Examples of Peruvian pottey from Easter Island in the Waikato Museum.

One of history's ironies is that the significance of ancient items has often been recognised thousands of miles away from their point of origin.

The discovery of Egyptian tombs has been precipitated by the appearance of artifacts in European shops. The first scholar to postulate the existance of a giant flightless bird in New Zealand was Sir Richard Owen of the Royal College of Surgeons who deduced the size and character of the moa from a single bone in the 1840s.

There was similar irony in the recent depositing of seven pieces of Peruvian pottery from Easter Island with the Waikato Museum in Hamilton. Scholars like Thor Heyerdahl have scoured the eastern Pacific for tangible links between South America and Polynesia, but it was in the western extremity of the Polynesian triangle that the most concrete evidence for their theories appeared.

The pieces of pottery are made of hard blackware, and are both functional and beautiful. They are hollow and decorated with designs of monkeys, snakes and birds. Their shapes and surface marks show they were not made on a potters wheel but moulded in two pieces around solid material, such as round stone, and sealed together.

Mrs. R. E. Harries donated the pieces to the Waikato Museum where their value was recognised. They were given to her father in the mid-nineteenth century by the captain of a Pacific trading vessel who had taken them from Easter Island. Mrs. Harries received the pottery from her father in the 1880s.