Maori Settlement of New Zealand: The Last Great Migration

The Maori settlement of New Zealand was the arrival, around AD 1250–1300, of Polynesian voyagers from tropical East Polynesia on the islands they came to call Aotearoa. It was the last major land mass on Earth to be settled by humans. Within a few generations the newcomers had explored the entire country, adapted their tropical way of life to a cool climate and laid the foundations of Maori society.

Background: the Polynesian voyaging world

The settlement of New Zealand was the final chapter of one of the greatest migrations in human history. Around 3,000 years ago, people of the Lapita culture sailed from the Bismarck Archipelago into the open Pacific, reaching Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. After a long pause in this western Polynesian homeland, voyagers pushed east into the islands of central East Polynesia, probably only around AD 1000–1100.

From there settlement spread remarkably fast, as described in Polynesian voyaging and the settlement of East Polynesia. Within roughly two centuries, sailors had reached the far corners of the Polynesian Triangle: Hawaii in the north, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) in the east and New Zealand in the south-west.

New Zealand lay some 3,000 km south-west of the Cook Islands and roughly 1,500–2,000 km across the Tasman Sea from the nearest large land, Australia. Reaching it meant sailing out of the tropics into cooler, stormier waters, against the prevailing easterly trade winds for part of the route.

How the voyages were made

The voyagers sailed large canoes, most likely double-hulled craft or outrigger canoes with sails of woven pandanus. They navigated without instruments, reading the rising and setting points of stars, the direction of ocean swells, the flight paths of birds and the shapes of clouds over land.

Experimental voyages since the 1970s with reconstructed canoes, such as the Hawaiian Hokule’a, have shown that such journeys were achievable with traditional techniques. The long-tailed cuckoo, which migrates each year between New Zealand and the tropical Pacific, may have hinted to navigators that land lay to the south-west.

The settlers carried what they needed to found a new society. Archaeology and later records show they brought the kuri (Polynesian dog), the kiore (Pacific rat), and crops including kumara (sweet potato), taro, yam, gourd and paper mulberry. Of these, kumara proved the most successful in New Zealand’s climate, though only in the warmer north and with careful storage.

Dating the settlement

For much of the 20th century, dates for the first arrival ranged widely, from around AD 800 to 1350. Since the 1990s, better radiocarbon methods have narrowed the answer considerably.

Three lines of evidence point to the late 13th century:

• Radiocarbon dates from early sites. High-precision dating of short-lived materials, such as seeds and twigs, from the oldest archaeological layers clusters around AD 1250–1300. A widely cited 2011 study led by Janet Wilmshurst concluded that East Polynesia as a whole was colonised rapidly in this period.
• Rat-gnawed seeds. Seeds and bones bearing the marks of the Pacific rat, which could only have arrived with people, appear in New Zealand deposits from around 1280, not earlier. Earlier claims of rat bones dating to about 2,000 years ago were later shown to be unreliable.
• The Kaharoa ash. The eruption of Mount Tarawera around AD 1314 spread a layer of volcanic ash across much of the North Island. Human sites and signs of forest burning appear just before or after this layer, but never well below it.

Pollen records tell the same story. They show sudden forest clearance by fire beginning in the decades around 1300, as people opened land for settlement, travel and gardening.

Who came: genetics and tradition

Genetic studies of modern Maori and of ancient remains suggest that the founding population was quite small. Analyses of mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down the female line, have suggested a founding group that included somewhere in the order of 50–230 women. This does not mean there was only one voyage; many researchers think several canoes arrived over a few decades, and some voyages may have returned to East Polynesia.

The closest cultural and linguistic links are with the southern Cook Islands and the Society Islands. Obsidian from Mayor Island (Tuhua) in the Bay of Plenty, found at early sites, also shows that the first settlers quickly located the best stone resources of their new land.

Maori tradition remembers the homeland as Hawaiki. Many tribal histories name an ancestral canoe that brought their founding ancestors, including Tainui, Te Arawa, Mataatua, Takitimu, Kurahaupo, Tokomaru and Aotea. Stories of the explorer Kupe, said in some traditions to have discovered the land before later settlers followed, are told in many forms. These traditions remain central to Maori identity and to the way iwi (tribes) trace their descent and their links to land.

Early Maori life: the moa-hunter period

The first generations found a land with no mammals other than bats and seals, and an abundance of large birds, especially the flightless moa. Archaeologists sometimes call this early phase the Archaic or moa-hunter period.

Wairau Bar, on the north-east coast of the South Island, is the most important early site. Excavated from the 1940s onwards, it contained burials, ovens, moa bones and eggshell, and artefacts closely resembling those of East Polynesia, including stone adzes, fishhooks and necklaces of drilled moa bone and whale teeth. Recent studies of the people buried there suggest some of them may have been born in the tropical islands rather than in New Zealand.

Early communities often lived near river mouths and coasts, combining hunting of moa and seals with fishing and shellfish gathering. The rapid hunting of large birds had dramatic consequences, described in the extinction of the moa. By around 1400–1450 the moa were gone, and seal colonies had retreated far to the south.

Settlers explored the whole country quickly. Within about a century, people were using stone from sources across both main islands, including pounamu (greenstone or nephrite) from the west coast of the South Island, which became the most treasured material in Maori culture.

From Polynesian settlers to Maori society

As the big game disappeared, communities shifted towards gardening in the north, fishing and the gathering of fern root, birds and shellfish. Food storage pits for kumara and fortified villages known as pa became widespread, probably from the 15th century onwards. Several thousand pa sites are known, many of them on terraced hills.

Over these centuries a distinct culture developed. Carving, weaving with harakeke (New Zealand flax) and new forms of architecture flourished, and society organised itself around whanau (extended families), hapu (sub-tribes) and iwi (tribes). The Maori language developed from East Polynesian speech into its own distinct form.

New Zealand’s settlers also travelled onward. People reached the Chatham Islands, about 800 km to the east, probably around 1500, where they developed into the Moriori. Archaeological traces also show brief Polynesian occupation of the Kermadec Islands and Norfolk Island.

Long-distance voyaging back to tropical Polynesia appears to have ended within a few centuries of settlement. When the Dutch navigator Abel Tasman arrived in 1642, and when James Cook circumnavigated the islands in 1769–1770, the Maori population is commonly estimated at around 85,000–110,000.

Myths and facts

• Myth: a “Great Fleet” arrived in 1350. This idea, popularised by the ethnologist S. Percy Smith in the early 1900s, merged separate traditions into one event and fixed its date by averaging genealogies. It was taught in New Zealand schools for decades but was dismantled by scholars, notably David Simmons in the 1970s.
• Myth: Maori arrived by accident, drifting on storms. Some mid-20th-century writers argued that Polynesian settlement was largely accidental. Computer simulations and experimental voyages have since shown that deliberate, navigated voyaging is the best explanation.
• Myth: an earlier people lived in New Zealand before the Maori. Theories of a pre-Maori “Moriori” or other population on the mainland were common in older books. There is no archaeological or genetic evidence for them, and the Moriori of the Chatham Islands were themselves descendants of New Zealand Maori.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 1000–1100: Polynesian voyagers settle the central islands of East Polynesia.
• c. 1250–1300: First settlers reach New Zealand from East Polynesia.
• Late 1200s: Occupation of Wairau Bar on the north-east coast of the South Island.
• c. 1314: Eruption of Mount Tarawera spreads the Kaharoa ash across the North Island.
• c. 1400–1450: Moa become extinct; settlement patterns shift towards gardening, fishing and fortified pa.
• c. 1500: Settlement of the Chatham Islands, where Moriori culture develops.
• 1642: Abel Tasman’s expedition reaches New Zealand.
• 1769: James Cook arrives and charts the coastline.

Why it matters

The settlement of Aotearoa completed the human exploration of the habitable Earth, apart from Antarctica. It is a striking example of navigational skill and of a people adapting a tropical way of life to a temperate land. For Maori today, the voyages from Hawaiki and the ancestral canoes remain living foundations of identity, kinship and connection to land.