14 Oct 2026 | Alina Berg
‘Made in Germany’ or How I became a Pounamu Detective
Between October 2025 and June 2026, I was fortunate enough to spend an extensive period of time in Aotearoa New Zealand to advance my doctoral research on pounamu (greenstone/nephrite) in European museums.
Pounamu, in its many carved forms as well as in its natural raw state, has long been regarded as a taonga (a treasure) by Māori. In 1997, as part of the settlement of claims against the Crown for breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi, ownership of the South Island (Te Waipounamu) deposits was returned to the Ngāi Tahu iwi (tribe), who now owns and controls the vast majority of pounamu in its area. Since then, tight control over export of raw stone has been established. This, together with the fact that various early contact travel reports and diaries explicitly state that Māori were reluctant to trade away their pounamu[1], has led me to wonder about all the pounamu that had made it to Europe prior to the Vesting Act of 1997.
When I started my PhD about two years ago, I was somewhat excited to call myself a type of ‘detective of colonialism’, someone who does critical research on the provenance and chain of exchange of pounamu objects in the European museums that would have me. I wanted to know more about how they got there; and under which circumstances. Reality soon hit, and it became clear to me that most of the trails I was following eventually came to an unsatisfactory end: Collectors’ lofty biographies, untraceable accession numbers, or simply no documentation at all.
So when I came to Aotearoa, I was hoping to, among other things, come across new, perhaps unexpected, clues from the other side of the chain. What I did not expect, however, was how many of these clues would lead right back to Germany.
An ethnography written by German anthropologist Rolf Herzog in 1990 retraces remnants of an old pounamu ‘trading’ system between the town of Idar-Oberstein and Aotearoa’s West Coast (Te Tai Poutini) around the turn of the 19th to 20th century. Idar-Oberstein, then a global hub for and at the forefront of cutting and working gemstones, imported pounamu boulders directly from Te Tai Poutini as well as via intermediary countries such as Great Britain. Various manufacturers specialised in imitating traditional Māori hei tiki (pendants carved in the form of a human figure), and countless such replicas were being sent back to Aotearoa New Zealand to be sold on the souvenir market, most likely as ‘authentically Māori’, although many ended up in museums. Herzog speculates whether some of these pieces were even commissioned by Māori iwi or individuals themselves. While this story raises a multitude of questions and concerns, ranging from notions of cultural appropriation and (somewhat reversed) ideas of global trade and the outsourcing of labour to the sheer absurdity of distances travelled by pounamu, I did not consider it to be of particular relevance in Aotearoa. I simply took it to be an interesting tale German anthropologists keep passing on in the field.
This assumption did not survive even my first month in Aotearoa. Not only did I find out that Herzog’s ethnography was translated into English and had therefore found its way into various museum practitioners’ personal libraries, but curators and pounamu carvers were actively speculating about hei tiki and other ‘suspicious taonga’ that were potentially ‘made in Germany’. Interestingly, most of the hei tiki I was shown in this context were of rudimentary quality at best, somewhat small, and looked nothing like the seminal taonga, even the ones from similar time periods, on display at the major museums. This contrasted sharply with German reports (often marked by evolutionary thinking and a perceived superiority over ‘savage’ Māori), portraying Idar-Oberstein hei tiki as ‘impeccable’ and the result of ‘advanced’ technologies.[2] I was also surprised to learn that pounamu manufacturing seems to have been dominated by German-run businesses and lapidaries from the late 19th century to WWI – information that is lacking from the German sources.
I eventually left Aotearoa New Zealand with more questions than I came with – but a new mystery to solve after an unexpected turn in my pounamu investigation. Now that I have come back to Europe, I am looking forward to exploring the extent to which German fake hei tiki actually resembled real taonga, where they ended up and if they are as easily identifiable as suggested by my interlocuters in Aotearoa.
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[1]Arthur Baessler. 1859. Südseebilder , p. 271; as quoted in: Andree, Richard. 1907. "Die Nephritindustrie in Oberstein-Idar." Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 39, p. 943. Georg Forster, who took part in Cook’s second voyage to the ‘South Seas’ in the 1770s, noted that Māori were reluctant to trade Pounamu items: Forster, Georg. 2000. A Voyage Round the World (Vol. 1). University of Hawaii Press.
[2]Andree, Richard. 1907. "Die Nephritindustrie in Oberstein-Idar." Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 39: 943-45.