The Moriori “Vanished Race” Controversy

Record summary

The claim that Moriori were a vanished, racially distinct people displaced by Māori persisted in popular and some older scholarly narratives during the mid-twentieth century. Archaeological, linguistic, and historical research increasingly demonstrated Moriori’s Polynesian origins and a more complex history of settlement, adaptation, and later colonial misrepresentation. This is a major case for studying how racialized pseudo-history can shape archaeological interpretation. The period’s sources include oral histories, colonial accounts, museum collections, and archaeological studies with unequal reliability.