A traditional Māori hand weapon could be returned to New Zealand after being on display at a US home for 20 years.
Sherri Hunter told the Rotorua Daily Post she found the wahaika, a taonga, in an antique shop in America after their car broke down on their annual trip from Denver to Washington State one year.
"My husband and I have tried to recall when we found the wahaika. We know it was after 1997 and before 2001," she said.
The couple sent a photo of the wahaika to the Auckland War Memorial Museum in 2001 with Sheree and her husband Stephen, an art reviewer and historian, having guessed that it was from New Zealand, where they had travelled to twice in the 1990s.
"It dawned on me that the carved motifs were highly reminiscent of Māori artefacts we had seen at the War Memorial Museum in Auckland and possibly at Rotorua,” she said.
The former curator of ethnology at Auckland Museum, the late Dr Roger Neich, replied to the couple.
"My opinion is that it was carved by a man of the Te Arawa tribe living about Rotorua, probably in about the 1880s,” he wrote.
The Hunters and Rotorua Museum are in contact about potentially returning the wahaika back to the Bay of Plenty.
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