KEY POINTS:
Auckland Museum hopes New Zealanders will do a bit of "way-finding" to discover a ground-breaking exhibition about the Polynesian migration across the Pacific Ocean.
The ancestors of today's Pacific peoples travelled the vast oceans 4000 years ago by a method of navigation traditionally known as way-finding, based on observations of the sea and sky.
The migration story is central to the Vaka Moana exhibition in the new exhibition space, part of the Dome museum extension.
It is the first comprehensive exhibition to explain the latest findings on the origins of the Pacific peoples, and how they migrated by sea, thousands of years before the oceanic forays of the Vikings, Portuguese and Spaniards.
The word vaka, used in Tokelau and elsewhere, is one of the variations of the Polynesian word for canoe including waka (New Zealand) and va'a (Samoa and Tahiti).
Work began on the project three years ago and the museum has drawn on its Maori and Pacific collections, and on contributions from international sources, to show about 200 objects including rare carvings and a full-size voyaging canoe.
They will be supported by multimedia installations and interactive displays.
After its Auckland debut, Vaka Moana heads to the National Museum of Ethnology at Osaka in Japan then to Taiwan, Canberra and Amsterdam.
Museum director Rodney Wilson said the Pacific had been a place of settlement for 4000 years and that had never stopped.
"Vaka Moana takes us forward as a nation, helping us to see ourselves as part of the Pacific family."
Professor Kerry Howe, of Massey University's School of Social and Cultural Studies, said the human settlement of the Pacific was the final chapter in the story of human exploration and settlement on this planet.
"With the settlement of the Pacific islands, we reached the end of our habitable world."
The exhibition tells how Hawaii, Rapanui (Easter Island) and New Zealand were the last places to be discovered because getting to them involved overcoming enormous physical and technological challenges.
It also examines the response of early Spanish, British and French expeditions to the widely scattered Polynesian peoples and presents their recorded impressions of the technology they encountered.
Professor Howe said it was no coincidence the islands of the Pacific were settled after humans had developed agricultural practices.
"Actually, they were the first places on Earth to be settled by humans who were agriculturists. Every other part of the globe had been initially settled by humans long before the agricultural revolution."
The means of finding a way to the new lands and back was also new, and so different from the instrument-based navigation of later European explorers that scholars at first dismissed the possibility that it had been done at all.
Professor Geoff Irwin, a University of Auckland archaeologist, said the exhibition shattered the myth of explorers arriving at luxuriant tropical paradises.
"Most islands were relatively poor in flora and fauna before the arrival of humans and were incapable of sustaining human populations for long periods of time. Successful settlement depended on the intentional introduction of new plants and animals."
The ancestors of the Polynesians took a whole suite of plants and domestic animals with them, he said.
Through computer simulation, Professor Irwin and his colleagues tested a range of voyaging strategies which indicated the early explorers could navigate accurately and that their method of exploration was rational and cautious.
"Clearly settlement was intentional and motivated, but it was underpinned by a concern for safety.
"There was a policy of searching, then returning home.
"The safest way was to go against the prevailing winds, so that the winds would take them home again.
"Their own islands then became a safety net to fall back on."
It was now thought that the Austro-nesian voyagers waited for the brief annual reversal of the Pacific's prevailing southeasterly winds to take them east, rather than trying to sail against them.
"What the story tells us is that humans expanded when they had the capacity and, in this case the technology, to do so. We increasingly know how it was done, when and by whom. What we still don't know is why."
Ever since European explorers first encountered Pacific peoples, there has been speculation about their ancestors and where they came from.
Archaeology, ethnology, traditional knowledge and comparative linguistics, with computer modelling of voyaging possibilities and comparative DNA of humans, plants and animals, have helped researchers find the probable answer.
It is now believed that there was a common ancestor, the Austronesian societies living throughout southern China and Southeast Asia 5000-6000 years ago (before the rise of modern Chinese civilisation).
New tools were needed to cross the Pacific, resulting in the vaka - the world's first blue-water technology.
VOYAGES OF THE ANCESTORS
The Vaka Moana exhibition tells the story of the exploration and peopling of the Pacific Ocean, using scientific research in genetics, linguistics and computer modelling.
The story starts 3500 years before Europeans headed south, when the ancestors of Pacific people launched the world's first seagoing craft into the greatest ocean on Earth, and incorporates material from the great European explorers such as Abel Tasman.
When: December 9, 2006, to April 1, 2007.
The launch coincides with the opening of the $64 million Dome. A free grand opening party is being thrown with tours of the new museum spaces, plus dance and cultural performances.
Where: Auckland Museum. Entry $15(adults) $6 (children) $32 (families)
