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Maori and Polynesian: their origin, history and culture

Not Since our Era has there been any Immigration — Into Polynesia

Not Since our Era has there been any Immigration
Into Polynesia

(13) The absence of iron from Polynesia would seem to have closed it to all immigration for nearly three thousand years. But this conflicts with the traditions and genealogies of the islands. For, if the latter are to be trusted in chrono-page 46logy, there seems to have been a drift into them from Indonesia about the beginning of our era. But the contradiction is removed when we remember that the iron age did not start in that region till about the same period, and that it followed there straight on the stone age, as in trans-Saharan Africa. The words in Malay for copper and bronze are all of Sanskrit origin; and these two metals were brought into the Malay Archipelago by the Buddhists from India when they established their empire and built their colossal temples in Java. Iron took the place, not of copper or bronze, but of stone, and that it never came farther east than the west of New Guinea till the Europeans arrived, shows the fallacy of the idea that the Malays ever mastered Polynesia by their influence, language, or customs, or had ever had even a trade route into it. Whatever there is in common between the Polynesian dialects and the Malay (and there is much) is due to the absorption of primitive elements in Indonesia. Language is never a safe test of race or origin. Had the Malays ever ventured as traders or conquerors into Polynesia, iron would have come with them. Its complete absence proves that there was neither immigration nor trade route into that island-world from the coasts of Asia during our era, and none from the eastern coasts for at least a thousand years before it. Had even chance metal weapons or tools found their way into the islands we should have seen them cherished as amulets or objects of worship.