Dixon, Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa

In the early 1920s, Henry Devenish Skinner of the Otago Museum, Dunedin, New Zealand, entered into a correspondence with Roland Burrage Dixon of the Peabody Museum and Harvard University and with Te Rangi Hiroa, then Director of Maori Hygiene in Auckland, New Zealand. The correspondence centred on recent publications by Dixon that used an experimental craniological analysis of his own devising to construct a number of global racial types and to trace their prehistoric migrations. This work had a bearing on theories of the settlement of Polynesia, in particular of New Zealand, a subject of vital interest to Skinner and Te Rangi Hiroa. Although the weaknesses of Dixon's technique were well documented in subsequent reviews, both New Zealanders were initially swayed by his arguments. This paper looks at the details of and context for the interactions between the three scholars and the possible impact of this correspondence on later work

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