The islands of New Zealand were among the last places in the world to be colonized by humans. In 1770 English explorer Captain James Cook and his scientific companion, botanist Joseph Banks, noted how similar the Maori inhabitants of New Zealand were to other people on the islands of the southern Pacific. But Cook, especially after his third and final visit to New Zealand, also noted their differences, such as fortified villages, carved canoes, weapons, and ornaments, and the fact the Maori did not erect the monumental stone pyramid temple complexes of other eastern Polynesian cultures.
European accounts from the early nineteenth century recognized the Polynesian origins of the Maori. Not only were they similar in appearance to tropical Polynesians, but they also spoke a Polynesian language. They noted that while the Maori shared a common language and social organization, they also demonstrated a range of economic and social differences and adaptations to the colder southern Pacific environment. The most obvious difference was the practice of sedentary horticulture on the warmer northern island and mobile and seasonal hunting and gathering on the colder southern island.
In 1839, the same year European settlers concluded a treaty with the Maori, geologist Richard Owen theorized that it was the Maori who had hunted the large megapode bird, the moa, to extinction. In the 1870s the first archaeological evidence from sites confirmed this, linking Maori weapons with moa bones, and estimating that the arrival of the Maori and the demise of the moa probably occurred ca. 1,300 years ago. There was never any doubt that the Maori had come to New Zealand from somewhere in Polynesia. In fact, their oral history described their large canoes arriving. However, writing the history of their colonization would prove a difficult and contentious task.
The origins and migration of the Maori remained central to the debate; only the details changed according to the different perspectives of the pro-tagonists—enthusiastic amateurs, museum personnel, ethnographers, and the Maori themselves. Were the Maori different from other Polynesians because they were a combination of Melanesians and Polynesians? Were other people living in New Zealand before the Maori came, and were the Chatham Islanders all that was left of these people afterward? Did the Maori originate in India, Micronesia, or Hawaii? Were there two migrations, as Maori oral history described? What all of these questions had in common was that none were based on archaeological evidence.
After World War I, New Zealand’s first professional anthropologist, H. D. Skinner from Cambridge University, began teaching at the Otago University and Museum on the south island. Based on his research into tanged adzes in New Zealand, Polynesia, and the Chatham Islands and the spread of Aus-tronesian language groups, Skinner eventually discounted the two waves of Maori migration theories. He also argued that the Maori were culturally and linguistically closest to eastern Polynesians (e. g., those people living in Hawaii, the Marquesas, and Easter Island) and had probably originated there, rather than in western Polynesia (e. g., from Samoa, Tonga, and neighboring islands).
Skinner’s student, Roger Duff (1912-1978), who became the director of the Dominion (later the National) Museum in Wellington, introduced modern archaeology to New Zealand during his excavation of Wairu Bar, on the south island, between 1939 and 1952. It was a rich site comprising thirty-six human burials with grave goods, moa skeletons, artifacts made from moa eggs, tanged adzes, fishhooks, and whale ivory jewelry, as well as evidence of housing, stone working, and cooking and midden remains. Duff divided New Zealand prehistory into two periods: the first and earliest, or ”moa hunter,” was defined by archaeological sites only, and the later, or “Maori,” was defined by ethnographic accounts from initial European contact. Duff’s analysis of evidence from excavations confirmed the two migrations theory, and the prevailing chronology for the discovery of New Zealand. This comprised initial discovery ca. AD 950, and then the arrival of the great canoe fleet, with Polynesian domesticated plants such as kumara and taro at AD 1350. Duff’s analyses also confirmed the eastern Polynesian origins of the Maori. In 1955 the radiocarbon dating of Wairu Bar to AD 1150 did not change his conclusions.
In 1950 the new anthropology department at Auckland University employed Cambridge-educated archaeologist Jack Golson, who began a surveying, recording, and excavation program aimed at understanding differences between Duff’s two Maori cultural phases. Golson argued that the differences between them were attributable to local adaptations and developments rather than to different episodes of migration. During the 1960s, as many of the Pacific Islands became politically independent, archaeological research refocused on their origins and the history of the relationships between them. New Zealand became a leader in this research because of its many resources: the Polynesian Society, which was founded as early as 1892 to conserve, record, and publish the customs, history, and languages of the Maori and other people of the Pacific; and the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, which was the major repository of Maori and Pacific material. The United States of America’s outstanding Bishop Museum in Hawaii also provided leadership and resources for this research.
In the late 1960s archaeologist Leslie Groube began to question the two Maori cultural /migration phase conclusions. He argued that the changes in adze forms and ornaments on which they were based were stylistic changes rather than functional ones, and there was little archaeological evidence of change from simple to complex settlements or of two migrations. The so-called later Maori phase was not only the direct result of post-European contact, but the ethnographic accounts of the nineteenth century had not discerned the immediate impact and extent of the changes to Maori society caused by early European contact.
Groube’s argument sent everyone back to the field, but armed with the latest developments in modern archaeology—radiocarbon dating, archaeological science, paleobotany, and palynology. And archaeology itself had moved on from its preoccupation with periods and phases to tracking processes in the archaeological record, which required new techniques in data collection and different sources of information: distribution and types of settlement sites, house forms, agriculture, foraging patterns, shell-midden contents, regional studies, population studies, the impact of economic and social organization, and multidisciplinary cooperation. This same style of archaeology was also being applied to the prehistory of Melanesia and Polynesia. Over the next two decades, while the number of archaeologists working in New Zealand and the amount of archaeology undertaken expanded, the prehistory of New Zealand was finally unraveled.
During the 1980s archaeologist Janet Davidson concluded that all Maori material culture—stone tools, fishing gear, ornaments, adzes, house and settlement forms, burials, warfare, pa design, art styles, and types of agriculture— changed at different times and in different places to different stimulation, and that there was no evidence of two phases of development or migrations in New Zealand prehistory. At around the same time archaeologists Wilfred Shawcross and Athol Anderson, who had been excavating and analyzing shell-middens, arrived at similar conclusions. Leslie Groube and Geoffrey Irwin, working on the prehistoric demography and settlement patterns of the north island, concluded that for the two centuries before European contact this island was overpopulated and under social and environmental stress. The intense pressure on its natural and agricultural resources resulted in the increase of the construction and abandonment of fortified pa (or hill forts) to protect these resources, and for the movement of north island Maori groups onto the south island.
Athol Anderson also reexamined the moa extinction on the south island. He found that the extinction, which occurred 400-900 years ago (ca. 12001600 AD), had been rapid and coincided with a period of small or “base” settlements with access to local rich resources of seals and moas—until the latter disappeared. This was an unsustainable and consequently short-lived strategy. Subsequently, larger villages grew up, mainly in response to the increasing numbers of visits of people from the north island, which had a more organized economy based on stored foods, trade and exchanges, and the payment of tributes to chiefs, but who were beginning to experience overpopulation and increasing competition. Radiocarbon dating found little evidence for the settlement of New Zealand earlier than AD 1000.
By the 1990s archaeologists regarded the initial colonization of New Zealand as a forced, but planned, migration of hundreds of people from
Polynesia. Such migrations were a standard Polynesian response to overpopulation, which was probably occurring in Polynesia as a result of agricultural intensification and competition for resources, as indeed happened on the north island of New Zealand during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, resulting in the movement of some groups to the south island.
The use of computer simulations of extensive voyages across the Pacific; experimental voyages in replica canoes; the increase in knowledge of currents, climate patterns, and prevailing winds; and the increase in knowledge of Polynesian navigation, sailing techniques, and canoe technology led to the conclusion that it is entirely possible that the Polynesian migrations to New Zealand were planned, and that there were voyages back to Polynesia as well. This means that there were probably multiple episodes of discovery and colonization and that there was continuous interaction between the different islands of the Pacific. This is supported by the use of X-ray fluorescence to source basalt artifacts such as adzes, some of which were traded over 1,500 kilometers from Samoa to the Cook Islands and from the Marquesas to the Society Islands. Other research involving tracing mitochrondrial DNA variations in Pacific rats, which were used as food on long canoe voyages, also demonstrates long-term interisland contact.
On arrival in New Zealand ca. AD 1000 these small and mobile groups of Polynesian migrants would have lived by hunting the moas and seals and on other rich, pristine natural resources. The use of Polynesian-style swidden agriculture, which involved field preparation and the cutting down and burning of forests, would have occurred later on when these large natural resources began to decline. By AD 1500, within a few hundred years of their arrival, the eastern Polynesian styles of adze blades, fishhooks, and personal ornaments were superseded by the distinctive Maori styles of these and by new adaptations to the cooler climate of New Zealand—carved wooden canoes and houses, clothing, pas, and curvilinear art forms.
See also Lapita Homeland Project (1983-1990).
Further Reading
Anderson, A. 1989. Prodigious birds: Moas and moa hunting in prehistoric New Zealand.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anderson, A. 1991. The chronology of colonization in New Zealand. Antiquity 65:
767-795.
Irwin, G. 1992. The prehistoric exploration and colonisation of the Pacific. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
World History
