Background

New Zealand is a continental landmass 270 000 km2 in area separated from its nearest neighbor by more than a thousand kilometers of ocean. It was the last major landmass in the world to be colonized by humans and this colonization event was different from other such events in fundamental ways. For most of world prehistory human colonization was characterized by population expansion into adjacent zones. The lifestyles and technologies of the homeland could be reproduced with relatively minor adjustments and there were few technological barriers to return movement or communication between homeland and colony. New Zealand colonization involved quite different sets of circumstances. First, the New Zealand environment is radically different from its first settlers’ homeland and there were severe limits on the ability of the colonists to reproduce their traditional economies or lifestyles. New Zealand was settled by people from eastern Polynesia who traveled in large, ocean-going, double-hulled canoes that traveled some 3000 km over deep ocean. These settlers came from tropical volcanic islands and small coral atolls and moved into a large continental archipelago straddling the subtropical to sub-Antarctic zone. Their island production system relied on a range of tropical-adapted crops, few of which would grow in New Zealand. The second factor is the problem of isolation. Once arrived in New Zealand further contact with the island world would have been extremely difficult and for all intents and purposes New Zealand prehistory unfolded in isolation from any outside influence until sustained interaction with the West starting in the late eighteenth century. The reason for this is not just the sheer length of the journey. The prevailing winds of East Polynesia are easterly and the trip to New Zealand was across and slightly down the wind, sailing into a large target. The return journey would have been much more technically difficult and it would have aimed toward much smaller targets.

In sum, the colonization of New Zealand involved introducing humans into an environment from which they could not easily return, and where few aspects of their original lifeways could be continued. As a consequence much New Zealand archaeology has been concerned with questions of adaptation and cultural change. To put this into perspective, Maori society, as described by the European explorers of the eighteenth century, had many distinctly Polynesian characteristics including elements of language, technology and deep ideological and sociopolitical structures. These reflect the ancestral roots of Maori society in the island homelands of tropical Polynesia. Yet at the same time Maori society was unique. Centuries of isolation in a radically different land and without any significant contact with the outside world had allowed Maori society to diverge radically in areas such as material culture, art, economics and social practice. Thus in all meaningful ways Maori society can only be described as an indigenous New Zealand society. It is the development of this indigenous society from its Polynesian roots that stands at the heart of New Zealand archaeological inquiry and in the following sections of this essay we discuss some of the major issues involved in this inquiry.

The shortness of the New Zealand prehistoric timescale makes it difficult to define the course of culture change with any precision but several key chronological indicators are discernable in the archaeological record. On the basis of these, archaeologists often divide the New Zealand sequence into two phases: an early Archaic phase and a later Classic phase. These phases are useful archaeological constructs but in no way imply cultural discontinuity. Indeed, despite the marked variation that underpins the two-phase sequence, there are much stronger threads of continuity running right through New Zealand prehistory and extending back to the islands of Polynesia.