In the two articles referred to above, Dr Roger Duff, the Director of the Canterbury Museum, reviewed the evidence then available for the origins and character of the first human settlement of New Zedand. Using the evidence of both oral tradition and archaeology, he saw the first settlers as Polynesians, coming from a tropical ‘Hawaiki’ to the north-east (identified as the Society group) and possessing a material culture similar to that typical of Eastern Polynesia, particularly the peripheral islands of Hawaii, the Marquesas, Easter and Pitcairn. Chronologically, he was prepared to argue that ‘. . . there is strong circumstantial evidence for believing that human settlement must be earlier rather than later than A.D. 950’, the genealogically derived date for the discovery of New Zealand by Kupe (who was followed, again according to traditional interpretations, by Toi, about A.D. 1150). To Duff, this ‘strong circumstantial evidence’ comprised the remains, particularly in the South Island, of a distinctive and now extinct avifauna consisting of moa, swan and eagle found in association with Eastern Polynesian-type artifacts but hardly referred to in Maori tradition. Duff argued that it would be logical to relate the Maori themselves to the traditional arrival of the so-called Fleet from Eastern Polynesia (Society Islands and/or Southern Cooks) in about A.D. 1350, which ‘. . . brings to a close a general period of migration from Polynesia. Introducing the sweet potato and other food-plants, the newcomers impose themselves as an aristocracy upon the Toi and pre-Toi descendants, and found the tribes which were dominant in Cook’s time’.