Otago University Museum
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Otago University Museum
Tūhura Otago Museum is located in the city centre of Dunedin, New Zealand. It is adjacent to the University of Otago campus in Dunedin North, 1,500 metres northeast of the city centre. It is one of the city's leading attractions and has one of the largest museum collections in New Zealand. Natural science specimens and humanities artefacts from Otago, New Zealand and the world form the basis for long-term gallery displays. An interactive science centre within the museum includes a large, immersive tropical butterfly rainforest environment. In February 2022 the museum was gifted the name ''Tūhura'', meaning "to discover, investigate and explore" by local rūnanga, changing the official name to Tūhura Otago Museum. History Origins The name "Otago Museum" was first used by James Hector to describe his geological collections on display at the 1865 New Zealand Exhibition, held in Dunedin. Some of these collections were the nucleus of the Otago Museum, which first opened to the p ...
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Moeraki Boulder
The Moeraki Boulders (officially Moeraki Boulders / Kaihinaki) are unusually large spherical boulders lying along a stretch of Koekohe Beach on the wave-cut Otago coast of New Zealand between Moeraki and Hampden. They occur scattered either as isolated or clusters of boulders within a stretch of beach where they have been protected in a scientific reserve. These boulders are grey-colored septarian concretions, which have been exhumed from the mudstone and bedrock enclosing them and concentrated on the beach by coastal erosion.Boles, J. R., C. A. Landis, and P. Dale, 1985''The Moeraki Boulders; anatomy of some septarian concretions'' Journal of Sedimentary Petrology, vol. 55, n. 3, p. 398-406.Fordyce, E., and P. Maxwell, 2003, ''Canterbury Basin Paleontology and Stratigraphy, Geological Society of New Zealand Annual Field Conference 2003 Field Trip 8'', Miscellaneous Publication 116B, Geological Society of New Zealand, Dunedin, New Zealand. Forsyth, P.J., and G. Coates, 1992, ' ...
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Ted McCoy
Edward John McCoy (23 February 1925 – 17 January 2018), generally known as Ted McCoy, was a New Zealand architect whose practice was based in Dunedin. He designed the sanctuary of St Paul's Cathedral (completed 1970), and the Richardson (formerly Hocken) Building of the University of Otago (completed 1979), among many others. In 1950, he established McCoy and Wixon Architects, joined in partnership by Peter Wixon in 1967. Biography Born on 23 February 1925, McCoy studied architecture at the University of Auckland, graduating in 1949. He moved back to his home city of Dunedin the following year, setting up an architectural practice in the city. His first major design was for the Dominican Order's Aquinas Hall, in the north of the city, (now an Otago University hall of residence, Aquinas College). The design won a Gold Medal as design of the year from the New Zealand Institute of Architects.Somerset, G.The Real McCoy", ''New Zealand Listener'', 25 October 2008. Retrieved 9 Jan ...
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Cuneiform
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-shaped impressions (Latin: ) which form its signs. Cuneiform was originally developed to write the Sumerian language of southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq). Cuneiform is the earliest known writing system. Over the course of its history, cuneiform was adapted to write a number of languages in addition to Sumerian. Akkadian texts are attested from the 24th century BC onward and make up the bulk of the cuneiform record. Akkadian cuneiform was itself adapted to write the Hittite language in the early second millennium BC. The other languages with significant cuneiform corpora are Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Luwian, and Urartian. The Old Persian and Ugaritic alphabets feature cuneiform-style signs; however, they are unrelated to the cuneiform lo ...
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Taonga
''Taonga'' or ''taoka'' (in South Island Māori) is a Maori-language word that refers to a treasured possession in Māori culture. It lacks a direct translation into English, making its use in the Treaty of Waitangi significant. The current definition differs from the historical one, noted by Hongi Hika as "property procured by the spear" war booty or defended property] and is now interpreted to mean a wide range of both tangible and intangible possessions, especially items of historical cultural significance. Tangible examples are all sorts of Antique, heirlooms and artefacts, land, fisheries, natural resources such as geothermal springs and access to natural resources, such as riparian water rights and access to the riparian zone of rivers or streams. Intangible examples may include language and spiritual beliefs. What is deemed to be a ''taonga'' has major political, economic and social consequences in New Zealand and has been the subject of fierce debates as the varying ...
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Māori Culture
Māori culture () is the customs, cultural practices, and beliefs of the indigenous Māori people of New Zealand. It originated from, and is still part of, Polynesians, Eastern Polynesian culture. Māori culture forms a distinctive part of Culture of New Zealand, New Zealand culture and, due to a large diaspora and the incorporation of Māori motifs into popular culture, it is found throughout the world. Within Māoridom, and to a lesser extent throughout New Zealand as a whole, the word is often used as an approximate synonym for Māori culture, the Māori language, Māori-language suffix being roughly equivalent to the qualitative noun-ending ''-ness'' in English. has also been translated as "[a] Māori way of life." Four distinct but overlapping cultural eras have contributed Māori history, historically to Māori culture: * before Māori culture had differentiated itself from other Polynesian cultures (Archaic period) * before widespread European contact (Classic period) ...
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Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a Megadiverse countries, megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with Deserts of Australia, deserts in the centre, tropical Forests of Australia, rainforests in the north-east, and List of mountains in Australia, mountain ranges in the south-east. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south east Asia approximately Early human migrations#Nearby Oceania, 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period, last i ...
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Polynesia
Polynesia () "many" and νῆσος () "island"), to, Polinisia; mi, Porinihia; haw, Polenekia; fj, Polinisia; sm, Polenisia; rar, Porinetia; ty, Pōrīnetia; tvl, Polenisia; tkl, Polenihia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, made up of more than 1,000 islands scattered over the central and southern Pacific Ocean. The indigenous people who inhabit the islands of Polynesia are called Polynesians. They have many things in common, including language relatedness, cultural practices, and traditional beliefs. In centuries past, they had a strong shared tradition of sailing and using stars to navigate at night. The largest country in Polynesia is New Zealand. The term was first used in 1756 by the French writer Charles de Brosses, who originally applied it to all the islands of the Pacific. In 1831, Jules Dumont d'Urville proposed a narrower definition during a lecture at the Geographical Society of Paris. By tradition, the islands located in the southern Pacific have also ...
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Melanesia
Melanesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It extends from Indonesia's New Guinea in the west to Fiji in the east, and includes the Arafura Sea. The region includes the four independent countries of Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, and Papua New Guinea. It also includes the French oversea collectivity of New Caledonia, Indigenous Australians of the Torres Strait Islands and parts of Indonesia, most notably the provinces of Central Papua, Highland Papua, Papua, South Papua, Southwest Papua, and West Papua. Almost all of the region is in the Southern Hemisphere; only a few small islands that are not politically considered part of Oceania—specifically the northwestern islands of Western New Guinea—lie in the Northern Hemisphere. The name ''Melanesia'' (in French, ''Mélanésie'') was first used in 1832 by French navigator Jules Dumont d'Urville: he coined the terms ''Melanesia'' and '' Micronesia'' along the preexisting '' Polyne ...
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Micronesia
Micronesia (, ) is a subregion of Oceania, consisting of about 2,000 small islands in the western Pacific Ocean. It has a close shared cultural history with three other island regions: the Philippines to the west, Polynesia to the east, and Melanesia to the south—as well as with the wider community of Austronesian peoples. The region has a tropical marine climate and is part of the Oceanian realm. It includes four main archipelagos—the Caroline Islands, the Gilbert Islands, the Mariana Islands, and the Marshall Islands—as well as numerous islands that are not part of any archipelago. Political control of areas within Micronesia varies depending on the island, and is distributed among six sovereign nations. Some of the Caroline Islands are part of the Republic of Palau and some are part of the Federated States of Micronesia (often shortened to "FSM" or "Micronesia"—not to be confused with the identical name for the overall region). The Gilbert Islands (along with the ...
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The Skeletons Of Eastern Moa And Other Kinds Of Moas In Otago Museum
''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the most frequently used word in the English language; studies and analyses of texts have found it to account for seven percent of all printed English-language words. It is derived from gendered articles in Old English which combined in Middle English and now has a single form used with pronouns of any gender. The word can be used with both singular and plural nouns, and with a noun that starts with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different forms of the definite article for different genders or numbers. Pronunciation In most dialects, "the" is pronounced as (with the voiced dental fricative followed by a schwa) when followed by a consonant sound, and as (homophone of pronoun ''thee'') when followed by a ...
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Harry Skinner (ethnologist)
Henry Devenish Skinner (18 December 1886 – 9 February 1978), known as Harry Skinner or H.D. Skinner, was a notable New Zealand soldier, ethnologist, university lecturer, museum curator and director, and librarian. The son of William Skinner, he was born in New Plymouth in 1886. Skinner received information on Māori house types and construction methods from Mere Harper. In the 1956 New Year Honours, Skinner was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, for services as director of Otago Museum and lecturer in anthropology at the University of Otago. The H.D. Skinner Annex of the Otago Museum, formerly the Dunedin North Post Office, was opened in August 2013, and named in honour of Skinner. During his time at the museum, Skinner was responsible for adding more than 65,000 objects to the humanities collections, including purchasing a piece of from one of Fletcher Christian Fletcher Christian (25 September 1764 – 20 September 1793) was master's ...
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Dunedin Exchange Building
Dunedin ( ; mi, Ōtepoti) is the second-largest city in the South Island of New Zealand (after Christchurch), and the principal city of the Otago region. Its name comes from , the Scottish Gaelic name for Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. The city has a rich Scottish, Chinese and Māori heritage. With an estimated population of as of , Dunedin is both New Zealand's seventh-most populous metro and urban area. For historic, cultural and geographic reasons the city has long been considered one of New Zealand's four main centres. The urban area of Dunedin lies on the central-eastern coast of Otago, surrounding the head of Otago Harbour, and the harbour and hills around Dunedin are the remnants of an extinct volcano. The city suburbs extend out into the surrounding valleys and hills, onto the isthmus of the Otago Peninsula, and along the shores of the Otago Harbour and the Pacific Ocean. Archaeological evidence points to lengthy occupation of the area by Māori prior to the ...
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