Transcript
THE AOTEAROA HISTORY SHOW: Māori: the first 500 years
MĀNI: On October 9th, 1769, the Tahitian navigator Tupaia stepped on the shore of Aotearoa for the first time.
A few months earlier British Navy Lieutenant James Cook had brought Tupaia on board the HMB Endeavour as an expert navigator and translator as the ship explored the South Pacific.
Now they were at the mouth of the Turanganui River, these days home to Gisborne’s Port.
WILLIAM: But a day earlier, when Cook first arrived in Aotearoa, he didn’t bring Tupaia with him and the Endeavour’s first meeting with Māori ended in disaster.
MĀNI: When Cook’s men encountered their first Māori, they panicked, opened fire and killed Ngāti Oneone leader Te Maro.
A day later, 100 warriors of Rongowhakaata gathered on shore.
WILLIAM: But Cook had realised his mistake; this time he brought Tupaia on shore with him.
And even though Māori had been separated from Tahiti and Eastern Polynesia for 500 years, Tupaia understood them.
MĀNI: Tupaia stepped forward and introduced himself.
It turned out they had more in common than language, they shared cultural values - like manaakitanga, hospitality and whanaungatanga, family connection.
WILLIAM: But later, as Tupaia explored the Māori world, he saw things which were totally unfamiliar.
MĀNI: He saw kūmara planted in rows of mounded earth, and stored in deep pits.
WILLIAM: He saw the huge wood and earth defences of Pā, fortified villages.
MĀNI: He saw elaborate curved patterns on wooden carvings and in moko, tattoos.
WILLIAM: None of it was anything like what Tupaia knew from home in Tahiti.
MĀNI: During their 500 year separation from the rest of the Pacific, the people of Aotearoa had transformed.
WILLIAM: How? What changed? Well, that’s what this episode is all about. The 500 year evolution of Māori.
INTRO STING
WILLIAM: People often talk about Māori culture before Tupaia arrived as if it was a single thing.
And that’s totally wrong.
Māori were a network of tribes and confederations. Each with their own history and way of doing things.
MĀNI: There's also a tendency to imagine Māori as a people frozen in time… but of course over 500 years any society’s going to change. A lot.
WILLIAM: When people study Māori history before European contact, they usually divide it into three phases.
First, the earliest phase of arrival and occupation. Currently estimated to run from sometime in the late 1200s to around 1400 AD. This is when the first waka arrived, and people spread out around the motu, or islands.
Archaeologists and historians call this the Colonisation Phase - A bit confusing because we usually talk about Pākehā colonisation which happened 500 years later.
MĀNI: Next, the Transitional Phase. Roughly 1300 to 1600. Moa became extinct, the climate changed, and there was huge social upheaval as people had to rely more on agriculture for food.
WILLIAM: Finally, the Traditional Phase. Approximately 1500 to 1800. This is when the cultural structures we see as distinctly Māori were embedded.
But society was still changing. There were huge internal migrations and increasing collaboration within and between tribes.
MĀNI: And these three phases happened at different times, and in different ways, in different parts of New Zealand.
Down South, the tribes of Ngāi Tahu relied on hunting, fishing and other wild sources of food all the way up until the 1800s
Whereas in the Far North, people were likely growing crops early on, taking advantage of the warmer climate.
WILLIAM: Ok, so let's start at the beginning. What do we know about the people who first settled Aotearoa?
Well, we know they came from Eastern Polynesia, probably in or near Tahiti, maybe Rarotonga.
The latest evidence suggests several hundred people made the voyage here aboard multiple waka.
They lived in tribes of roughly 50 to a hundred, made up of a handful of whānau, extended families.
MĀNI: All the whānau in a tribe could trace their heritage back to shared tūpuna - ancestors.
Tribes were often named after a female tupuna, which helps to explain why the Māori word for tribe is “Hapū”, which also means “pregnant”
WILLIAM: Yeah, it emphasises shared ancestry.
MĀNI: But that doesn’t mean everyone was equal. Hierarchy started long before Polynesians arrived in Aotearoa… It was largely determined by whakapapa, or ancestry.
WILLIAM: Rangatira were often the eldest sons or daughters of the eldest sons and daughters going way back to ancestors described as descended from gods.
This meant they were particularly tapu, and therefore held a lot of mana - spiritual power and authority.
MĀNI: These first people all came within 100 years of each other, on deliberate voyages starting around 1270 AD… At least, that’s the current best estimate.
Their descendants rapidly spread out around New Zealand and outlying islands.
Some hapū traveled hundreds of kilometers from mainland New Zealand to places like Rangitāhua, Mauka Huka and Norfolk Island.
WILLIAM: Experts believe stone tools found on Australia’s east coast might belong to voyagers from these outlying islands!
MĀNI: The locations of tools and moa bones sometimes mark the sites of kāinga - villages or camps.
Looking at what’s left at these camps tell archaeologists quite a bit about the people who lived there.
WILLIAM: For one thing, early kāinga were only occupied for a couple of decades at most. They weren’t permanent villages.
Second, they’re often found near river mouths, and sit next to huge piles of bone and shell.
MĀNI: It looks like early Māori would sail along the coast in their waka, stop at a river mouth and set up camp.
Then they would travel inland, hunting moa and other large birds - and along the coast harvesting fish, shellfish and seals.
When these food sources ran out, they simply moved on.
WILLIAM: These camps are also interesting because of the stuff we don’t find. For one thing, there are very few weapons, those only turn up later.
So maybe this phase when Māori first occupied Aotearoa was more peaceful than later phases?
Or maybe weapons in this era were made of wood rather than stone, so they rotted before archeologists could find them?
Or maybe they were so valuable their owners carried them away?
MĀNI: There are different ways of interpreting the evidence, but most experts think this early phase of Māori arrival, exploration and occupation was relatively peaceful.
For the first one or two hundred years there were so few people, and so much food, that there wasn’t much need to fight - and lots of reasons to cooperate.
WILLIAM: Instead of weapons, archaeologists find tools. Particularly toki, types of adze.
We find toki all over New Zealand, and some of the outlying islands.
Most of these tools are made from a stone called argillite, and they’re mostly made in the same place: Wairau Bar.
MĀNI: Archaeologists digging at Wairau Bar have found nearly 40 tonnes of argillite chips, leftovers from making toki.
That means hundreds must have been made at this site every year. It was a toki factory!
WILLIAM: Archaeologists have also uncovered giant umu, cooking pits, filled with the bones of thousands of moa and seals, plus 1600 tonnes of shells.
MĀNI: Wairau Bar also has something we don’t find at other early Māori settlements - a cemetery, urupā. The bones of roughly 60 people have been discovered there.
WILLIAM: When archeologists analysed those bones closely, they discovered some of those people had diets which were high in sugar and low in protein.
MĀNI: That suggests they grew up in Tropical Polynesia eating sugary fruit, not in cold New Zealand, eating moa meat.
So these might be the bones of some of the very first people to come to Aotearoa.
WILLIAM: What does this all mean? What was Wairau Bar for?
Well, New Zealand was a weird landscape. It was different from the tropical islands the first migrants came from: bigger, wetter and colder.
These early arrivals needed a place where different hapū could gather together, tell each other what they had discovered - which foods were poisonous, which were good to eat - and to trade.
MĀNI: They needed a place to reinforce connections, share gossip and memories of the old days...
WILLIAM: ...And for expert toolmakers to practise their craft and teach it to the next generation.
MĀNI: So archaeologists think of Wairau Bar as basically New Zealand’s first capital city!
WILLIAM: But within a hundred years, Wairau Bar was abandoned, probably because local food sources ran out.
MĀNI: To tell the story of Wairau Bar we’re relying almost entirely on archeological evidence.
That’s because oral histories of these early days of Māori occupation focus on stories of Rangatira travelling around Aotearoa claiming land for their hapū.
But they don’t talk much about the details of day to day life. Writing about the oral traditions of the Tainui people, famous Ngāti Maniapoto historian Dr Bruce Biggs said:
“For the first 7 or 8 generations little but personal names are recorded in pedigrees stemming from just a few of the immigrants. Then beginning with Taawhao [in 1475] the tradition suddenly becomes more detailed ... it is an astonishingly detailed record, matched in the Pacific only by other Māori tribal histories, all of which seem to follow a pattern of sparsely recorded remote past followed by a sudden efflorescence of detail beginning 3 to 4 centuries ago.”
WILLIAM: That explosion in the oral tradition marks a turning point in this new Māori culture. The start of the Transitional Phase. And historians think this pretty much comes down to kai, food.
Moa and seals reproduced slowly, and their populations couldn’t cope with the amount of hunting going on.
By 1450 AD the last moa had vanished and the seal population had been decimated.
MĀNI: So, why did Māori hunt these animals so heavily?
Well, in the tropical islands Māori came from they hunted animals that had evolved to reproduce quickly. It helped them cope with disasters like typhoons and tsunamis.
New Zealand’s animals evolved in a more stable environment so they became slow breeders to avoid overpopulation.
WILLIAM: It seems likely that after the extinction of the moa, Māori learned to manage natural resources. They probably used rāhui - temporary bans on gathering those resources in certain areas.
MĀNI: With the extinction of large animals like Moa and seals, most Māori had to fall back on a food they had brought with them from the tropical islands, the kūmara.
To grow a decent crop Kūmara needs the average temperature to stay above 15 degrees for 5 months. In tropical Polynesia that means two harvests a year.
WILLIAM: But if you hadn’t already noticed, New Zealand is not a tropical island.
So it was only possible to get one crop a year, and only in what we’ll call the Kūmara Zone. Northerly, coastal parts of the country where it’s warmer.
MĀNI: So this was a time of massive migration. During the early phase of Māori occupation, settlements were evenly distributed across Te-Ika-a-Māui and Te Waipounamu, the North and South Islands.
But by the end of the Transitional Phase, about 98 percent of Māori lived inside the Kūmara Zone.
The remaining two percent lived in the southern North Island and parts of the South Island, where they migrated between seasonal sources of kai.
The more remote islands were completely abandoned. Probably because they were too small to sustain a permanent population.
The only exception was the Moriori people on Rēkohu/Wharekauri, the Chatham Islands. And we’ll tell their remarkable story in another episode.
WILLIAM: As you’d imagine, the switch from moa to kūmara as the primary food source led to huge societal changes.
You had to stay near your kūmara pretty much all year - to tend them and make sure someone didn’t come along and steal them.
So Māori had to set up permanent settlements. And it became really important to know which land belonged to your hapū, and which belonged to your neighbour.
MĀNI: This is why we see that explosion in detail of the oral tradition around 1500 AD.
Like, if you were a rangatira and you caught someone trespassing on your land how did you prove it was yours?
You used your whakapapa.
You said: “Hey! My tūpuna claimed this land hundreds of years ago and have held it ever since. I can tell you their name, I can tell you how they did it, and I can tell you the names of all of their descendants up until today.”
Reciting whakapapa asserts both your rights to land and your identity. The two are connected.
Any transfer of land or resources through marriage or warfare or gifting is also recorded in these stories.
So the oral histories get more detailed as land becomes more valuable. They are a library, a legal record and a family tree all in one!
WILLIAM: On top of the extinction of moa and decline of other large animals, Maori faced another big change in the Transitional Phase from 1300 to 1600: The beginning of the Little Ice Age. Several hundred years of global cooling and rapidly changing weather patterns.
Historians think the Little Ice Age reduced harvests, and increased competition for farmland and other sources of food.
This didn’t just affect Aotearoa, it’s linked to disruption and cultural change all over the Pacific.
Pretty much everywhere from Fiji, to Timor, to New Zealand we see more signs of warfare in the archaeological record - more weapons and defensive fortifications.
MĀNI: We also get more mentions of violence and battles in Māori oral histories.
WILLIAM: But just because warfare was increasing, doesn’t necessarily mean it was common. Māori had ways of trying to resolve disputes without bloodshed.
One of the most important was “taua muru”.
Say you’re a rangatira, and your neighbour insults you, or hunts in your hapū’s patch of forest, or takes fish from your stream.
You could launch an all-out war against them,
But that would be an overreaction - like life in prison for stealing a packet of chips. The punishment needed to fit the crime. You needed the right form of utu.
MĀNI: Utu is a key concept of tīkanga, Māori customary law. It's commonly mistranslated as "revenge" - but it actually means something more like "rebalancing", “cost” or “reparation”.
We can understand utu a bit better by looking at it as one of three interlocking concepts: Take - Utu - Ea
“Take”, an action or issue, demands “utu”, an appropriate response, resulting in “ea”, balance.
WILLIAM: Coming back to our example, launching a war for a minor insult or trespass wouldn’t be an appropriate utu, it’d be an over-reaction, and costly for everyone.
And it might prevent both sides from achieving a state of ea.
MĀNI: So, instead, people on both sides agree to a taua muru which was sort of like a relatively non-violent plundering raid … A way of publicly righting a wrong that fell short of actual combat.
WILLIAM: Of course, taua muru couldn’t resolve every dispute. When violent conflict did happen, it was usually utu for a more serious take, like for the murder of a rangatira or a dispute over resources.
MĀNI: The growing threat of warfare in the Transitional Phase led to the building of pā, defensive fortifications.
WILLIAM: Thousands of pā popped up around Aotearoa, almost all inside the Kūmara Zone. Some were just small forts to protect kūmara pits. Others were much larger.
MĀNI: The biggest was Maungakiekie Pā, One Tree Hill in Auckland. In the 1700s it covered 17 hectares and could protect five thousand people in times of crisis.
WILLIAM: Pā also had religious significance.
In fact when Tupaia saw his first pā, he didn’t think of them as fortifications at all, but more like giant temples.
MĀNI: And in a way he was right. Pā often contained carvings of atua and important ancestors.
Senior rangatira lived at elevated positions within pā, which were tapu spaces.
Particularly large and elaborate pā enhanced the mana of the rangatira who lived there, and of their wider hapū.
WILLIAM: And pā weren’t the only status symbols.
Through the Transitional Phase archaeologists start finding elaborately carved ornaments, tools, weapons and waka.
Some archaeologists say this suggests increasing hierarchy - a growing gulf between high-ranking rangatira and lower-ranking common people.
MĀNI: Several European explorers and missionaries commented that Māori were more conscious of social status than other Pacific people.
The early missionary, Samuel Marsen, wrote that:
“The New Zealanders will not be insulted with impunity and treated as [people] without understanding, [they] resent to the utmost of their power any [insult] heaped against them.”
MĀNI: These new pā, waka and weapons we find in the transitional phase are also often decorated with new kinds of art.
Alongside the traditional rectilinear art styles of Eastern Polynesia, we start seeing the curved, flowing designs which we think of today as distinctly Māori.
This might partly reflect that during the transitional phase from 1300 to 1600, Māori were learning to work with new materials they found in Aotearoa.
There was fine grained tōtara timber, the bones of seals and whales, and most of all, pounamu.
WILLIAM: Pounamu was super useful for Māori. A beautiful mineral, soft enough to be shaped into jewellery and hard enough to make an effective tool or weapon.
So it’s not surprising pounamu was especially prized as a symbol of mana. Some hapū migrated across Cook Strait especially to access the land they called Te Wai Pounamu - the waters of greenstone.
MĀNI: Pounamu was so important to Māori that it was traded all over New Zealand.
But they weren’t using cash. Instead Maori used a system of gift exchange - kind of like a mental IOU
A good example of this is kaihaukai, the ceremonial exchange of food.
Your whānau might harvest birds in summer months. You would preserve some to eat in the winter but also to give some to other people within or beyond your hapū.
That gift created a debt - an utu. So, later that year when your stock of preserved birds were running low, your neighbour might harvest inanga, whitebait, and share that with you.
WILLIAM: Kaihaukai was particularly important in the South Island, where it was often too cold to grow kūmara. Instead the hapū of Ngāi Tahu traded seasonal sources of kai to keep everyone fed all year round.
MĀNI: This kind of utu based trade is still important to many Māori today and it has deep roots in Māori history.
We already mentioned how toki made at Wairau Bar were distributed far and wide in the earliest phase of Māori history.
At the same time we find knives made from obsidian sourced from Tuhua/Mayor Island, in the Bay of Plenty. Those obsidian blades are spread everywhere from Rākiura - Stewart Island, to Raoul Island in the Kermadecs.
WILLIAM: Evidence of long distance trade is harder to find in the Transitional Phase.
Archeological evidence shows Māori were mostly making stuff using local resources, it’s another sign hapū were becoming more closely tied to their land
When they did trade, it was almost always with closely related hapū.
And that makes sense right? You would only give an IOU to someone you trust, and for Māori that usually meant relatives.
MĀNI: The Transitional Phase of Māori history never really ended, it just flowed into the Traditional Phase - the phase Māori were in when Tupaia and Cook landed at Tūranga in 1769.
But this wasn't the end of Māori cultural evolution, not by a long shot!
Looking at the oral histories and material culture, plus written European accounts of Māori in the early 1800s, it's clear the culture was still changing.
WILLIAM: Why? Well for one thing, the climate had changed again. By 1650 the Little Ice Age was ending. Aotearoa became warmer and drier.
As the Kūmara Zone expanded, some hapū migrated away from heavily populated Northern parts of Aotearoa.
MĀNI: We also start to see more collaboration between closely related hapū, and the growing importance of wider iwi groups.
The word iwi also means “bones”, symbolising the deeper connections of hapū. They are typically named after ancestors who arrived on the first waka to Aotearoa.
WILLIAM: Iwi connections became increasingly important to hapū in the Traditional Phase. There were also increasing alliances between iwi as time went on.
In the late 1700s or early 1800s the paramount leader of Ngāti Toa, Pikauterangi, got into a major dispute with other hapū of Waikato and Maniapoto, in particular Ngāti Apakura.
MĀNI: Pikauterangi reached out to his relatives, and they reached out to their relatives. Together they formed a massive alliance of iwi and hapū, including Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Kahungunu, Te Āti Awa and Ngāti Ruanui.
Together they planned an attack on Pikauterangi's enemies.
WILLIAM: In response, the hapū of Waikato, Ngāti Maniapoto, and Ngāti Apakura made an alliance.
MĀNI: They got Ngāti Whātua and hapū of the Hauraki gulf involved too.
It was a large, diverse alliance of different iwi, but they agreed that in battle they would all follow the commands of an ariki, a paramount leader - Te Rauangaanga of Waikato
WILLIAM: This all ended with the Battle of Hingakākā, near Te Awamutu.
This may have been the biggest battle ever fought in New Zealand. It’s said to have involved thousands of warriors, some say as many as 16 thousand.
MĀNI: Pikauterangi and his allies had the advantage of numbers, but their leadership was divided. Each hapū was commanded individually by its own rangatira.
Meanwhile, his opponents were unified under the leadership of Te Rauangaanga
WILLIAM: So, in the end, Pikauterangi and his allies were defeated.
MĀNI: In the Traditional Phase, from 1500 to 1800 AD oral histories make increasing reference to rangatira and their hapū banding together under the mana of ariki - paramount leaders like Te Rauangaanga.
It wasn’t just about warfare. Often multiple hapū worked together to celebrate important occasions, create new gardens, and build new pā.
WILLIAM: And while these projects were often organised by ariki, decisions were made collectively. The wishes of ariki could be overruled if their people disagreed with them.
MĀNI: The arrival of Tupaia and James Cook marked the beginning of the end of the traditional phase - but it’s interesting to imagine what might have happened if that contact never happened
This was a time of significant cultural and societal change for Māori, who knows where it might have led?
WILLIAM: We’ll never really know… As more and more Māori began speaking, working, and living with visiting explorers, whalers and missionaries; and Aotearoa was pulled into the expanding British Empire, Māori society would change once again.
MĀNI: But that’s a story for a different episode.
