Museum Curator Awarded Major Funding For Māori Rock Art Research

Aotearoa’s rock art heritage has been given a huge boost with a major funding award for Tūhura Otago Museum’s Curator Māori, Dr Gerard O’Regan. He will dedicate the next four years to researching, sharing knowledge and promoting the important but fragile Māori rock art treasures.

Dr O’Regan has been selected by The Royal Society Te Apārangi as one of twelve mid-career researchers to receive Mana Tūānuku Research Leader Fellowships in 2025. These highly competed for awards support “each selected Mana Tūānuku Fellow with $1,160,000 over 4 years to accelerate their research programme, consolidate and expand their leadership capability, boost their contribution to the sector, and enhance the impact of their work for Aotearoa New Zealand.”

‘He tuhinga ki te ao, Māori rock art through time’, the project that Gerard will be undertaking, will see ‘boots on the ground’ surveying to understand gaps in the archaeological knowledge of rock art in Central Otago and Fiordland. This will be combined with a review of other surveys by Ngāi Tahu and Gerard’s own research on North Island rock art to give an up-to-date overview of Aotearoa’s rock art heritage.

Investigating how Māori rock art relates to that of other Polynesian islands will show what can be learned through the recognition of shared heritage, especially by looking at how rock art was used at the time of contact with Europeans. This will involve connecting with researchers and traditional owners in Hawai’i, the Marquesas, Tahiti and Rapa Nui.

Looking at how Māori rock art motifs have been used across the country and in all sorts of different contexts and media, will examine how Māori ringatoi view motifs in their modern artworks, and the guardianship concerns of local kaitiaki marae for their rock art places. This will help understand how the rock art heritage can contribute to cultural revitalisation and tourism development appropriately.

For Gerard one of the most exciting aspects of the research is the opportunity to bring together experts with knowledge in traditional Māori arts and the different landscapes the rock art is found in. “We will explore and test how the rock art may be conceived through a mātauranga Māori lens” says Gerard. “This has been the missing component in Māori rock art research to date. Although the archaeological information has been accumulating, and more iwi are aware of the extent of their rock art, we have not yet had the full and robust discussions that try to understand it in Māori terms. To have the opportunity to foster such kōrero is an incredible and humbling privilege”.

This research project will directly feed into a major exhibition on Māori rock art that Tūhura is developing in collaboration with Canterbury Museum and the Ngāi Tahu Māori Rock Art Trust. It will open here at Tūhura in 2027 before going to the redeveloped Canterbury Musuem and possibly beyond. By then it will be accompanied by a new book, the first to bring together both archaeological and mātauranga Māori lenses on the rock art heritage.

“We are so excited about the research, the exhibition and the book” says Tūhura Director, Dr Ian Griffin. “We are proud that this Fellowship will see Gerard fulfil his research leadership in this space and we’re hugely appreciative of this recognition and vote of confidence in the Musuem’s continued place in Aotearoa’s research sector”.

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