As early as the 18th century, tribes in New Zealand have been engaging in trade that provided them resources for crafting cloaks and donning feathery fashion.
Researchers studied the Maori tribe's kiwi feather cloaks called Kahu kiwi and attempted to identify where the feathers had come from. They found that these people wearing the cloaks had been engaging in inter-island trades.
A team of researchers from Griffith University in Nathan, Australia analyzed DNA preserved in retrieved kiwi feather cloaks and published their findings in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution.
With the help of museums in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the researchers sampled the DNA of kiwi feathers in 109 cloaks. They mapped the geographical origins of the kiwi feathers, basing the origins on a previous study that enumerated and analyzed the geographical distribution and genetic diversity of New Zealand's five kiwi bird species.
According to Griffith's evolutionary geneticist and the study's lead author, David Lambert, the feathers mostly came from the North Island brown kiwi (Apteryx mantelli); 15 percent of the cloaks that the researchers looked at were woven partially from kiwi feathers that would have come from different regions across the North Island.
Lambert added that trans-island feather trades would have emerged during the early 19th century, after the Musket Wars. Maori traders and hunters alike were likely to have looked further around in search for kiwi feathers, further configuring tribal boundaries.
The researchers also noticed that more or less a third of the cloaks were made of the feathers of birds that belonged to a population of small eastern swath of the North Island. Lambert speculates that cloak-making started in this region, which eventually made its way to the south.
However, Murdoch University's Morten Allentoft notes that the study is based on current distributions of the kiwi. The ancient DNA expert says that migration patterns would have been different 200 years ago, and this could complicate interpretation.
Allentoft does admit that the results of the study show real insight into the history of the Maori.
"The ability to trace these old feathers back to geographic origin is a significant achievement, displaying the kind of detailed insights that can be obtained when you let a molecular biologist into a museum collection," Allentoft said.
The Maori's kiwi feather cloaks were so revered that some even had their own names. At the Auckland Museum, one of these extraordinary cloaks was traded in exchange for a gigantic wooden war canoe.
