Tag Archives: panels

Five Motunui Panels at last returned to NZ tribe

Posted on: September 8, 2015 by Alexander Herman

Following up on a post from last year, the five Motunui panels that had been illegally exported from New Zealand back in the 1970s have finally made the journey back to the tribal lands from which they came. The panels have been with the people of the Te Atiawa since March 2015, having been earlier kept at the Te Papa […]

End of a 40-year saga: Motunui Panels returned

Posted on: July 8, 2014 by Alexander Herman

It has recently been announced that five panels carved by the Te Atiawa iwi in the late eighteenth-century have been returned from Switzerland to New Zealand by the wife and son of the late antiquities collector George Ortiz. The panels had been discovered buried in a swamp near Motunui in 1972 and were subsequently exported […]