In New Zealand, the Māori people have upheld a long tradition of creating wooden or stone carvings of deities, ancestors, or sacred animals. These carvings are known as tiki, which is also the name of the first man in Māori mythology. These carvings were often placed in and around sacred areas that corresponded to what the characters represented. The tradition of tiki would spread throughout the Pacific region over time, and has since become a somewhat wrongly-attributed staple of Hawaiian culture in Western civilization. All this to say—a tiki-carving grass hut might…
