Abstract

The emergence of so called “natural systems” of classification in the early nineteenth century was a product of the huge volume of specimens and information entering European institutions from around the world. Concentrating on successive botanical explorations of Aotearoa New Zealand from the activities of Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander and their team of field assistants in the 1760s through to Allan Cunningham, the King’s Botanist of New South Wales, who visited New Zealand in 1826 and 1838, this talk analyses their use of Māori knowledge when cataloguing and classifying species. The original Polynesian inhabitants of Aotearoa New Zealand, Māori terms for species, physical characters of plants and broader groupings of species are systematically integrated into the manuscripts these naturalists compiled in addition to details on the uses of plants by the Māori. As such, this talk analyses the practices through which Indigenous knowledge on the plants of Aotearoa New Zealand was integrated into the advanced assemblages of paper technologies developed to keep these records in the field. It also shows how other information relating to the geographical distribution of species, the use of particular plants by the Māori and their approaches to classifying species became integrated with European classification systems, contributing to the breakdown of the Linnaean system and the emergence of so-called ‘natural systems’ of classification by the early nineteenth century.