NTERNATIONAL RELATIONS COMMITTEE Invites you to a talk on
Ingenious paradoxes cultural heritage and ontological alterity in Aotearoa New Zealand

By

Prof. Simon Holdaway | Head, School of Social Sciences | University of Auckland

Abstract

Joan Gero argued that archaeological interpretation is not result of accumulating truth but rather an ideological construct while the contemporary Māori academic Linda Smith criticised western intellectuals for assuming that they can know all that there is to know about indigenous culture. I discuss both these critiques in the context of the way heritage professionals in New Zealand define taonga tūturu or ‘national treasures’. These special archaeological finds defined based on aesthetics of form and manufacture are privileged over mundane items like stone artifacts and hearth stones. Using an artifact assemblage from a site on Ahuahu (Great Mercury Island), New Zealand and drawing on the literature describing the ontological turn in anthropology and applications to archaeology, I explore alternative Māori concepts of material connections to the ancestors as a way of interpreting archaeological assemblages.