A former curator of Maori taonga at the Auckland War Memorial Museum says treating the Oldman Collection as a single unit may help people identify where individual items came from.
The collection of Maori and Pacific Island artefacts was put together by William Oldman in England in the first half of last century, reports Waatea News.
The New Zealand Government bought it in 1948 and split it between museums in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Dunedin, which last month agreed to coordinate guardianship of the collection.
Paul Tapsell says it is a significant collection with many fine objects, but the specific tribal or geographic origins of most of the pieces are unknown.
He says a lot were probably collected by early visitors such as whalers, settlers or missionaries.
Professor Tapsell says there could be clues about some of the items in early writings by missionaries or travellers, or in tribal records, but it will require diligent research to track them back.
