The Polynesian Steam-oven is North Temperate or
Sub-Arctic in Origin

(11) But there is community in features of the life that is not to be rejected so lightly. To take one instance, the method of steaming food that is universal in Polynesia is as common on the coast of North-west America, whilst all around both regions there is little or no trace of it. In Melanesia it is used in one or two groups; but this can be proved to be due page 53to infiltration from Polynesia. In Papuasia, Indonesia, and all along the south of Asia there is nothing to be found like it. None of the tribes over the Rocky Mountains, and none of the Esquimaux to the north have it It is also true that the Ainos do not use it; but we have seen reason to believe that they were not first in the Japanese Archipelago, and have been greatly influenced in their habits of life by their conquerors and the materials and vessels that they supplied.

(12) The natural genesis of the custom is easily explained in British Columbia, and especially amongst the Thlinkeets on the borders of Alaska. A fire kindled and kept up in the deeply frost-bound earth would suggest it. As the soil melts and the water escapes from it in steam, it sinks, and ultimately the fireplace becomes a hole in the ground lined with red-hot stones; if, when the smoke disappears and the fire dies down, a covering is placed over the mouth of the hole, there is at once a cooking-place like the Maori oven.

(13) It is not so easy to explain its origin in a tropical region like Polynesia. There the open fire would be the natural method of cooking; there would be no excessive accumulation of heat, and the fuel could be scattered and the flame extinguished rapidly. The principle of the steam-oven is that the heated stones keep their heat for long periods, and this would be offensive in the neighbourhood of dwellings in the tropics. Moreover, the natives of luxuriant forest regions of the torrid zone avoid, wherever they can, digging holes in the rich humus. Experience has taught them that the practice leads to disease and death. They never live like the dwellers in frost-bound regions, half underground, but prefer to raise their houses on stone or wooden piles so that the air may circulate freely underneath the floor. And here we may note that there are ancient groups of hollows in the ground in several parts of New Zealand, as, for example, in the Marlborough Sounds, and near Lake Manapouri in Otago, that page 54seem to be the remains of half-underground dwellings, and the Maoris often have their open fire in a hole in the floor of their whares. That the pre-Polynesians in New Zealand had used steam-ovens is evident by their having been found as much as fourteen feet below the surface of the soil, as, for example, on the Manuherikia Plains in Central Otago.