The First New Zealanders

What if the first New Zealanders crossed an ocean, landed in a brand-new world, and built a whole society in just a few generations? Tristan Hughes and Dr Richard Walter tell the story of East Polynesian voyagers who reached Aotearoa around the late 1200s, bringing canoes, knowledge, and ambition from Hawaiki to a vast, forested island world. From the moa-rich site of Wairau Bar to archeological evidence of exquisite stone tools, ornaments, and fishhooks, Tristan and Richard discuss how these settlers adapted fast, explored far, and laid the foundations for Māori life in New Zealand. MORE The First Hawaiians Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-first-hawaiians/id1520403988?i=1000730634117 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/2uChZoFRNuwMUEBl4EJdXM?si=vJfKdGzQQHmq8KN6vNSG6Q Ancient Polynesia: Pioneers of the Pacific Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ancient-polynesia-pioneers-of-the-pacific/id1520403988?i=1000522780508 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0LAoHR7chMBGn5KN2KU8qu We're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - final tickets are available here https://fane.com.au/whats-on/an-evening-with-tristan-hughes/. The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Arstall. Produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early ad-free podcasts and exclusive subscriber-only episodes every fortnight. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:06Tristan Hughes?

  Hello, quick shout out from me to everyone listening to this podcast from New Zealand. If you're an Ancients listener from New Zealand, first off, I'm delighted that we're now finally covering your country's amazing archaeology, the story of the first people to settle your country roughly 700 years or so ago. And secondly, if you're in Auckland, if you're near Auckland and you're free on Saturday, the 8th of August, well, we're going to be there. The Ancients live tour includes one show that's happening in Auckland that night. I'm really excited for it. My first time back in New Zealand in a decade or so since I was a student. And I love to see you there. I'd love to meet you in person. So yes, I just want to do a quick shout out of that before the episode begins.

• 1:50Tristan Hughes?

  There's a link in the description where you can get tickets. Now into the episode.

• 2:09Tristan Hughes?

  The story of how the Polynesians colonized the Pacific over thousands of years is one of the greatest tales of maritime history. Fiji, Tahiti, the Marquesas, Rapa Nui, Hawaii. On all of these islands and many more, these expert seafarers and navigators settled, bringing their way of life with them. Then roughly 700 years ago, they colonized the largest islands in the Polynesian Triangle, what we know today as New Zealand.

• 2:44Tristan Hughes?

  In this episode, we're going to delve into the story of these settlers, how they arrived and made their home in this brave new world full of wondrous creatures like the moa, the great flightless bird that soon went extinct. We're going to explore what archaeology is telling us about these East Polynesian adventurers who would pave the way for the rise of New Zealand's iconic indigenous culture that still lies at the heart of that country, the Maori.

• 3:14Tristan Hughes?

  Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the first New Zealanders with our guest, Dr Richard Walter, Professor of Archaeology at the University of Otago.

• 3:32Tristan Hughes?

  Richard, Kia ora, it is wonderful to have you on the show.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Kia ora Tristan, nice to be here. Thank you very much.

• 3:38Tristan Hughes?

  This amazing topic. Is it fair to say that, I mean, is it true that New Zealand is the last large landmass in the world to be settled by humans?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. We sometimes would say that it's the last place to be colonized. If you like using colonization in the strict sense of a place where people come and make a colony, a place to live. People will say, well, what about Antarctica? But of course, there isn't a colony on Antarctica. There are visitors from time to time, but they don't breed there. They don't have children and raise families. And they're pretty much dependent on what they get on their air force planes. So yeah, New Zealand is the last place in the world to be significant island to landmass to be settled by humans.

• 4:24Tristan Hughes?

  It's a great story and we're going to delve into the archaeology and probably some of the mythology as well. But first things first, Richard, of course, many of us call the country New Zealand today, but we can also call it Aotearoa.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Aotearoa, that's correct. That's a Maori word, of course, a Maori name, and its origin is a bit obscure. It probably emerged post-European times amongst Maori speakers. And it's widely, you say, my guess is that within probably not my lifetime, but within the next 50 years, it will probably become the accepted name for New Zealand.

• 5:00Tristan Hughes?

  Right. And so we may well go between the two names as time goes on. But rest assured, we are talking about the same area of the world, the same country, the same islands.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  We're talking about New Zealand.

• 5:12Tristan Hughes?

  Absolutely. So Richard, let's get straight into it. So when do people first reach New Zealand?

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Well, the likely time for first arrival in New Zealand would be the very last decades of the 1200s of the 13th century. And they're coming from Tropical East Polynesia around 3,000 kilometres to the north east.

• 5:36Tristan Hughes?

  And do we have quite a narrow timeframe now? Thanks to archaeology, thanks to modern science, thanks to the remains that have survived that we're going to delve into. The fact that the time period we're talking about for the earliest settlement of New Zealand is, you know, in that what is quite a small period of time, the end of the 12th century.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a narrow gap. I mean, we've been playing with the radiocarbon dates for about 20 years now, really trying to narrow them down. And that's, it's a big problem in New Zealand. Radiocarbon dating is a very big problem here because we're dealing with a very short time span. So a few years makes a quite a big difference for us. I mean, Australian archaeologists always tease us and say that our radiocarbon record, our entire history falls within a single standard deviation of one of their dates. But the other problem is our history falls within a particularly wiggly part of the radiocarbon calibration curve. So it's difficult to nail down. But we're now comfortable with our first settlement occurring in the last decades

• 6:38Speaker 02

  of the 1200s at the very earliest. And with canoes continuing to come out to New Zealand for probably 50, 60 years or so.

• 6:49Tristan Hughes?

  And the people who are settling New Zealand. So, so these are Polynesians and you mentioned kind of East Polynesia. So which islands in particular should we be thinking about?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  In fact, most Polynesians refer to a mythical homeland of Hawaii. So for us in New Zealand, Hawaii is very certain to lie somewhere within the realms of the Southern Cook Islands, the Austral Islands and the Society Islands. So that's between Tahiti and Rarotonga, if you like. And there's a dozen or more islands in there. And it's likely that the canoes came out to Aotearoa, to New Zealand from more than one of those islands.

• 7:27Tristan Hughes?

  And the story of, I mean, how the Polynesians, you know, would have reached those islands and much earlier, the La Pita culture as well, is a fascinating one. So how, Richard, after they've gone eastwards into the Pacific, do they then, you know, with their brilliant navigating in their canoes, do they manage then to reach New Zealand, almost kind of go rather than continuing east, go, go kind of southerly, right, a southerly direction?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Well, over the last 25 years or so, our thinking has changed quite a lot about that. And we're not really certain. I'll give you the update of how we're thinking at the moment. So we've got La Pita people coming into West Polynesia a bit less than 3,000 years ago. Now there's a big, West Polynesia, by that I mean Fiji, Tonga, Samoa. Now there's a big gap between those islands of West Polynesia and the Eastern Polynesian islands, starting, say, with the Cook Islands. And there appears to have been a gap in time between those settlement, between the settlement of those two areas of thousands of years.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  So it's, it's looking very much as if the East Polynesia was settled probably out of West Polynesia, but not necessarily, about probably no earlier than 1500 years ago. And personally, I think much more recently than that. I wouldn't be surprised if it's as recently as, say, 1150 to 1200 AD. I don't think it's much earlier than that myself. They're giving into East Polynesia and they're moving fairly rapidly throughout East Polynesia. And so again, my thinking on this is not necessarily what all people would agree with,

• 9:12Speaker 02

  but I think they're coming into New Zealand from, say, the Cook Islands or Tahiti area very soon after they arrive in East Polynesia as a whole. So I don't think they're waiting. I mean, New Zealand and Hawaii, Easter Island, the tips of the Polynesian Triangle, they're the most difficult places to get to. But I don't think there's really a very long gap, certainly with New Zealand. The closest East Polynesian island group to New Zealand is the Cook Islands. And I doubt, that's where I did my PhD research, actually. And I don't think New Zealand was settled much later than the Cook Islands, maybe a century or so later.

• 9:55Tristan Hughes?

  And so how do they do it? Because as you mentioned, I mean, thousands of miles between New Zealand and the Cook Islands. How do they navigate, you know, this open ocean mass, you know, between them, you know, with no land in sight? How were they able to reach Aitira?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  We don't know as much about that as we would like. I mean, it's, what you're asking is basically a technological question. There are a number of archaeologists who have very strong ideas about the technology of canoe construction, sail construction, and the ways in which people moved their vessels from the tropics to the south. We don't know as much about it, and it's highly contested. But what we do know is that it's possible. Whether they could navigate from New Zealand back to the islands is also contested. My own view is that they must have done so. We have a lot of canoes coming out to New Zealand, and we know that from various lines of evidence.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  I don't think people would head south out of the tropics on a 3,000 kilometre journey, unless they had some idea of where they were going, especially if they're carrying all of their livestock and plants, because they had to bring those with them, because there is nothing in New Zealand that they could use as a domestic plant. So they brought all that stuff with them.

• 11:16Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, yes, I mean, Richard, what should be imagining? Because trying to get a sense before we get to to New Zealand itself is kind of the canoes that they're in, and how full to the brim they must have been with people, with supplies, you know, that that voyage to reach this new land. So, I mean, how large a a transport canoe should we be thinking? And with what items are they bringing with them?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Again, I don't know about that. I mean, it is often, it has been said in the past, when people were thinking more about these large, double-hulled canoes with platform between some sort of structure in between, that perhaps we could be talking about 80 people on board. But I think nowadays the thinking is that it's, they're probably not quite like that. They're probably smaller. We think from genetic evidence that at least 200 women arrived in New Zealand. And I I say women simply because we're using the mitochondrial DNA evidence for that. And not in one canoe, of course. 200 women, most migrations involve roughly the same amount of men and women, perhaps a few more men, actually.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  So we're probably talking about five or 600 people, maybe 1,000, coming out from the islands. So how many canoes would that take? I don't know, a lot, fair number.

• 12:36Tristan Hughes?

  And when they reach New Zealand, I mean, what type of world greeted them if it had not yet been touched by humans? This is a brave new world. This is a pristine landscape that they're emerging into.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a heavily forested landscape. It's a very diverse landscape. It's a continental landscape. I mean, the people are coming out here from oceanic islands. These are volcanic islands. They're on the Pacific Plate. They're not on the continental plate. So they're coming out to New Zealand, which has a very ancient, long-evolved biota, and a very complex geology. It's heavily forested, and a lot of that forest had to be cleared and was quite rapidly cleared, in patches, of course. We've got very diverse marine environments in the in the islands. The marine environment is fairly uniform from place to place. We have extremely diverse marine environments.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  We've got sandy beaches, we've got mud flats, we've got long riverine sort of tidal areas. And so from the marine perspective, there's a great deal of resources here. We don't have land animals, that is land mammals. We've got a lot of sea mammals, and they were very important in the early subsistence economy, along with the flightless birds, the giant flightless birds, the mola, the rattites. So it's a promising place for people turning up. It's a vast landscape, too. I mean, we have little islands in our harbour that are bigger than Rarotonga. In Auckland Harbour, there are islands bigger than Rarotonga. So it is a place that would have looked extremely promising to people coming out here.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  But it would have been daunting, too, because, I mean, the environment is very different. Coconuts don't grow here. Most of the tropical coltogens won't grow well here in New Zealand. So it would have been tough in many ways.

• 14:27Tristan Hughes?

  So they really, kind of this brave new world, different climate, as you say, but large and diverse landscapes. And these these first Polynesians that are reaching New Zealand on their canoes with their supplies, whereabouts do we think they choose to settle? I mean, what types of landscapes are they looking for that they decide to kind of, you know, to to put their ships up at, to put their canoes up at, to beach them, and then decide we should create a settlement here?

• 14:54Speaker 02

  They are deliberately selected for large, the larger sites are all deliberately selected to be placed on the larger river mouths, the harbours, on the edges of sandbanks and bars around lagoon edges. So the river mouths are particularly important. I mean, they don't have river mouths in the same sense in tropical Polynesia, because there's the fringing reef, and they're much smaller land masses anyway. So the river mouths are really important. They provide access to the interior, they provide easy places to bring canoes ashore, much easier than the, you see, we don't have the protective reefs. So you, a river mouth is a really good place.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  And so particularly in the South Island, we've got these really large first-generation or colonisation-phase sites perched on nearly every of our major rivers as we run right down the east coast and the northwest coast of the of the South Island. And the North Island, the very early sites are not as well-known. We don't have as many examples, but there are sheltered islands within the harbours, that sort of place. But they're selecting ecotones, places where there's a lot of ecological zonation, so they're coming together and easy to access.

• 16:19Tristan Hughes?

  But Richard, that's so interesting. So we can actually imagine them kind of, given how much of the coastline you see evidence of these settlements, yes, in South Island and North Island. I mean, you can imagine them just scouting the coastlines, can't you? Really getting a sense of the land and then choosing the best places to settle before then settling.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, and there's very, very clear archaeological evidence of this. They they moved round the coastlines very, very rapidly. And we note this because all of the earliest sites in New Zealand, to my knowledge, have material from distant sources, imported material, not from the islands. We only have two artefacts that came out from Hawaiki. But we do, all of the early sites in New Zealand are chock-a-block with material brought from other locations around the North and South Islands. And the really interesting thing is that within probably a few years,

• 17:16Speaker 02

  the explorers had discovered every major industrial resource, all of the really high-quality industrial resources in the country. Obsidian and ads-making stone, the basalt and the argelites. And they'd found the best sources in the country. Often, these sources are very remote. And so presumably, they're finding boulders at the river mouths, and they're following them upstream. So the earliest sites in the country all contain material from all over the country. So they're moving around, they're establishing small settlements, they're quite mobile, but they are deliberately exploring up the rivers and all around the coasts,

• 18:00Speaker 02

  even into very remote areas where we don't even live today.

• 18:05Tristan Hughes?

  Well, we certainly delve more into that when we explore particular archaeological sites, and, you know, how that's showing how these people adapt to this new, these new environments that they're living in. Um, but Richard, one other thing I want to mention, just kind of generally on the arrivals, first of all, is you mentioned how it seems like there are hundreds of people, and then how they're quickly scouting all of these areas and learning a lot about where the the resources are. Is this a case then, the settlement of New Zealand, is this a case of Polynesian mass migration, lots of people arriving in a short amount of time, or very gradual arrival of people over several generations?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  This is a contested point. I think that there's very clear evidence that it's a mass, I've called it a mass migration in the past, and what I mean by that is that, well, I simply mean a large number of people over a short length of time. I mean, there are two models really for the populating of New Zealand. Now, when James Cook arrived here, there's an estimate of the Maori population of around about 100,000, perhaps more. So there's two ways you can get, say, 100 to 120,000 people in New Zealand in the 1780s. Either you can have a small number of people arriving a long time ago and breeding themselves

• 19:28Speaker 02

  up, and that's what we used to think. We used to think that New Zealand had been settled 1,000 years ago or more. In fact, that was the standard model right up until 25 years ago. New Zealand was settled 1,000 or more years ago, so you only needed a small number of people, and by the time you get to Captain Cook sailing here in the Endeavour, you've got 100,000 people, easy peasy. It's like breeding chickens, right? You just get more and more and more. So, but the problem was that our prehistory, our history is not that long. We just don't have time for a small number of people to get here in 1300 AD.

• 20:10Speaker 02

  My own view is that 1300 might even be a little early, but the consensus of opinion is last decades of the 1200s. But you can't get here with 80 people and breed up to 100,000 in that short period of time. So we know people were not coming out here much later than the 1400, than 1400, and we know that because in East Polynesia, Hawaii at that date, all of the voyaging networks are starting to collapse. There's not a great deal of long-distance voyaging happening in East Polynesia after 1400. So for me, the window of opportunity to get people here is roughly 1300 to roughly,

• 20:55Speaker 02

  say, 1380, 1370. So given all of those sort of factors, I would say this looks like mass migration.

• 21:05Tristan Hughes?

  And can mythology at all help us with like kind of these theories? I mean, I'm looking at the stories that are associated with the earliest people to arrive in New Zealand and Aotearoa, of names like Kupé. Do the stories that survive potentially align with that idea of lots of people coming in a short amount of time?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  This is a much more complex question than we might think. The short answer to your question is that I believe very strongly that oral traditions are extremely important, and in all of my work in the Pacific and New Zealand, I work with the indigenous traditions a lot. But there are problems, and the problems were pointed out from the 1960s by Maori scholars as well as European. And this is that the oral traditions we are dealing with and the ones that you just cited are largely constructed by European scholars in the late 1800s. They are pulled together as coherent narratives based sort of on the European traditions,

• 22:11Speaker 02

  sort of Viking saga-type traditions, whereas oral tradition in New Zealand was probably more associated with smaller groups. That probably wasn't in the form of these long coherent narratives that were being put out to the New Zealand public and in scholarship right through to the 1940s, 1950s. Now, these type of traditions are so prevalent and have been so influential that although they haven't been taught in schools since the early 1960s, most New Zealanders still have them in their head. But they are very problematic.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  All of those figures that you cited do appear in the oral traditions, and that's true. But what you need, and this is what's happening now, is that fluent speakers of the language need to go back to the original texts and understand them in the same way that we understand other literature. You can't just take things at face value, you've got to understand the context in which these stories are being told and written, relayed, et cetera. And scholars are really only just starting to do this. So that's a long way of saying, yeah, these are really important, but no, we don't fully know how to use them yet.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  There's a lot of Maori scholars doing exactly this.

• 23:39Tristan Hughes?

  Still love asking that question though about, you know, how can mythology and oral tradition help alongside the archaeology? Because if we now turn to the archaeology, this is really exciting. So, I mean, Richard, we do have people like yourself who are working on these sites. I mean, there is some amazing archaeology that has survived from these earliest people, from these earliest settlers of New Zealand, that is revealing so much.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's very surprising. And in fact, some of the best understood sites in the country are the early ones. We have a very good record. I mean, there's undoubtedly a lot missing because we are experiencing all sorts of coastal processes that are impacting on sites, but we do have a very rich record of the first century of settlement here, particularly from the South Island.

• 24:33Tristan Hughes?

  And is there one site in particular? Well, there is one site in particular that we're going to focus on now, the site of Wairau Bar, and please forgive me if I get the pronunciation wrong, you can absolutely correct me, but where are we talking with Wairau Bar?

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Wairau Bar is located on the east coast of, the north-east coast of the South Island. So it's on the river mouth, the Wairau River mouth, and it's a large site. It's probably 20 hectares or so in size. We know that there's at least 11 hectares of intact deposit there at the moment. It's what was once called or often referred to as a Moa hunter site. It's a site where people were living and hunting the Moa, the extinct Ratite. Big birds, big, you know, big as us.

• 25:21Tristan Hughes?

  Big flightless bird, yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Big flightless bird, ranging in size from turkey size right up to bigger than emus and ostriches. It's a very rich site, vast array of artefacts, beautiful artefacts and remains, food remains. And there's also a lot of burials on the site, human burials, which aren't that common in New Zealand sites, not as common as they are in British, European sites, for example, Neolithic sites.

• 25:50Tristan Hughes?

  And for how long have we known about this site, about Wairau Bar?

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Well, local people were probably fossicking the site in the very early 20th century. By the late 20s and 30s, there was excavation being carried out there by interested amateurs, but I use excavation in the very loosest sense of the term. And the material that was coming out of the site was so clearly important that the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch got involved from the 1940s and carried out a series of excavations there, including of many of the burial, human burials, on and off, but through to the 1960s. Now, the burials attracted particular attention because many of them were buried with extremely

• 26:37Speaker 02

  ornate grave goods, and these artefacts are identical to the ones that we find in East Polynesia at the same period. So they provided this wonderful link, direct link. It was already reasonably well-known that there was similarity in artefact forms, but you know, the artefacts from Wairau Bar and now many of these sites, I often say to my students if I have an ads, you know, a stone ads from, say, Wairau Bar or an equivalent sites, quite a site of equivalent age, if I took that to Tahiti and threw it on the beach, no one would raise an eyebrow, they're identical.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  These early ads forms from tropical East Polynesia and New Zealand are extremely well-made, a high point of Polynesian stoneworking technology.

• 27:28Tristan Hughes?

  And just to go, so these ads is are used for kind of cutting trees, but potentially also farming equipment too?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  They're woodworking tools mainly, and they are, Polynesians and Maori were very skilled at stoneworking, and the stone tools from early New Zealand sites are amongst the finest you get for these type of tools anywhere in the world.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  They, later periods, after 1400 or so, they've become much less sophisticated, but this early phase really links tropical East Polynesia to New Zealand, not just the ads, but also the personal ornaments, the fish hooks, the tattooing chisels, all of these things are just identical.

• 28:21Tristan Hughes?

  Amazing. We're going to explore all of that because I want to get us into those nerdy details, Richard, and absolutely go wild on them. But shall we first off, I like to kind of get more of a sense of what this settlement would have looked like. So you mentioned kind of 20 hectares. The dwellings, do we have much of a footprint left of the houses that they built, that these early settlers built?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  No, we don't. The site is incredibly rich, and we've excavated a couple of fireplaces and we have some sense of where wall lines of houses are. But one of the odd things about these early sites is despite the fact that they have huge quantities of artefacts and other material in them, it's proved very difficult to find evidence of the structures. And right now, this is causing a number of us to really rethink what these sites are. I have always assumed that they were large, permanent villages, but it may well be the case that there was more mobility involved than we currently think, and that the size

• 29:21Speaker 02

  of the sites might be related not to long-term continuous occupation, but to the fact that people are moving around quite a lot on the landscape. This is an extremely wealthy community, the type of material they've got on the site is, these are wealthy people. But the site is a single occupation and it probably wasn't occupied for a long, long time. So it's beginning to look, to me and to a number of others who have thought about this with me, is that it's possible that these large Maori hunter sites may have been occupied on and off. People may have moved between a number of these sites for various

• 30:05Speaker 02

  social reasons, rather than sort of logistical rounds of activity, you know, going here for fishing, here for hunting. I think for social reasons, people were actually moving between sites because another really interesting aspect of these very early sites is that a huge number of the artefacts we find are in deliberate caches, as if people are going away and then coming back, going away and then coming back. So I think the size of these sites is not a reflection necessarily of large, complex, permanent villages, but just of people moving around, coming back, going somewhere else, coming back. As individuals,

• 30:47Speaker 02

  as what we call hapu or family groups, or even as subtribal groups, we don't know. I don't think they're large, complex villages anymore.

• 31:07Tristan Hughes?

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• 31:37Tristan Hughes?

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• 31:56Tristan Hughes?

  People, as you say, more mobile than we think, these early settlers. So maybe the idea of them, you're kind of living in a, in a village, in a house all year round and farming the land, we shouldn't be thinking like that. Should we be thinking more kind of hunter gathering, that kind of idea for the earliest?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  No, no. New Zealand is long and thin, so it goes through a lot of latitudes, right? In the far south, there's no possibility of agriculture or anything like that. So people were relying very heavily on hunting and gathering, but they were in communication with people further to the north who were agriculturalists, because we have this movement of material. And Wairau Ba lies well within the horticultural zone. So the Wairau Ba people did have gardens. But what I think is that although they had gardens, they were still moving from time to time, and most likely for social reasons, rather than for

• 32:54Speaker 02

  subsistence reasons. And, you know, if you look at 14th century East Polynesia, we see a similar thing. There's an awful lot of movement going on, and it's not just about moving stone from this island to this, to that island. It's about meeting people, engaging in religious activity, social activity. It's about political events. It's about finding a new boyfriend or a new girlfriend. You can't really, I mean, the archaeological record in New Zealand is about shells and fish bone and moa bone, and it's about adzes and obsidian, blah, blah, blah. And we know what's happening there. But the social dimension is probably a much more important driver of activity and what people are doing than where they

• 33:39Speaker 02

  get their food or where they get their tools.

• 33:42Tristan Hughes?

  So that, so, right. So a place like Wairau Ba is very much, it could be a communal area known far and wide by these people who've travelled along the coastline, where people gather, as you say, for social reasons. And they do stuff together from different communities. Can we imagine there almost being, I'm presuming, as you've already mentioned, it's, it's difficult to see in the surviving archaeology, but yes, maybe not kind of houses, but maybe a big kind of communal area where they all gathered and did stuff together?

• 34:10Speaker 02

  I'll just say at the start that there are much bigger sites than Wairau Ba, but they have less in them. Part of me thinks that Wairau Ba is special in some way, because of these burials of people, some of whom we know from the isotopes, were born in the tropics, were born in the islands. So part of me thinks that Wairau Ba is special and may have been a special place. But part of me also thinks that it may not necessarily have been. So I think that other sites may also have been similar to Wairau Ba. But what you asked was about communal structures. No, I don't think so. I think that there probably weren't communal structures. Communal structures are a very important part of late

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Maori society. But I've done work recently on much smaller sites of a similar age to Wairau Ba. And what we're finding there is evidence of huts, you know, more makeshift, less permanent structures. And I think that makes sense if the houses were small and make more makeshift, you know. You can still have a complex, wealthy society with highly ranked individuals and chiefs, but not necessarily have permanent, large structures and communal structures and what have you. But this is what makes New Zealand archaeology so interesting. The answer is, we don't know. We have the tools to find out, though.

• 35:35Tristan Hughes?

  Let's focus on another kind of area of the site, though. And you mentioned that in passing, which are, Richard, these incredible burials. And how many burials should we be thinking from Wairau Ba?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  There's about 40, which isn't big by international standards. But this seems to be a, you know, a communal area, a place that was set out for burial as a cemetery zone. The individuals are clearly highly ranked individuals are buried there because of the grave goods we find, the personal ornaments. Now, one of the most interesting and surprising things we found when I was excavating at Wairau Ba, must have been 10, 12 years ago now, we excavated this massive oven, cooking area. It showed up in our geophysics survey as this big black dot on the landscape, about four to five metres across. And we excavated

• 36:30Speaker 02

  a quarter of it. We did a two by two metre unit and excavated down. It was this massive stone lined cooking area, which had been infilled later with food remains. And we were able to use some clever methods to demonstrate that the food remains had all been deposited as a single event. They hadn't accumulated through time. And so we have argued that it's a feasting event. Yeah, which would be very, really interesting. That would be a communal sort of activity. It's, it's vast. I mean, I think there were more than 60 species of animal in that oven. Moas and a lot of birds, a lot of fish, shellfish, et

• 37:13Speaker 02

  cetera, sea mammals, all sorts of bits and pieces. And so it was, it's a very interesting feature. And there, we know from the geophysics that there are a number of these on the site. There are at least, there's a ring of about four, five of them where we started to excavate, and there are possibly some more. Nothing like this has ever been seen in New Zealand archaeology before. It's really strange.

• 37:36Tristan Hughes?

  So do you think they're into, that they are connected, very much kind of these, these great elaborate burials, buried with these amazing artefacts, and then these potential feasting events? I know it's all theory at the moment, but if it does align with this idea that maybe it is a special place and the people are wealthy, that if someone passed away who was important, they'd be buried at that site, and then there's a big kind of ceremony surrounding their burial with all of this, you know, all of these different animals, these new animals that they're, they're now adapting to eating, quite frankly. You know, it all comes together in the archaeology.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how I've been very tempted to see it. I have suggested in the past that the, that big cooking area, which is only, it's only what I would guess about, I can't remember, 40, 50 metres from the burials, from the large and most complex burials. So I have been tempted to speculate that it might be funeral event of some sort, you know, funeral ceremony. I mean, in Maori society at the moment, we have a, a ceremony, it's what's called the tangi or the tangi hanga. The tangi is the time when you have the burial. And people who are related and from all over the country will go to the

• 38:55Speaker 02

  tangi hanga, and there will be feasting over a period of day, where there'll be food cooked. And today, in the, in the large tangies, food is cooked underground in very large quantities. So maybe related, but you know, it's only speculation. I don't know how we could demonstrate that archaeologically.

• 39:15Tristan Hughes?

  I also kind of want to go back to that other key thing, which is, you mentioned that there are moa bones there. And am I correct that, Richard, one of the fascinating types of artefacts that have been discovered, is it from these burials, is the fact that they have moa bone jewellery? They're not just eating these great birds, they're also then using the bones for their own personal ornaments?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. The thing to remember is that we don't have the same range of industrial, although we've got wonderful stone in New Zealand, what we don't have is one of the key industrial items from tropical Polynesia, which is pearl shell. You know, the mother of pearl are large pearl oysters. Now, in the tropics, those pearl oysters are used for a huge range of artefacts, especially for fish hooks and for ornaments and other things. Now, in New Zealand, we don't have that. So, and the item that seems to have been picked up to replace that for the manufacture of fish hooks and other items is moa bone.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  So moa became a very important industrial item, as well as a food source. So moa bone artefacts are very, very common in early archaeological sites.

• 40:32Tristan Hughes?

  And is this a great example then, Richard, of, as you're mentioning earlier, how these early settlers, they're coming in, they've got these traditions from their homeland in the tropics. But at the same time, because of the new resources, you can see How they're clearly adapting to this new way of life with new species like the moa to make the same sorts of tools, the same sorts of artefacts, but with different materials than they were used to back in the tropics, back where they came from.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes it's quite, well, I find it a little bit funny too, because some of the things they were doing, you know, because like, one of the really characteristic items of the of Polynesia is the pearl shell trolling lure. It's a two-piece hook, it has a law, a section about that long, made of pearl shell, and on the end they put a bone point, and it's dragged through the sea to catch the surface swimming pelagic fish. So it was really important in Polynesia. And we've actually, the only, one of only two artefacts from Polynesia ever found in New Zealand is one of those things. So when they came to New Zealand, there was no equivalent shell they could use for that. So they used stone.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  And they used to, I mean, it's like, it seems, it sounds insane, but it works. So for the first hundred years, they were making these beautiful lures about this long out of stone. And they were choosing stone that had glitter in it, like schist and things like that. Later, they even used some of the low-grade green stones. But it's so unexpected. I mean, of course, I would have used wood or something, but they really liked, I guess, the weight and the feel, they knew what they were doing, they'd been fishing for years, and they decided to try stone. And you find hundreds of these, they're beautiful, beautiful artefacts, lots of them at Wairau

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Bar, and they used a lot of different types of stone, but it would have been very difficult, much more difficult to manufacture. Later on, they did turn to wood and they used wood. The stone fishing lures stopped around 1400, like many things. And after that, they tended to use wood with an inlay of one of our abalone. In New Zealand, we have an abalone which has beautiful turquoise and pink, and they used that inlay, which seems to me, which would have been a much more sensible thing to do from the start, but they, they really experimented and very successfully with stone. And you find it in a lot of the other artefacts, but not quite so dramatically.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  There was an attempt to reproduce the island technology, one for one here in New Zealand. There were other attempts to modify, and then there were whole new innovations as well.

• 43:22Tristan Hughes?

  It sounds a fascinating sight, Richard, you know, for those discoveries, but I guess also that idea of the contact, not just the links between that settlement and Polynesia and the tropics where they came from, Cook Islands and so on, but also from what you mentioned earlier, evidence of resources being there that have come to Wairau Bar from elsewhere in New Zealand, from other settlements at that time, Obsidian, et cetera, which once again gives a really interesting insight into how these peoples were interacting with each other, even if, as you've highlighted, you know, kind of how, just how special Wairau Bar was, and its, its, its purpose is still unclear.

• 44:02Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, in your mind, Richard, how significant would you argue Wairau Bar is for, yeah, and and in the future, for trying to learn more about this earliest stage of Polynesian settlement in New Zealand?

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Wairau Bar right now is still very well preserved, has a lot of intact site there. So it does contain a great deal of archaeological information. So the answer is, is it's potentially a very important sign. However, I think we need to do a lot of other thinking. You know, we need to really look at what we've got now and what the evidence is and what seems to be, there's a lot of rethinking. I've had to rethink a lot of what I understood about early period, not just by looking at the Wairau Bar material, but by thinking about it in the wider context of other sites

• 45:01Speaker 02

  around the country. We've got a hell of a lot of work to do. Wairau Bar, there are other sites contemporary with Wairau Bar, this couple on the west coast I've worked on, which just as amazing as Wairau Bar. This is a really interesting period of Polynesian history, and yeah, these sites have a lot to say. But we really have to think broadly about ideas about settlement patterns and kinship and the nature of communities and societies. And I wouldn't like to go back to Wairau Bar unless I had some really clear ideas and questions in mind. I don't want to dig for the sake of digging. Well, I do, but I shouldn't and I won't.

• 45:46Tristan Hughes?

  Shall we then briefly highlight, as you've highlighted there, Richard, that there are, there are these other sites contemporary to Wairau Bar from elsewhere in the South Island and North Island?

• 45:56Speaker 02

  About a hundred.

• 45:57Tristan Hughes?

  About a hundred? And are they quite varied in, in what we have archaeologically from those sites?

• 46:02Speaker 02

  When I say about a hundred, we have around about a hundred sites, probably more, that are contemporary with Wairau Bar, okay? We have sites in the South Island that are much bigger than Wairau Bar. What we don't have at the moment are sites that are as well preserved and contain such a rich array of information as Wairau Bar. And also, as I mentioned before, with some reticence, I do think Wairau Bar, I, Wairau Bar might well be special. It might well have special significance. And, you know, the fact that there are people buried there who were born in Hawaii has got to be significant. It's the only place where we have a large cemetery site.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  It's the only place where we have these huge communal cooking areas. So I am inclined to think it's special.

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• 48:25Tristan Hughes?

  So, Richard, I know you've now done a lot of work on kind of also the next phase as well, about how these communities, these settlements seem to evolve over time. So what do we think happens over the next century or so with these early settlements as the generations go on? Do we see a clear kind of evolution or, or growth in them? What do we know? What do we think we know so far?

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I've got a pretty good handle on that, or a start of one. Okay, so first of all, I think in the South, and I, by the South, I'm talking about the South Island, after about 1400, these big river mouth sites are not being used anymore. I think people are not utilising these large sites anymore. Now, partly that's because moa are extinct.

• 49:14Tristan Hughes?

  They've already made them extinct, wow.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  Oh, God, you know, we used to think it took hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, but they may have driven moa to extinction in as little as 80 to 100 years. Which, I mean, how would you do that? I have no idea. If you have an answer, tell me, because we just can't, people say, oh, yes, they hunted them to extinction. What does that mean? How do you hunt? We so we don't really know how they went extinct. But the point is, they did go extinct. So these larger sites simply seem to have broken up. They were no longer living in these large coastal settlements on river mouths.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Now, what we see instead in the southern parts of New Zealand, where I've done a lot of work of recently, we see by the 1400s, people are focusing much more on simply on fishing. The middens are not nearly as diverse. They're focused on a very small number of fish species, which can be caught in bulk, and shellfish. And we also see a really big decline in importation, the use of these exchange networks, which seemed to be dominant early on. So there's a decline in long distance communication and a move towards more specialised and smaller settlements.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  In the North Island, we're not quite as sure, but probably something of the sort went on. There also seems to have been a general movement to the north, where agriculture, where horticulture is far more viable. So by the 14, 1500s, by 1500, we have the majority of the population are living in the north of New Zealand. The part where I live now was virtually abandoned. You know, from where I am now, which is Dunedin, and the about two thirds of the way down the South Island, and further south, I think was largely abandoned. I mean, there were probably people living here from time to time.

• 51:22Speaker 02

  And I think there was still a lot of mobility in New Zealand. People were still moving around, but this concentration of settlements down the east coast of the South Island, that's gone. Population dramatically declined in the south, most of the South Island. And people are living largely, most populations are in the north, where they're using sweet, we call it kumara, sweet potato production, using large scale Sweden systems, which require, you know, you have to clear more bush. So there's a lot of bush clearance, a lot of forest clearance to open up for Sweden gardening.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  And we see, I think the settlements are still small, fairly mobile, but we do see the start of the construction of fortifications. And these are what we call the par sites. And these fortifications are large fortified settlements. I don't know if you've ever been to New Zealand. Have you ever been to New Zealand?

• 52:23Tristan Hughes?

  Once, yeah. And I went down to Dunedin, started in Auckland, all the way down. Yeah. So Richard, is it fair to say that by that time, can we say that the Maori culture has well and truly emerged?

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Yes. And it's, that's a really good point. Often I get asked, where did Maori come from? Where did the Maoris come from? And the answer, of course, is they came from New Zealand. This, this unique Maori society, culture, language, tradition has never existed anywhere else in the world. It didn't come here as a discreet package from somewhere else. And New Zealand is one of the only places where you have this, what you might call ethnogenesis, the emergence and development of a cultural tradition entirely in isolation from the outside world. So it's a really interesting case. Those sites I was talking about before, like Wairabaa, the people who lived there were

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Polynesians, you know, they had a language, a tradition, a way of life that really came out from tropical Polynesia. They were like my grandparents who talk, used to talk about Britain as the, as the homeland. And it would have taken more than a hundred years for even people to think of themselves as being, you know, really indigenous to the land. So this Polynesian culture and traditions, these were changing. And we see rapid, radical changes in the archaeological record, as I outlined before, from about 1400, from 1500 onwards, we're getting a society and culture emerging, we're

• 53:59Speaker 02

  getting the origins of tribalism, modern, modern Maori tribalism. I mean, the substance of Polynesian tribal society of chiefdom systems has always been there, but each place in Polynesia expresses it differently. And the Maori expression of Polynesian tribalism was quite unique. And it was emerging from after, I, you know, by late 14, 1500s, 1600s. We do get an indigenous Maori society developing right here in New Zealand. Having said that, I would also just add one point. A lot of Maori say, we were Maori from the time we stepped off the first kados.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  I would also agree with that, you know? That's a cultural and political statement that carries a lot of importance. But from an anthropological, archaeological point of view, we do see the evolution of a very distinctive Maori society right here in Aotearoa.

• 55:01Tristan Hughes?

  I find it fascinating, though, Richard, all of that and the fact that, as you say, it takes time for people to see themselves as something different as Polynesian. But at the same time, from the archaeology, Richard, yes, highlighting how those differences emerge over the centuries. But also, if we go back to Wairabaa, what I love, and I know you've done a lot of work around, is how quickly, at the same time, you see how they're adapting their tropical culture to suit this new environment that they've made their home, the colder climate of, you know, the non tropical climate of South Island and North Island, New Zealand, and, you know, these, these new types of animals, like the moa and landscapes that they were getting used to, which is wonderful.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true. But running parallel to that, one of the things that I've highlighted in my research is that with this adaptation, we also get, which people have ignored and not noticed, is that these people were also, at the same time, really striving to recreate the social and cultural conditions of the homeland. And we see this expressed most clearly in the really rapid emergence of these communication and exchange networks, which were really the, what characterized 14th century East Polynesia. You know, in the 1300s, all these islands were connected and they were moving people and things back and forth.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  The moment they got to New Zealand, they reproduced that. They spread out around the country. There's all of these different settlements. People are clearly moving between them and they're also moving material around. So it's not like they came here and forgot their homeland. They came here and I think one of the great drivers, I mean, we've always focused on adaptation. But I think one of the other great drivers of cultural change in New Zealand was the desire and the drive to reproduce the homelands.

• 56:59Tristan Hughes?

  Right. Well, Richard, I think that's a great point to leave it on. We have barely scratched the surface. I know there's more we could cover archaeologically. Haven't even talked about rock art and those other sites, correct? Which I'm sure are also very interesting. It seems like archaeologically, with new developments coming up, with all of these sites that have been identified, and no doubt more will be in the future. It feels a very exciting time for archaeologists like yourself, who've been studying the earliest settlement of Aotearoa back in the 13th century and 14th century. So it seems very exciting for the future, Richard.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  It's going to be fun.

• 57:37Tristan Hughes?

  Richard, very grateful for your time, dialing in from Dunedin in the South Island. I know it's late over there and it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time for coming on the show.

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Ngamiihi.

• 57:51Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was Dr Richard Walter introducing you to this amazing archaeology left behind by New Zealand's very first settlers, these East Polynesians some 700 years ago. I hope you enjoy the episode just as much as I did recording it. Thank you so much for listening. Now, as I mentioned at the beginning, New Zealand is very much on our mind at Ancients HQ, because in just a few weeks' time, on Saturday, the 9th of August, at the Bruce Mason Centre in Auckland, well, we're going to be there. We have a live show event and we'd love to see as many of you there as possible. If you're free that night, if you're in the vicinity of Auckland, if you're an Ancients listener and you'd like to see us live, well, now is your opportunity.

• 58:37Tristan Hughes?

  We're going to be talking all things Romulus and Remus. So the myths, the many myths around the origins of Rome, but also then delving into what does archaeology actually tell us? So exploring this great story where myth meets archaeology meets history. What do we actually know about very, very early Rome? Could there have been a figure called Romulus, a figure called Remus, et cetera, et cetera? It's going to be a whole lot of fun. I can't wait to get back to New Zealand. The last time I was there was a decade ago when I was a student. So yes, I'm very excited and I'd love to see as many of you there as possible. We'll put a link where you can get tickets in the bio in the description of this episode. That's all from me.

• 59:21Tristan Hughes?

  I'll see you in the next episode.