1 Like many commentators, Martyn Bradbury thinks the people digging for the remains of a mythical white civilisation in NZ's backblocks must be seriously mental ill, the victims of our 21st century conspiracy culture. This view is understandable, but it's badly mistaken (thread)
2 The pseudo-archaeologists who desecrate urupa searching for the bones of a non-existent white tangata whenua are not a contemporary or marginal phenomenon. They are of a mainstream tradition in Western thought & scholarship.
3 A century ago nearly every scholar of NZ history held some of the assumptions of today's grave robbers. They believed in higher & lower races, thought human progress came thru cultural diffusion across the globe, & researched by ransacking Maori wahi tapu & traditions. 
4 If we look, for example, at Percy Smith & Elsdon Best's massively influential theory of the Moriori as the original people of NZ, & if we look at the way they gathered for evidence for that theory, we can see obvious precedents for the work of today's pseudo-historians.
5 Smith & Best believed that a primitive & cannibalistic Melanesian race called the Moriori arrived in NZ, before being displaced by the more advanced Maori, who were in return, of course, colonised by Pakeha. Their theory implied racial hierarchies & development by diffusion.
6 Like today's pseudo-historians, Smith & Best appropriated fragments of Maori oral history, & used these to justify their ideas about history. Their claim that the Maruiwi legends concerned Moriori was as incoherent as the contemporary claim that patupaiarehe were ancient Pakeha
7 Smith & Best were far more sophisticated than today's pseudo-historians, & they did not, so far as I'm aware, desecrate ancient sites. But many cruder scholars of their era did. Andreas Reischek, for example, looted burial caves across Te Ika a Maui.
8 NZ was no exception in the early 20th century. Across the west, race-based scholarship ruled. & it was in Nazi Germany that this scholarship was perfected. Reischek & Smith would have loved to be members of the Ahnennerbe, Himmler's archaeological army.
9 Reading Heather Pringle's superb study of the archaeologists & other linguists that Himmler despatched to places like Tibet & Sweden in search of evidence for his ideas about racial hierarchy & cultural diffusion, I think continually of NZ's early 20th century scholars.
10 There are parallels b/n the expeditions Himmler organised & some of the grand scholarly research projects in NZ & the Pacific. The Bayard Dominick expeditions to Pacific Islands in the '20s, for eg, were sponsored by a US broker who wanted to find ancient white civilisations
11 Over the last five decades or so NZ archaeologists have done a superb job of professionalising & decolonising their discipline. There is no prospect, today, that they would be duped by white supremacist giant hunters. But the same can't be said for other disciplines.
12 Last year the NYT ran a long, well-researched, & very disturbing article about the way one of the world's top academic laboratories has been using DNA obtained from bones acquired at ancient Pacific archaeological sites. nytimes.com/2019/01/17/mag…
13 The NYT piece focused on a high-profile 'discovery' that scientists made while examining bones from Teouma, the oldest burial site on Vanuatu. According to a small group of US scientists, these bones belonged only to the Lapita ancestors of today's Polynesians.
14 On the basis of their DNA 'result' from Teouma, the US scientists decided that a more advanced Lapita people must have settled Vanuatu, then spread their culture to less advanced Melanesians.
15 But the NYT revealed that the Teouma interpretation was based on the examination of only a few bones from the cemetery. The investigation's author slammed David Reich's prestigious lab for this, & for the racialist, 19th century argument it built on such thin foundations.
16 David Reich & the team at his DNA lab are not racist crackpots, but for various reasons, which the NYT documents, they've deployed the same methods & drawn the same sort of conclusion as people like Percy Smith & today's giant-hunters in NZ.
17 The racialist scholarship of the 19th & early 20th century was disastrous for Maori. It led to the desecration of wahi tapu & to negative stereotypes. It was also subtly assimilated by some Maori scholars. Ngata, Buck & Haare Hongi all absorbed some racialist ideas from Pakeha
18 Today the scholarship of Reich & his lab has had deleterious effects in Vanuatu. It has perpetuated the notion that the nation's Melanesian majority is somehow culturally backward, & it has obscured the way Lapita-Polynesian & Melanesian peoples interacted & blended.
19 When we treat the contemporary white supremacist pseudo-archaeologists as crazy outliers, we stop ourselves from thinking about our own intellectual history, & miss the ways that racialist ideas are still seeping into some research on the Pacific.
