New Zealand History - The Truth 4

THE SURVEYORS

According to a learned Maori elder who has memorised the oral traditions of his iwi, the forebears to his people first arrived in New Zealand in the year 700 AD from India. Upon finding these shores, this branch of Ngati-kuri ancestors encountered a long-term resident population who were preoccupied with erecting stone markers on hills all across the country. The newcomers thus named the long established residents, "the surveyors".

Their surviving ancient handiwork can be anything from solitary obelisk boulders, smaller standing stone arrangements, stone-piled cairns, large earthen mound humps to sighting-pits or cliff-cut notches, etc. Many of these structures are on high hills or range crests, while others are in valleys. Each has a good view onto at least one or many horizon targets and each served an important surveying, astronomical or navigational function for the ancient society that erected it.

Some markers served a calendar-relate d function as solar observatories and still work perfectly. They were used to determine the exact days for the solstices or equinoxes and keeping the calendars running true. Yet others were primarily or solely for land-mapping over vast distances and were made up of a centre hubstone and circuits of satellite boulders that stood off from the central hub. In such cases, the hubstone would invariably orientate accurately onto a horizon target that provided a fix for true North, South, East or West. The far distant outer marker targets would be the highest mountain peaks or hill crowns in the region, at least one of which would provide the essential, primary degree angle by which all other degree angles could be precisely read through 360-degrees of vista.

The ancient surveyors had brought very profound mathematical knowledge with them from their lands of origin. They possessed highly refined measurement standards and shared an assortment of "cubits", "reeds" or "feet" rules with their many cousin nations. Measurements were standardised amongst the great civilisations and were all founded upon the selfsame inch.

At standing stone circles sites the ancient savants encoded their sciences by numbers, based upon a stone marker set at a measurable distance out from a hubstone and at a coded angle around from North. Both the distance and angle out from the hub would generate special factorable numbers related to cyclic astronomy, the lunisolar calendar, the equatorial size of the earth or systems of navigation and positional-plot ting for safe traversals of the world's oceans.