Gone Medieval - Origins of the Māori

Episode Date: September 5, 2023

Around the time of the start of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France, and the Black Death was devastating tens of millions of people in Europe and Asia, waves of migration from Polynesia laid the foundations of the Māori society in Aotearoa - modern-day New Zealand. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega traces the early history of this remarkable people with archaeologist Dr. Amber Aranui, curator at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gaughan medieval from history hit. I'm Eleanor Yonaga and in today's episode we are going to be talking about the origin of the Maori people. I'm absolutely delighted to be joined by the brilliant Amber Aranui. She is an archaeologist at Taipapa Museum in Wellington and the curator of Maori cultural objects. Currently she's been doing a lot of work on repatriating cultural and human remains back to communities of origin.

But today we're here to talk about origin stories writ large. Amber, thank you so much for being here. Kiyora. Kiyora, Illinois. Nice to be here. I am just absolutely over the moon to talk about this topic because I think it's so fruitful to be able to think about other communities outside of Europe and how they kind of come to be and move around. Because this isn't a story that is true of just one place in the globe.

People are moving and doing interesting things and starting new cultures everywhere. And so I guess really huge broad question to start you out with, which is going to make it incredibly difficult. Where would we say that the Maori people originate? Firstly, probably to say that Māori as a people, as a culture, became Māori within New Zealand. But prior to that, they were our East Polynesian ancestors who originate from a number of island nations centered in what we call today East Polynesia. So the islands of Tahiti, the Cook Islands, the Rorotonga, the Marquesas, sort of all around in that area is where the ancestors of Māori come from. So it's really kind of a larger diaspora.

We can't just say, oh, here's one island, right? It's going to be a huge cultural shift. Yeah. Our canoe traditions give us hints and in some cases identify specifically which islands within the Pacific they come from. So we know that we come not just from one island in the Pacific, but from a canoe. a number of different islands. And do we have a really good idea of why it is that people kind of underdominator?

Is this kind of a particular one pressure need to migrate? Is it just a kind of desire to discover? Do we really have any idea there? There's a lot of theories out there. And I guess a lot of what I'll talk about today is what we call the currently accepted theory. Nothing is known 100% for certain. But there are stories both here in New Zealand as well as in the Pacific. which I think allude to reasons why our ancestors arrived here in Ultero,

and conflict is definitely one of them. Population pressures, of course, is another. These are people who explored our vast oceans and came across islands, populated those islands, survived, thrived, and of course population growth, there's a lack of room, fight start, even things like pressures on resources, and so that causes people to continue to sail on, of course, to find new places to settle. And of course, we were a voyaging people. We didn't just sail to one island, and that was it.

We just stayed there. They were our highways. So we were always traveling and exploring and finding new places. So I think it was just a bit of a natural progression, and probably much like the way people would have settled and populated the continents like Europe. In particular, I've always been completely obsessed with the sort of canoes and catamaranes that people used to move around, because there's some... such incredible pieces of tech, especially for the time.

You know, and people quite rightly talk in Europe about Viking long ships and the things that they're able to do with that technologically. But good Lord, you can get a long way on a catarad, can't you? Yeah, I think thinking about using the Pacific as our highway and us as Polynesian people, we have a connection to the sea that goes back to 7,000 odd years. So we've had a long time to experiment with ocean-going vessels. to maybe start off with single canoes. We were sort of island hopping in close proximity

in areas we think about places like Micronesia and Papua New Guinea around those areas where islands were fairly close together so there wasn't really a need for vast ocean-going walkers but as they travelled eastwards, islands get further apart, sea gets a lot different than what it is in more sheltered areas and so naturally there's that evolution

of a more hardy sea-going vessel which ended up being the sort of double-hulled canoes or what we call here in Oltiroa Waka-Hourua. Because I suppose that's a kind of generalised question. I know that there's this brilliant tech in terms of the ships and this ability to kind of move around, but we're talking about vast distances. Even the idea of just when you say canoe,

and I'm like, oh, I could never be brave enough to just kind of get in that because we're talking about, you know, between Tahiti, 4,500K, right? which I know because I had to go look it up. And that's terrifying to me, the vessel like that. I know. It is on my bucket list to do a voyage in a traditional ocean-going waka. I feel a bit scared to do it, but I feel like we have to experience it.

We take for granted that we fly everywhere today. But in those days, jumping on a waka and traversing the oceans, I imagine was like us getting in a car and going for a ride. It's a bit more worrying for us today than I guess it would have been for them. in the past. And I think what we've learnt is the way that they discovered places as they travelled east throughout the Pacific is they travelled against the currents so that it was much easier to come home. And so they go back out and then that's easier to come back. I guess it was an ingenious way to explore and to know that you get so far, it's easier to get home. They were

amazing people and using the environment to help them navigate that vast ocean with not landmarks. It's just mind-boggling. That's very interesting that you mentioned the currents, because I think that's something I haven't really thought about very much. I think the thing that I and quite a lot of people talk about when we imagine this is the really intricate and sophisticated knowledge of stars that people have to have had in order to do this navigation, right? Oh, absolutely. And knowing how to read those stars, we're only just uncovering that knowledge. There are people out there now from throughout the Pacific and here in Otero. That's the work that they do now.

They're following the paths of their ancestors and going back and learning how to read the stars. And I guess it's not just the stars we have to learn. During the day, we've still got to navigate. When it's cloudy, we've still got to navigate. So it's using the stars, using the currents, learning how to read the water, learning how to read the waves, things like birds, fish, whales. Those are all signs to help navigate signs of land. If you see certain types of birds because they are primarily,

or they go inland to roost, there is a landmass somewhere. There are a lot of signs out there, we call them Tohu. So like signs that indicate where people are within those oceans. And so it's using everything that you have, the whole environment, depending on the weather that you're in. But again, mainly sailing by the stars. and they would have, I imagine, gone and undertaken these voyages at certain times of the year so that the weather was favourable.

Yeah, so very, I don't know, New Zealand we say onto it, but it's probably not the right word for it. That makes sense to me. Sophisticated onto it. It's all the same. If there's one time that we're allowed to use Kiwi slang, this is it. Do we have an idea of how many people ended up making this journey? I don't know that we know exactly how many people or even how many Waka would have made this journey

but we do know that this journey was made over, I would say, generations. So it wasn't just one big fleet of Waka that arrived in New Zealand and then they settled everywhere. It actually happened over several generations of time and our traditional stories tell us that. But if you look at Waka Hōrua or double-hulled canoes that exist today, it gives you an idea. of how many people can fit on them, all the resources that you needed, because you needed to bring all of that with you to be able to survive. And if you're going to settle a new place, you'd want to take as much as you can of your previous life with you so that you can continue that in the new place.

So I imagine these Waka were quite large. And though it's not necessarily scientifically accurate, if you look at the Disney movie Moana, it gives you a good idea about what it may have looked like. And especially for our listeners out there who have no idea what these ocean voyaging walkers might have been, I think that's quite a good example. To give you an idea of their size, and of course, even on that movie, there are different size walkers, but the big voyaging ones, I imagine, would have been huge. Do we have any archaeological evidence for these walker that they came in originally? We have small fragments, like the prow of a very old waka. The thing is with these ocean voyaging canoes is that you are able to dismantle them

and then they became single-hold canoes to continue to use around New Zealand. There's also an example in New Zealand that has been uncovered in the last few years and that has a turtle carved on the bottom. Now, of course, this turtle was not native to New Zealand, which gives us maybe an inclination about its use. Of course, the wood has been tested and the wood is well. from New Zealand. What is that telling us? We don't know for sure whether this was part of a deep sea ocean voyaging waka. It may well have been. So we haven't found a whole waka buried in New Zealand.

Unfortunately like some of the Viking ships that have been uncovered, there are pieces that give us clues as to what these vessels look like. And of course, we also go back to the Pacific, and they also have examples of what these vessels were like. And I suppose this is one of these things when we're talking about the Waka. These are completely degradable materials too. We're lucky if we can keep wood going now when we've got Shalak to put on it and things like this. And I'm kind of like, is there a 700-year-old wooden boat around for me to leave? It's a huge ask. I realize that.

Yeah. It's also such a testament to how incredibly savvy these are as a group of people too. Because you know, you make this huge ocean-going vessel. And then, yeah, what do you do when you get there? Well, I'm not going back out in it. Use it again. because resources are limited, I suppose. I think we could learn so much from that as a mindset of how to kind of use objects or think about what it is we actually need, really.

Okay, so I used to, when I was growing up, I would go sometimes to the Field Museum in Chicago. And there was this great exhibition about islander culture more generally. And there was a little video game you could play about loading a waka to go try to find something. And it was kind of like in the Oregon Trail model, you might die if you'd. did it wrong. They would say, okay, well, how much water are you going to bring? How many chickens are you bringing? How many pigs are you bringing? And I remember when they asked the question about pigs, my little mind being blown, because it was sort of like, not only are you and some people and your water and some pineapples getting on this walk-eye, it was like, pigs? I can't even imagine

bringing along, you know, livestock as well. It's just such a huge undertaking, I suppose. Yeah, in a way, I suppose they would be used to thinking that way about, okay, we're traveling however long to this island, we need to take everything we want with us. Coming to New Zealand, that would have been a massive undertaking, the distance between even the Cook Islands, Rarotonga, for instance, to New Zealand. It's still a vast distance. And having to really think about, okay, so we're going to this new land. What do we need to bring with us? So they would need to bring with them everything they needed for the voyage itself, food, water, things to collect water while out on the ocean. There would have been ways in which they were able to store and collect.

If it rained, you'd be out there with your containers collecting water to be able to drink along the way. But also food, of course you're going to be doing a lot of fishing while you're there. So that would be a really good source of protein. But then you also need carbohydrates, so you need to be able to store food like tarot and yams and breadfruit and that kind of thing. But then you also need to think about what am I going to bring with me for when I'm there? So you need to bring your tools, your gardening implements, all your fishing gear, things that you might need for trapping, things to build houses and shelter and all of that kind of stuff. I guess there's a lot of things to think about in terms of exactly what they need. So I can imagine the canoes would have been very full on those journeys.

It's just amazing even just trying to think about it. So here they are. They arrive. It's around, we think kind of 14th century, kind of 1320 to 1350, something like that. And they encounter this really different environment. Yeah. For one, it's subtropical. So you come from a tropical region where it's warm and you come to Altiroa,

even coming to the north of the North Island. It's not always a warm. place and you just imagine having sailed from the islands and coming upon New Zealand and then just as you get closer you see this huge landmash these huge mountains that you've never seen before imagine those that even went to the south island to see snow they would never ever have experienced that before i just think it would have been a great adventure and of course you have the people that you need they have the skills to be able to get out there and investigate and understand this new climate, understand the resources that they have, these different trees, these different grasses, there's different birds, of course, there's the moa, this giant bird.

So we know that it's highly likely our ancestors would have brought chickens and pigs, but you look at the moa, you also look at seals, there's no need to hang on to those. So they haven't really survived in our archaeological record at least, but the dog survived that they brought with them, the rat, the kiorari, that survived. Of course, that would have survived quite easily, I would have expected. There are only some things that have survived from our East Polynesian or tropical Polynesian homelands. Everything else, we're just adapted to this new environment, this lush, green, fertile place with fresh water so easily accessible. And it may not have been that way in some of our islands within the East Polynesia. While it was a bit colder, it would have been, wow, this is amazing. We've got everything we need.

and there's enough room for everybody. You say enough room for everybody. But whenever I think about showing up on the beach and seeing a moa, I'm like, that's a dinosaur. Right? They moved into this island and there's dinosaurs walking around. And they're huge. You know, like 10 feet tall.

No, it's such a brave thing to do. I mean, really, we talk a lot about medieval ideas, about new places being full of monsters if you don't know what it is. But these people came to a new place and found monsters and were like, yeah, I can make it work. If you think the moors bad, we had the haste eagle, as said to have been the biggest eagle ever. And that eagle was there picking up and hunting more.

So you can imagine the type of environment that they had come across, and they would have had to be very skilled to have to avoid that predator, at least. I guess that would have been the only predator that they would have had to worry about. Because that's the thing is that it is this really very specific ecosystem. You know, so sure, there's terrifying birds. So, you know, there's a lot of dinosaurs around, but you're not going to have large carnivorous mammals or anything like that to worry about. No, I think the only mammal that is native to New Zealand is the bat, and that's only quite small.

We have no snakes, no carnivorous animals. We have a couple of poisonous spiders, but you don't have big mass of tarantulas or anything like that. No scorpions and nothing as terrifying as you'd find in Australia, for example. It's just a world full of birds and birds of all sizes. birds that didn't fly that were easy to catch. So yeah, I think in terms of food resources and protein in particular, I think it was extremely plentiful. This plenty really kind of encourages spreading out across the islands. And when we do this, do we see people kind of maintaining their tribal groups that they came in? Or do we see kind of more of an adaptation to creating new connections

within this space? I would say it's a bit of both. Of course, you come to New Zealand, on your Waka, you're already an established community in that sense. And so you establish yourself in certain areas. There is evidence also of ancestors. So from the Ta'iwaka, for example, it sailed to one area within New Zealand.

Some people got off and then others continued on and then they stopped at another area. And so then they settled in that area. It all depends on what is already established. Who else is already there? Of course, because you've got several waves of settlement over generations. So you might find you're like, oh, this is perfect for me. Oh, no, oops, there's already somebody here.

And they're not keen for us to live with them. So we'll just go off and find somewhere else. But then others were like, yeah, no, come in. So there's a variety of intermarrying into already established groups with an altero. And my iwi too, Nātogunu, that's part. of our history is that when we came and settled into the area called the Hawks Bay, there were already people there who had arrived in previous voyages. And so we ended up into mixing.

There was a bit of fighting, of course, which is usual. But you intermarry and you mix and then you live in harmony. And so now when we think about our ancestors, we acknowledge all of those lines that we come from because they are the people of the land. It's a quite complex sort of social structure though, right? So you kind of have political disagreements can happen. You know, there's going to be intermarriage. There's going to be all these things.

How do you manage a society like this? I would say very carefully, there'd be a lot of marriages to help smooth down issues. The chiefs or the rangatira of settlements, of areas. They are your leaders. And if there's areas where tension is cause, mainly sometimes it's around resources and food. Or somebody has perhaps stolen somebody else's water. life, things like that, that go on in all communities even today. There's certain ways in which these issues were sorted out.

One is warfare. The other is marriage to strengthen those ties between those two communities or those two tribal groups. The other might be saying, oh, okay, we'll share this resource with you. You can have access to these fishing grounds at these times of the year. While I would imagine in the early period of settlement, there wouldn't have been too many issues around that. I think once Māori become Māori and cease being East Polynesians and the population grows and because you all want to be in areas where you have a lot of resource and it's nice weather. The Far North was the most highly populated area archaeologically in Oteoroa because it had

the perfect climate to grow Kumara which we bought from East Polynesia and it doesn't grow further south. It doesn't grow in the South Island. You're very lucky if you can grow it at the bottom of the North Island. And if that's your primary source of carbohydrates, then that's important to try and stay up in those areas. But as population grew, land gets very scarce and you want to do what you can to protect it. And of course, then, what's the more common part of our history is our tribal warfare when we have par, or fortified villages, start cropping up around the country. And a theory is that a lot of that was over the kumara, was over food.

So there's food scarcity in areas. so you do what you can to protect that food source. So it's a very interesting time period, I think. And even today, we're still learning more about what happened during those times. That's completely understandable as well, because I'm telling you, in Europe, we see exactly the same thing. You know, every single town pretty much is fortified because you never know when someone's coming through. And one of the things that they do, even if it's some high-minded battle between kings, well, they're still going to steal your crops. That's what happens, you know, and that's a huge part of it.

So we have a kind of hierarchical society. You know, there are kind of people who are leading various tribes. Do we also see anything kind of like a council where they are also doing, I don't know, diplomacy between varying places? There were two main types of units. There were the commoners and there were the chiefly people. And even within that chiefly community, there are your araki, which is your high chief. And then you have your rangatira, which I guess would be leaders of larger family groups.

And I would imagine that there would be times where those leaders would all have to come together to discuss matters arising around food, around warfare, obviously, and maybe even around creating relationships, resources, trading, all of that sort of things. And if you look back to the way that communities we set up within East Polynesia, very similar. Not exactly the same as what we imagine now, but it would have been the same set up, the same. same structure in East Polynesia when they first came to Oltiroa to New Zealand. And while it would have adapted and changed slightly, I imagine it would have been the same sort of concept. So when you as an archaeologist are sorting through all of this, we've got some pieces of some waka. We have some evidence for fortified towns. Do you have any other kind of material evidence that you can find about these super early communities? Yeah, that's quite hard. But there are three

locations within New Zealand that have been dated as being quite early. And the most popular one is Wairo Bar. So that's located at the top of the South Island. And this is a settlement, a village, not fortified, but in the 40s and 50s, some early material was uncovered. And human remains were uncovered, burials were uncovered. And so the burial goods that were found with these ancestors, were very early and very un-Maudi-like, very East Polynesian in style. And over time, a lot of research has been done. They've done some scientific research on those ancestry remains with the support of the local Iwi,

who are the descendants of those people. And they've found that some of those burials there could well be part of that first wave of settlement to New Zealand. And that's amazing. And for me, studying archaeology, that was the holy grail of New Zealand archaeology. That is the place that you study to learn about who Māori were, how Māori became Māori.

And there's really good examples of that kind of transitional period, perhaps, between going from an East Polynesian people to having that culture change and to becoming Māori. And it's an amazing site, and there's a lot being written about Wairoba, but there's also other locations within the Coromandel and also in the Wairarapa that are also seen as being just as early.

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Dan Snow's History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. It's just incredible to me to really think about this process of becoming because you're coming from a sort of similar background in East Polynesia, but as you say, you become this new thing, the Maori, presumably there's going to be a kind of almost communal will, I suppose, to kind of band together and create this, right? I suppose sharing the new knowledge and becoming this sort of distinct new. thing and I just find that's so interesting in a time when you can kind of think that's lost,

I suppose, you know, that the things are very settled and well, no, you know, we're still kind of like doing the messy business of being humans and decide what that looks like, right? Yeah, I think if you look at the way in which the Pacific was settled, you can see places like New Caledonia, Vanuatu, all of that area, that's where you have two groups of people coming together and learning of each other, creating and adapting a new culture and then that culture then moves east towards Fiji, Tonga, Samoa. And then they are there for a period of time. They're in isolation.

And then they go from being what's termed the Lapita people to being Polynesian. They go from being one cultural group, move into another area, settle, adapt, their culture changes, and then they become a new people with a new identity and new beliefs and new practices and a new fakapapa or genealogy and history. And that sort of just continues

as you move further across the Pacific and you see the Hawaiians and then you go as east as you can possibly be within the Pacific Yeterapanui or Easter Island and then come here to Aoteoro and if you look at those three nations and all those in between, you can see, oh, there's a lot of similarities

but they all have their own differences. And I think with New Zealand being that last, landmass in the Pacific to be settled by Polynesians. It's just amazing how different we are, but yet how still very close and similar we are as a people. And even today, many of us see each other as family as relations, because we are all still related, even though the vastness of the oceans and the thousands or hundreds of years separate us. But I personally still see us as one big Pacific family. So I guess natural question here. at them. When we're creating these cultures and these communities and this new way of kind of

thinking about ancestor, what do we know about the spiritual belief systems that we find? Yep. So that is one of our cultural practices that has continued. And that has also continued in many ways right from East Polynesia. Our ancestors had a spiritual belief system where we had many gods, not just one. And those gods related to various. environmental aspects as well as spiritual elements. For an example, we have Tangaroa. So Tangaroa is god of the sea. And you'll find that tangaroa,

tangaloa is all throughout the Pacific. You also have Tane. Tane Mahuta is god of the forest. So he is the god of birds, trees, plants, not cultivated plants, but the natural world. So that when you are going into the forest and you're wanting to build a canoe, for example, you'll do a ritual which acknowledges Tane.

We have the god of war, Tumatauenga. So he's not a god of any specific element, but he is a god of war. And so he is invoked in times of war to be able to support you. And then we have Rungo. Rungo is the god of peace and of gardening. Each god has their own realm. And then we have Maui Tikitiki A Taranga. He is known actually by many names.

And he's a demigod. He was responsible for fish. for fishing up Aoteuro or the North Island specifically. But again, if you look into the Pacific, Māori is all through the Pacific. From Samoa, Hawaii, all the way down to Otero.

And again, the movie Moana demonstrates that Maui was naughty. We have a lot of stories, a lot of our oral traditions, tell us about the deeds that he did and the things that he did that created the country that we live in today. So you mentioned there,

if you're kind of looking for trees to make a connection, to make a waka. You might do a ritual. Do we know much about the rituals that are kind of being practiced at this point in time? Yeah, they are like incantations, maybe prayers, maybe not quite the right term, but we do know a lot about those. So those incantations or karakia would have been performed by what we call Tohunga, so experts.

So they would have been experts in their field, so experts in that spiritual arts. And that's their job. Some of that knowledge isn't known by everybody. You have special people that have special roles within a community and spiritual roles were one of them. I think one of the really great sort of rituals that, I mean, I know a lot more about because a bunch of my friends, they have their tamoko. You know, they've got their tattoos.

And yeah, my girlfriend just has the most beautiful tamoko on her chin, which she got done recently, and it's just, oh, stunning. These sort of things are kind of like particularly Maori. right when we're talking about Tamoko, no? Yeah, tattooing Tamoko, as we call it in New Zealand, today it's very popular. It's about your identity. And Moko, even in the past, you have Mokokauai, which your friend has on her chin, and you have Mataura, which is a full face tattoo,

and those signified who you were, the deeds you've done, who you represent. So even today, we wear them as marks to show who we are. So you'll look at somebody with a Māori moko and you assume straight away that they are Māori. Some may not be, of course, because the tattooing culture is huge around the world. But it's a really important cultural signifier for us here in New Zealand as a people. And I guess that also too spreads throughout the Pacific with Tatau. But tattooing, the beautiful thing about Ta-Muco for me is that it's only becoming more and more worn and accepting. here in New Zealand. There was a period of time where the art of Tamoko almost disappeared.

Today we've got some amazing Tohunga Tamoko or tattoo artists who have studied and trained under previous experts and some of the work that's coming out is just amazing and to see facial tattoos as a norm in New Zealand. It's very heartwarming. In the past they were associated with a more negative side of gangs and that kind of stuff. But actually, despite that, I think that also had a role in keeping that part of our culture alive. So today, it's not so much associated with that more negative side, but we've got politicians that have full facial tamoko, people in the military, police officers. It's amazing to see. It's a norm even within our museum to have people with tamoko. And I believe it's only going to grow, which is great. We know a lot about

what happens from archaeological evidence, but again, in a world where everything is kind of biodegradable and organic, we can lose that. So oral traditions and songs and stories, this is, you know, one of the big ways that we understand Maori culture, no? Yes. It's a huge part of the way in which we impart knowledge in Faka Papa,

so Faka Puppa's genealogy. But it's not just lineage, straight up and down, Faka Baba, it's sideways as well, and it's how we connect to the world. It's a real taunga, it's a real treasure for us to have had that knowledge passed down for us. And I think oral tradition for us comes in many forms. It comes in things like Fakatoiki, which are proverbs or songs. And it's a really great way of continuing to transfer that knowledge over generations is in a song. We have what's known as Quorero Purokau or stories.

Again, Faka, and also one thing that we might not automatically think about is place names. It also helps us to remember what happened in a certain place. It could be named after a battle. It's like a trigger of saying, oh, okay, so that place name is that, and that relates to this battle that happened, and then you're able to remember and recite what happened in those times. but each of those types of oral tradition, they have their own special forms, and they make reference to things that have happened in the past.

They are either transferred down in full, or they might be, I don't know, like little triggers to remember things that happened in the past. They might be funny little stories that teach us a lesson about something that happened in the past. I think things like the story of Māori and how we fished up the North Island. Of course, for some of our very early explorers that came to New Zealand and tried to understand who we are, they took our culture very literally, and we're not a literal people. We talk in riddles and we talk in imaginations and we talk about Māori, this demigod who fished up the North Island. And you don't take that literally.

It's a story about how we settled here and how we discovered this place. And so by turning it into a cool story that's easily remembered, just helps to impart that knowledge on to future generations. So you mentioned here the importance to place names in doing commemoration and thinking about, for example, battles. We've kind of touched on this very briefly, but what did warfare kind of look like at this time? It was very much hand-to-hand combat,

because, of course, we didn't have metal. So our weapons were made out of wood, stone and bone. So we have things like taeaha or spears. We have various types of spears or, or long clubs. We also have a lot of shorthand clubs, so very close contact fighting. I guess you could say they would have been

our own version of hatchets and axes and those types of quite gruesome weapons, as you can imagine, will do quite a lot of damage. We see from the archaeological record, particularly with burials, the way in which people have died. Blunt force trauma was quite common,

so you can imagine that would have been atu which is a sort of a short handled weapon. Sometimes we made out of Pownamu which was a really prized resource greenstone or jade. It might be known more commonly and that was as hard as steel so that could do some real damage. We didn't really have things like bow and arrows so nothing long distance but yeah more really close quarters

hand-to-hand combat was pretty much the way that we did things in those days So, okay, there's really intricate and kind of evolving landscape here in terms of what it means culturally on the ground. So it seems like life is really kind of changing. You know, you get here in the 14th century, eventually Europeans show up about 500 years later. But this isn't static, right? It's not like, oh, here's the culture. Bang, it's done, right? Over the years, and various archaeologists and historians and theorists have theorized about the different stages of adaptation and culture change that Māori women.

through from the time they arrived until the time of Cook. I think generally we can split that time period up into three sections. So there's the settlement period, which is from the time of arrival to maybe around the 1400s. It's hard because there are two schools for early settlement and a later settlement. But I guess that early settlement period is whenever we arrived and probably the first sort of couple of hundred years when we are still very much Polynesian. We have scattered mainly coastal communities at this time

because that's the way in which we're used to living mostly within those Pacific nations. By this time, we've fully gotten to know our environment and the resources that are available, so we know what's poisonous, what's not poisonous, what we can use to weave our mats to make our clothing and all that kind of stuff. So it's really a time of investigation and experimentation.

Here, horticulture is established by this time as well. interesting thing about this time is that with the kumara in particular, that main source of carbohydrates. Coming from East Polynesia is a period where you can pretty much grow them all year round. But when you come to New Zealand, we have a winter. We have to figure out, okay, so we can't grow them all year round, how are we going to store them? That is a huge adaptation that we have had to make to figure out how to store our food over a period of time and that it not go off. So during this period, we figured out ways of storing our food effectively so that we wouldn't starve. And I think a lot of our cultural practices, perhaps, and a lot of artifacts, our tools, would still

probably be quite recognisable as East Polynesian. And then we go to a period which is called rapid expansion and change. And so this is from up into about 1,500 maybe. And at this time, Population's growing, and as population grows, people got to move. The population in the north of the North Island, a nice warm area, that's just exploding, and people are starting to move southwards. This period of time, there's a decline in some of our food sources, and that is the moa in particular, that, as we know, disappears. There's a more intensified production, so we're intensively farming areas, so there's slash and burn.

We're cultivating large tracts of land by this time. time and actually we kind of change in terms of our political organisation where groups are based on a common ancestor so that's where we get iwi and hapoo so iwi is national tribe and hapoo is like a sub-tribe a more extended family and i guess all of these things that are expanding and rapidly evolving the same for what we call endemic warfare and the arrival of pa and at the end of this time that's when par just start popping up everywhere. That's understandable

with the just huge increase in population growth. And then finally we have what we call the traditional period and that's from about 1500 to 1769, the arrival of Captain Cook. And that period of time, when you go to

museums in New Zealand or overseas and artifacts from New Zealand from multicultural, most of those artefacts, if not all, will come from this period. So there is not a lot that has survived prior to that period. Why, we don't know. Of course, a lot of things don't last. We don't have monumental stone architecture like many other places and places, especially within the Pacific, things like that just don't last. So yeah, the weapons that we see, the carvings that we see, all of those bone implements, fish hooks and so on,

they all come from that period. And the other interesting thing is that the theory is that Most of our oral traditions, not so much about Māori and things like that, but other things that relate to tribal history and that sort of thing probably relate to this period of our history. So it's interesting how far we've come, actually, and how much we've developed over the short period of time. But I'm sure similar things were happening all around the world in other places as well. I think that one of the things, though, that is really important coming from a kind of European context, right, is there's no monumental stone architecture, but what you have instead are this monumental architecture of oral communication,

right? This creation and building of a society and a world where we actually do know so much about the Maori. And it's not just about every time, you know, oh, there's a big building. I can see it right now. Being able to communicate these things. And that's something you can take everywhere.

You can get in a walka and take this story and tell it to someone else. and this is a form of mass communication that is available to everyone. And that's a technology. Absolutely. And what I love is that we still can connect back to our East Polynesian roots. I love that. We've been here for such a long time, yet we still know where we've come from. And I think that's amazing.

And even Māori today, we're still traveling. We're still voyaging around the world. Living in places like Australia, the UK, we still have that wonder lust. for travel and for exploration. It's in our DNA, and I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. I hope not. I think that's as good a place to leave it as any, because otherwise I'll just talk your ear off for the rest of the day.

Thank you so much for listening, and thank you to Amber for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval by History Hit, and if you like what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and please tell your friends about it. If you're looking for more medieval goodness in your life and who isn't, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter by following the link in the show notes below. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. Otherwise, I'm going to be back next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday. Until next time.