For tens of thousands of years people have used red pigment derived from ochre to paint and draw symbols and figurative representations on cave walls. Archaeology has revealed that tools, shields and weapons were also painted red. A natural product derived from iron-rich clay or sandstone, ochre ranges in colour from yellow to red to brown. Māori called the prepared pigment kōkōwai, and the red colour in particular had symbolic associations although context was all important for interpreting meaning.

The term kōkōwai is generic for the red pigment applied to objects, but Māori had a number of terms for the types of material able to be manufactured into kōkōwai. Iron-rich clay (tākou) or sandstone could be burnt in a specially constructed fire to oxidise the iron and intensify the red colouration. The altered material was then ground to a powder and applied in that form, or mixed with water or oil from the liver of sharks, or oil-rich seeds such as tītoki, before being applied. Another source of the pigment was iron-rich sediment present in some streams. Fern fronds laid in the water trapped the thick mineral iron deposit (hōrū), which could then be dried, moulded into balls and roasted to make the finest quality of pigment. The powdered kōkōwai was stored in containers – including pumice pots, shells such as pāua, scallop and freshwater mussel (fig 2), and gourds – as was the liquid form or oil emulsion.

Other colours were also used. Black pigment was obtained by burning kauri gum or resinous wood and grinding to a fine powder, white was derived from white clay and prepared in a similar manner to kōkōwai, and blue pigment was prepared from some forms of clay.1 All colours were used to paint faces; and timbers and carvings could be painted with red, black and white, or just red.2

Red (kura) symbolises the mythological origin of the world when Ranginui (sky father) and Papatūānuku (earth mother) were intertwined. As their children tried to separate them, the blood of Ranginui was spilt and soaked into Papatūānuku, manifested as kōkōwai. The symbolism associated with the colour red is common throughout Polynesia, but the meaning varies according to circumstances.

Generally speaking kōkōwai was associated with rituals of tapu (sacredness), and with status derived from age and rank which also linked to a relationship with gods. It was not the kōkōwai material itself that had the power, but the colour red.

Full coating of the body with kōkōwai, with or without oil, was described in accounts from Captain James Cook’s voyages.6 Both men and women could be painted, but not all people encountered were. Hair could also be coated in kōkōwai mixed with oil; and French captain Jean-François Marie de Surville in 1769 described an individual from Doubtless Bay with yellow painted hair.7 Faces of adults and children of both sexes were painted on occasion. Red was the predominant colour, but yellow, white and blue were also used. Accounts describe pigment being used on chins, cheeks and nose, and red strips over the eyebrows, or sometimes diagonally from forehead across the eye to the cheek.8 Some of these face paintings were for decoration or amusement (particularly for younger people), but on older individuals kōkōwai may have been used to emphasise tattoo patterns or status.9

European observers in the 19th century noted house carvings and palisade posts stained red. Several of the images by George French Angas show painted structures and house carvings, and tapu areas associated with the dead. After death, the places where a corpse was rested prior to burial were dabbed with kōkōwai to signify a tapu state, and in the case of secondary burial when the bones were prepared for interment, they were often coated with kōkōwai (fig 3).

Many of the ritual uses of kōkōwai belong to the past and evidence of their significance is confined to historic accounts. Archaeology, however, deals with the tangible surviving evidence left behind by people in the past. Interpreting ritual and symbolism is more difficult but the presence of powdered kōkōwai and the tools used to grind the pigment are concrete evidence around which the more intangible aspects of society can be reconstructed. Kōkōwai staining of bone and stone tools and ornaments, derived either through contact with painted flesh or through direct application to the object, is less common but not unknown.

The kōkōwai and associated objects in the exhibition Five Māori Painters are from the pā and settlement site of Oruarangi on the Waihou River, 10 kilometres upstream from Thames. Oruarangi was one of the largest pā in Hauraki, occupied by several iwi (tribes) over several hundred years and probably last occupied in the 1830s. Fossickers were very active on the site in the early 1930s, and many thousands of artefacts were found.10 A large number of these are now in Auckland Museum, having been gifted, or purchased from various individuals who dug there. Fossickers were interested only in artefacts, and not the context of those artefacts in relation to one another or to their placement within the site. The items in the Oruarangi collection, therefore, have no associated story from which the lives of the people living there can be reconstructed. For instance, it is not known whether the flat grinding stones were found with the cobblestones (autoru) used to grind the kōkōwai to a powder, and whether this activity took place inside a house, outside it, or in a specially reserved place. The uncontrolled digging was far removed from techniques and accurate recording used in modern archaeological excavations, which uncovers more subtle details which might include rotting timbers of houses or storage structures, or tiny specks of kōkōwai mixed in with the soil. The objects from Oruarangi with kōkōwai staining include pendants, bone toggles, heru (bone combs), pūtātara (shell trumpets) and pumice pots (fig 4). Some of the grinding slabs are large and heavy, up to 60 x 40 centimetres, with a heavy pigment coating on one surface.

Other sites excavated more carefully by archaeological methods have revealed more about the use of kōkōwai. We now know that its use was widespread, although few sites of the first hundred or so years after Polynesian arrival (from about 1300 AD) have kōkōwai or kōkōwai-stained items. This suggests that although the symbolic use of red is Polynesian in origin, the uses to which it was put in Māori culture became more common over time. Artefacts can have traces of pigment embedded into the surface of the bone or stone, or the tools used to grind the pigment are present. However, many of the paintings in rock shelters, which date to the first few hundred years after Polynesian arrival, have paintings executed in red paint, as well as black and white (fig 5). In sites of more recent age the better examples of kōkōwai are preserved in caves, or in wet sites where the water creates anaerobic conditions which slow down decay of organic materials including wood and vegetable matter. From the 17th- century pā of Kohika11 near Whakatane in the eastern Bay of Plenty there is additional information for context. Excavations between 2004 and 2008 revealed a large house with remnants of dressed timbers, with one of the central posts having traces of red pigment;12 and at Raupa, a large 19th-century pā near Paeroa, the largest quantity of kōkōwai and staining of the soil was in the vicinity of a large house almost certainly, like the one at Kohika, the residence of the chief.13 In another example, a swamp below a pā at Kauri Point in the western Bay of Plenty contained numerous small wooden hair combs and other wooden Notes artefacts in an enclosure. The deposits surrounding the artefacts were stained red from the fine particles of kōkōwai, and lumps of kōkōwai were found in gourd containers and wrapped in flax wallets.14 The combs were stained red and had thick deposits of kōkōwai remaining between the teeth, probably from being in hair that was coated with kōkōwai and oil. Many of the combs appeared to have been deliberately broken, perhaps to remove the state of tapu before being placed in the swamp.

While the symbolism and ritual use of the colour red is less apparent in modern times, reference to it can still be found in wharenui (meeting houses) around the country where carvings inside and outside are painted red. Its past use also lives on in museums, a legacy of the early 20th century when red paint was applied to carvings, sometimes over the original multicoloured painting, in a misguided view that by doing so the museum was reconstructing and holding on to the traditional culture which was perceived to be rapidly disappearing.