesting. The reason? If there were a race of Caucasians running around America as some like to suggest, then where is the evidence. Where are the sites. Where are the other burials. Where are the examples of unique material culture. Where are the examples of unique landscape use. These are the questions one must ask. The answer is that there are none. As for archaeologists covering it up, well, they obviously didn’t do a good job did they. Makes one wonder what grounds someone has to make that accusation when everyone knows about said conspiracy does it not?

    RE: Martins book and website. Yes I have looked at both thank you. His ramblings are well known to most archaeologists.

    RE: “Humble yourself too”. Should I not call into question Doutre’s complete and total lack of archaeological method and theory? Am I not entitled to speak with the knowledge I have of my own area of expertise? Should I lower myself to unsubstantiated grunts and snarls like most of the Doutre cultists so as to not hurt your delicate feelings? I speak in terms which I would to anyone. I am not so arrogant as to assume you or anyone else is not intelligent enough to understand me, so I do not censor myself in a manner which I would think would be patronizing to someone. I admit I am in need of the language of explanation, which I am learning slowly. But there you go. I called your questions retarded simply because, to me, they are. I have heard them all a million times so don’t assume they are the first time I have heard them. Leading on from this, I don’t lack confidence in my own knowledge. Unlike Doutre’s cult I know very well and very acutely the limits of my knowledge and I am always ready to admit it in order to learn. Likewise, I do not struggle to dismiss your questions. I am simply dumbfounded that someone could or would ask such questions. I am frustrated at the repetitive, arrogant, uninformed, ignorant, ethnocentric, paranoid and hostile rhetoric of pseudo-archaeology and pseudo-science apologists. I have tried the softly-softly approach in the past, even with Doutre, and been met by accusations of corruption etc. So why should I bother now, when it is beyond obvious to anyone working in archaeology or related fields that the questions like those you raised are merely ridiculous and the result of wishful thinking.

    here you state “I sense that you have not read Martin’s material properly, just as you berate him for not reading everything else. He’s seen things that he thinks mean something. I think these things should be investigated. If its found that Maori made all the stone things, then isn’t that a cause for pride amongst the Maori.”
    I am familiar with his work as I have previously stated. I don’t ‘berate him’ for not reading everything else – who on earth has read ‘everything else’? I certainly haven’t. I t would take a hundred lifetimes. What I berated him for (if again, you would bother to actually read what was written previously rather than seeing what you want to see) was a complete lack of understanding about archaeological methodology and theory. A lack of understanding epistemological issues, data collection, bias, and analysis, or even the scientific method by which you test a hypothesis (again, Martin merely concludes things to fit his). This wasn’t an accusation of failure to read ‘everything’. These are the basics. Even a high school kid should know this, so yes, it appears very much on the retarded side to me when grown “researchers” such as Doutre and his cult can’t grasp it. Answer your question?!? And it’s already been found that “Maori made all these things” so why should scholars continually have to defend this to reinvented pseudo-theories again and again and again and again!? It disrespectful not only to Maori but also to the decades and decades of research undertaken by scholars which has been repeatedly tested and adapted.

    Lets look at this next: “I could just as easily call you racist for asserting that stone observatories couldn’t possibly exist in NZ because Maori are too dumb to make them. Maybe Martin has discovered something real, but his conclusions are wrong? Maybe you should get off YOUR high horse and check it out?”
    You could indeed call me racist if you want, but it will be unsubstantiated and simply untrue. ‘Megalithic’ stone observatories don’t exist here simply because they don’t exist here. There is not one shred of evidence. And no amount of wishful thinking on yours or Doutre’s part will change that reality-based fact. Period.
    As for me getting of MY high horse (to use your like of capitals), I am a field archaeologist. I am out in the landscape all of the time just like every other archaeologist looking at the archaeological record. It is what we do. What do you think archaeologists do? Sit around on our asses like a useless blob making up stories based on nothing but our own imaginations? I’m working on research up in the Bay of Islands now, doing a landscape approach which involves pedestrian survey of an entire peninsula then analysing it using GIS and methods of the sort which real scientists use rather than the inflated rhetoric Doutre spews which he sees as evidence. So thanks for the suggestion, but I do in fact “check it out” all of the time. It’s what I do on a full time basis. How about you? Do you “check it out”? Or are you yet another person who demands everything but understands nothing?

    Again (slightly repetitive): “Have you, personally, gone to have a look at any of these alleged observatories, or do you refuse to because Martin found them first?
    Or do you believe they are just random piles of rocks, not worth looking at? If so, is there statistical analysis that proves this beyond doubt? Is it a concensus among all archaeologists that they are just random rocks? Or do you agree that they exist, but think they are just Maori in origin? Have any digs been made of these things? Are they just in Martin’s imagination? Has anyone but Martin’s crew looked at them?
    What’s the verdict?”

    I and other archaeologists have looked at sites Doutre claims as belonging to ancient Celts. Some of them are unavoidable such as the volcanic cones in the Auckland isthmus. Others are well known to archaeologists (and I have visited several myself on more than one occasion) and have been researched thoroughly already. So in fact Doutre hasn’t really found much of anything first. It’s just that the public don’t bother to read the wealth of literature out there published by scholars (what I have already accused you of which is obviously true)(some of which are aimed at a public audience).

    Some of his other “sites” consist of rocks deposited across the landscape due to volcanic activity. He then usually sets out to subjectively record those rocks which might fit a particular pattern he wishes to create, such as a pentagram of whathaveyou. The problem is that he ignores the fact that the entire field is covered in rocks which have been deposited by the nearby volcano or whatever so his selection of the “meaningful” rocks which he will use in his ‘analysis’ (for lack of as better word) is completely subjective and in a sense predetermined by his hypothesis. Think of it this way, if you have a piece of paper covered in hundreds of black dots, you can construct pretty much whatever pattern you like if you select the ones which fit the shape you have determined in your mind. This is not science. You cannot just ignore data like that. So to answer the second question, yes. In most cases they are just random piles of rocks not worth looking at.

    The third question. Yes, there are many statistical analyses which can and sometimes are run. But really most of the time we don’t need to because it fails as a “site” at the first hurdle.

    The fourth question. Yes, it is a consensus amongst archaeologists that Doutre’s ‘celestial observation’ sites aren’t really sites at all. That is because archaeologists are more than capable of seeing the underlying flaws in Doutre’s conclusions, and as I have said, it is very basic stuff. What this does not mean is that archaeologists are part of some twisted conspiracy. In fact, like other scientific disciplines, archaeologists are more likely to be skeptical of each others conclusions and can often be found challenging each other’s inferences – it is only when the evidence amounts to such a cumulative or high standard that a model or hypothesis will become theory. As previously stated a million times, that is what peer-review is. Something Doutre has always rejected because we are all out to “get” him.

    Question five. Many of the other kinds of sites Doutre claims as Celtic such as pa and horticultural stone walls are unarguably Maori. Much research exists on these. What else do people suppose archaeologists research in NZ?

    Question six. Yes. Many digs have been made on these kinds of sites. Not so on volcanic fields because, well, they are volcanic fields. But excavations are not needed on the kinds of sites Doutre fabricates as ‘celestial observatories’ anyway because survey methods (which are undertaken regularly) suffice.

    Question seven. Yes. These celestial observatories exist in the same way Santa Claus exists. Only in the imagination. But in this case there would be more reason to believe of Santa’s existence because at least more than one person believes it. Doutre makes claims which are discredited by a wide variety of experts – not just from archaeology but also linguistics, history, sociology, philosophy, biology, geology, chemistry…the list goes on. Are you trying to argue thousands of these people with different backgrounds and years and years of sound, repeatable and tested research are wrong and this one man is right? Hmm.

    Question eight and nine. Yes others have looked into it. The verdict is he’s probably mentally unstable (due more to his paranoia and failure to take on board criticisms than anything else) and that his “research” is lacking and false at best, racist propaganda at worst.

    It is actually good advice on your part to assert that I not throw the baby out with the bathwater. It is advice I have given others at times also. But I can assure you, while I appreciate your warning, that is not the case in this instance. There are many people I probably wouldn’t (and don’t) like very much personally, but I very much respect their opinion because it has proved sound time and time again and is based in reality. Doutre I dislike because of his agenda (yes he does have one despite what his apologists might say) though I do not know him personally. And as Scott has pointed out the company you keep can and does sometimes reflect the kind of person you are ala Bolton et al. But, all of this aside, it is his sloppy, biased and, well, useless “research” which I have always attacked. Read through again this open letter and you will see the main and sustained argument I make against him. Methodology. Or lack of it. So, not really any baby in this bathwater this time to throw out even if I wanted to.

    Lastly, no. He hasn’t found anything of interest after all of this time. At least not anything which hasn’t already been researched and tested by archaeologists. What he has found is his own imagination. A bit of a ‘hunting for the snark’ moment me thinks. Sad really isn’t it? As for being a retard? No. I don’t think that. I do think his “research” is retarded though. Thoroughly retarded. Or perhaps I shouldn’t use that word. Delusional, false, biased, ridiculous, absurd, silly…these words may be exchanged for the ‘R’ word if you wish.

    Again, my apologies if my manner is short or harsh, but I am filled up to the top of my frustration-o-meter. I hope my reply is of some help. And again, I hope you might further your education in these matters with some of the scholarly and peer-reviewed works – often you will find attached at the back of many articles replies and critiques from other scholars who may take issue with a particular aspect so you can see we don’t all just act like sheep and do what the conspiracy-generating government wants us to ;)

    Here’s a resource to help begin with: http://archaeologyaeoteoroa.blogspot.com/

    Other than that try searches on Google Scholar.

    Cheers.

     

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