Bats and beaked birds, plaques and pendants, and even jade inserts and fillings for the teeth, club heads, ear ornaments, lip and nose plugs, and almost any other object imaginable were produced by the thousands. All of it perished in the sudden onslaught of a foreign culture. The subsequent poverty and prostration of all the native cultures erased a good part of what was left—even the memories.
Another Stone Age culture began to develop the use of jade at some unknown time after settlement of the two islands of New Zealand about A.D. 1000. The Maoris found jade there and promptly put it to use for work purposes. They needed good knives, hatchets, and fish hooks above all else and had little thought of making ornaments until much later. Then, these tools themselves became the first amulets. A curious and strangely contorted human figure—the Hei-tiki—with cocked head, lopsided eyes, and bowed legs, was also worn as a pendant. It and a few other carved fishhook and serpent forms are just about as far as this jade culture was able to go before the world of the European intruded with the arrival of Captain Cook in 1769. Today jade is cut in New Zealand by descendants of the same people, using power tools and carborundum drills, not the primitive tools of their ancestors and loose diamonds.
All over the world the age of the jade cultures is finished. Now it is just another art form pursued by collectors and connoisseurs. Even so, the strong attraction of this beautiful and magic stone persists. One can judge it by the sudden scarcity of raw jade and by the escalating prices of the finished carvings of quality in the market place.
Maoris Jade
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