The Astronomical Knowledge of the Maori, Genuine and Empirical

Elsdon Best was an early twentieth century ethnographer who worked extensively among Maori communities in New Zealand, and this Dominion Museum publication is his scholarly compilation of Maori astronomical knowledge, documenting named stars and star clusters including Matariki. Its strength is that it preserves detailed astronomical and calendrical knowledge recorded directly from Maori informants at a specific historical moment, material that would otherwise be harder to recover. Its limit is that Best was an outside Pakeha observer working within the ethnographic conventions of his era, and later Maori-led scholarship has revised and expanded some of his readings, so a claim resting on Best alone should be checked against more recent Maori-authored or Maori-led astronomical scholarship where it exists.