Animal skins

Māori stitched dog, seal, and bird skins together to make warm clothing, including the prestigious kahu kurī (dog-skin cloaks). Find out what archaeological evidence and research tell us about these animal-skin garments. 

Stitching skins

Animal skins with fur or feathers gave early Pacific settlers much-needed warmth in the cold climate of Aotearoa New Zealand. Seal, dog, and bird skins (like those of weka, moa, and kākāpō) would have been widely available.

Archaeological finds

Māori were stitching skins together to make garments several hundred years ago. We know this because old fragments of seal, weka, and moa skin have been found. Some fragments show signs of careful repair, which indicates how treasured they were.

Thousands of bone needles recovered from archaeological sites all around the country suggest that stitching was widespread. These needles, made in many different sizes and shapes, were used to stitch a range of garments. Some of them are up to 700 years old.

Research – Dr Patricia Wallace

Dr Patricia Wallace, an expert in customary Māori textiles, has been studying rare examples of seal, weka, and moa skins that are more than 300 years old. Some skins – often only fragments – have survived only because they were stored in cool dry sites such as burial caves.

These fragments, and later examples of animal-hide kākahu (cloaks), provide information about forgotten construction techniques. For example, they contain evidence that holes were probably punched through the hide before needle stitching began.

Māori possibly tanned or wind-dried skins to prepare them for sewing, but much more research is needed into these and other methods of working. 

Working with prized dog skin

The ancestors of Māori brought the kurī (Pacific dog) to Aotearoa New Zealand 800 to 900 years ago. They used the skins to make chiefly kahu kurī (dog-skin cloaks). After the kurī became extinct in the mid to late 1800s, the practice of making dog-skin cloaks died out.

Sometimes Māori sewed whole dog skins together to make a cloak. Much more commonly, and economically, they used an obsidian blade to slice the precious skin into narrow strips. They stitched the strips onto the cloak’s foundation so that the fur all lay in one direction and overlapped. This created the impression of a single skin, concealing the stitching and the woven foundation.