Hawaiki: The Original Home of the Maori

Record summary

S. Percy Smith’s Hawaiki: The Original Home of the Maori presented a reconstructed account of Polynesian origins, migrations, genealogies, and voyaging based on Māori traditions, comparative linguistics, and nineteenth-century ethnology. It became highly influential in early twentieth-century discussions of a unified Polynesian migration history, while later scholars criticized its selective treatment of oral traditions and speculative chronology. The work is useful for comparing Indigenous traditions, colonial-era synthesis, and the development of archaeological migration models, but its reconstructions should not be treated as a direct historical record.