Amulet Atlas

amuletsHei-tikihei tiki

said hei TEE-kee; hei means to wear around the neck

also: tiki · pounamu pendant

amuletAotearoa New ZealandThe PacificNew Zealand

A pendant of a human figure, head tilted, hands on thigh and chest or both on the thighs, carved from pounamu and suspended on a plaited cord fastened with a loop and toggle. Pounamu is the Māori term for several hard, tough stones found only in the South Island — nephrite jade in the varieties Māori classify by colour as kahurangi, īnanga and kawakawa, and the translucent bowenite called tangiwai. A hei-tiki is a taonga: a treasure with whakapapa, an ancestral line of its own.

cited

Māori hei, 'to wear around the neck', + tiki, which originally refers to the first mortal cited

When

pre-European Māori to now; no first date this project could cite still carried cited

PeriodMāori, pre-European to the present
How the date is knownart-historical — dated by style
NoteNeither cited source dates the form's origin. Ngāi Tahu reached the South Island in the middle of the 18th century, after which pounamu production increased — that is a date for the trade, not for the hei-tiki.

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The thing itself

FormPendant
Made ofJade · Bone and ivory · Plastic and resin
GoesAt the neck · In the grave
Made byMāori carvers; pounamu in its natural state has been owned by Ngāi Tahu since the 1997 settlement
Colourgreen · white
Retiredno — it is kept
NotePounamu is nephrite jade or bowenite; jade is the nearest key in this project's materials list and is not the Māori classification, which is by colour. Plastic is listed because retail versions are named by the cited source, not because a taonga is made of it.

What its carriers say it stops

Reported, attributed, not tested here. Each row below is somebody's claim, with their name on it.

The story

Hei-tiki are, in Te Papa's summary of Māori adornment, the most famous and most highly prized of Māori personal ornaments. Two readings of the figure are given by Horatio Gordon Robley in A History of the Maori Tiki: that they are memorials to ancestors, or that they represent Hineteiwaiwa, the goddess of childbirth. Both have practices attached. A hei-tiki was often buried when its kaitiaki, its guardian, died, and retrieved later to be brought out at tangihanga, the mourning. And because of the connection with Hineteiwaiwa, hei-tiki were often given to a woman by her husband's family if she was having trouble conceiving.

The mana of one is not in the carving. Dougal Austin's 2014 thesis, supervised by Peter Adds and based on Te Papa's hei-tiki collection with early-contact pieces in overseas collections, finds that the mana of hei-tiki comes from the "agency of prolonged ancestral use", and that the form was "highly developed ... from the outset to conform to adze-shaped pieces of pounamu". Pounamu taonga gain mana as they pass between generations; the stone is held to take on the mana of past owners, and heirloom pieces are named after former owners. That is why the most prized taonga are the ones with known histories running back many generations, and why they were given to seal agreements.

The collections are large and their history is not neutral. Te Papa holds over 200 hei-tiki and the British Museum about 50; some were exchanged or gifted to European travellers and sailors at the earliest point of contact, and, in Wikipedia's words, "the majority were stolen or improperly obtained through colonial processes".

One story sits oddly beside the rest and is reported here as somebody else's reading, not this atlas's. The captain of HMS New Zealand, a battlecruiser funded by the New Zealand government in 1911, wore a hei-tiki and a piupiu into three First World War battles; the crew attributed the ship's lack of casualties to it and called her a lucky ship. That is a Pākehā crew's account of a taonga, and it is what a taonga becomes when it is read by people outside the whakapapa it belongs to.

In 1997 the Crown returned ownership of all naturally occurring pounamu to Ngāi Tahu, the South Island iwi, under the Ngāi Tahu Claims Settlement.

cited

How it is made and carried

The stone was first cut roughly as a small adze — pounamu is hard and valuable enough that a carver removes as little as possible, which is why the head tilts. It is then smoothed by abrasive rubbing, shaped and bored with sticks and water, and polished over a long time. Finished, it is hung on a plaited cord with a loop and toggle. It is not retired; it is inherited, and its history is the point of it.

cited

Now

Carved by Māori artists, including collectives set up by iwi that export jewellery and carvings, and worn by Māori and by other New Zealanders as a mark of identity. Retailers also sell visitor versions in jade, other stone, plastic and other materials; the Wikipedia account of pounamu notes that much of the carved "greenstone" in souvenir shops is jade sourced overseas. As of 2026 the two trades run side by side, and this atlas reports the difference without ranking the buyers.

cited

Where you can see one

An accession number appears here only where it was read off a catalogue page that is linked. No link, no number.

Not to be confused with

What this is near

traditionTaonga Māorithe tradition this belongs to, and the one that decides that this is a treasure with whakapapa and not an ornamentkinHei matauthe other pendant worn at the same neck, carved from the same stone, for water rather than for ancestorsmaterialJadethe material class pounamu falls into for a mineralogist, and does not fall into for Māori, who classify it by colourorgMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewathe museum holding over 200 of them and publishing about them in Māori termsplaceMana Whenua, Te Papathe room a reader can stand in and see themorgThe British Museumthe overseas collection holding about fifty, and part of the reason repatriation is a live questionpracticeInheritingthe practice that makes one: mana accumulates by passing between generations, not by carvingstoryWho owns a charmthe long read this record is central toparallelDreamcatcherthe North American parallel — an Indigenous form now also made by everybody else, and objected to by namepracticeGrave depositthe practice recorded here: buried with a kaitiaki, and lifted again for the tangihanga

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

parallelDol hareubanganother carved ancestor-figure that became a national emblem and then a souvenir, and carries the same argument with itparallelDreamcatcheranother taonga sold in plastic beside the original, and another argument this atlas reports rather than settleskinHei matauthe other pendant from the same stone and the same cord, for ancestors rather than for waterparallelKeris pusakathe other heirloom in this atlas treated as a person rather than a possession, and handed down the same waycarriesTaonga Māorithe taonga this record is mostly written from — a treasure whose mana comes, in Austin's phrase, from prolonged ancestral usecarried-byJadethe pendant this stone is best known as outside Asia, and a taonga whose mana is held to accumulate with each ownercarried-byGrave depositburied when its guardian died, then lifted again and brought out at tangihangacarried-byInheritingthe taonga that goes into the ground with its guardian and comes out again for mourningcarriesMana Whenua, Te Papathe pounamu neck pendant held here in the largest number anywhere, over 200 of themcarriesMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewathe pounamu neck pendant the museum holds and interprets as taonga, not as a specimenparallelWho owns a charma taonga whose return is governed by the tradition's own terms, not by a museum's

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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