The Ancients - The First New Zealanders

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

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.MOREThe First HawaiiansListen on AppleListen on SpotifyAncient Polynesia: Pioneers of the PacificListen on AppleListen on SpotifyWe're going on *TOUR* to Australia and New Zealand! - final tickets are available here.The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcastPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Arstall. Produced by Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe 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 for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello, quick shout out from me to everyone listening to this podcast from New Zealand. If you're an ancient's 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 Ancants 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. There's a link in the description where you can get tickets. Now, into the episode. The story of how the Polynesians colonise 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. 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. 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.

Richard, Kiaora, it is wonderful to have you on the show. Keora, Tristan, nice to be here, thank you very much. This is 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? 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, landmass to be settled by humans. 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 Altearoa.

Altaireoa, 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 Māori 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. 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. We're talking about New Zealand.

Absolutely. So, Richard, let's get straight into it. So when do people first reach New Zealand? 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. 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. 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 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 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 of the 1200s at the very earliest, and with canoes continuing to come out to New Zealand for probably 50, 60 years or so. And the people who are settling New Zealand, so these are Polynesians and you mentioned kind of East Polynesia. So which islands in particular should we be thinking about? 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 Raritonga, if you like. And there's a dozen or more islands in there, and it's likely that the canoes came out to Al-Tero or to New Zealand from more than one of those islands. And the story of how the Polynesians, you know,

we've reached those islands, and much earlier the Lapita 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 kind of southerly, right, a southerly direction? 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 Lepita 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 the settlement of those two areas of thousands of years. So, 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 1,500 years ago. And personally, I think much more recently than that, I wouldn't be surprised if it's as recently as, say, 1,150 to 1,200 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, 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, and 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. And so how do they do it? Because as you mentioned, I mean, thousands of miles between New Zealand and the Cook Island, How do they navigate this open ocean mass between them? We've no land in sight. How were they able to reach Ayataroa? We don't know as much about that as we would like. I mean, 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. I don't think people would head south out of the island. the tropics on 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. I mean, yes, I mean, Richard, what should be imagining? Because trying to get a sense before we get 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 voyage to reach this new land. So, I mean, how large a transport canoe should we be thinking and with what items are they bringing with them? Again, I don't know about that. I mean, 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 they're probably not quite like that. They're probably smaller. We think from genetic evidence of at least 200 women arrived in New Zealand. And 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. So we're probably talking about five or six hundred people, maybe a thousand coming out from the islands. So how many canoes would that take?

I don't know. A lot. Fair number. 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. 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 islands. the marine environment is fairly uniform from place to place. We have extremely diverse marine environments. 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 mower, the ratites. 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 Raritonga. In Auckland Harbour, there are islands bigger than Raritonga. So it is a place that would have looked extremely promising to people coming out here, but it would have been daunting too because, I mean, the environment is very different. Coconut's don't grow. most of the tropical cultogens won't grow well here in New Zealand. So would have been tough in many ways.

So they really kind of this brave new world, different climate, as you say, but large and diverse landscapes. And 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 put their ships up at, to put their canoes up at, to, to be. beach them and then decide we should create a settlement here. They are deliberately selected.

The larger sites are all deliberately selected to be placed on the larger river mouths, the harbors 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, we see we don't have the protective reefs. So a river mouth is a really good place. And so particularly in the South Island,

we've got these really large first generation or colonization phase sites perched on nearly every of our major rivers as we run right down the east coast and the northwest coast 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 harbors, that sort of place. But they're selecting eco-tones, places where there's a lot of ecological zonations, sort of coming together and easy to access. 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 is 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. Yeah, and there's very, very clear archaeological evidence of this. 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 Hawaii, but we do, all of the early sites in New Zealand are chocker 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, 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 basalts and the argylites, 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, even into very remote areas where we don't even live today. 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 these new environments that they're living in. 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 that there are hundreds of people and then how they're quickly scouting all of these areas and learning a lot about where 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 a very gradual arrival of people over several generations? This is a contested point. I think that there's very clear ever that it's a mass, I've called 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 up. And that's what we used to think. we used to think that New Zealand had been settled a thousand years ago or more. In fact, that was the standard model right up until 25 years ago.

New Zealand was settled a thousand or more years ago, so you're 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. But the problem is 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.

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 breathe 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 and 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, say, 1380,

1370. So given all of those sort of factors, I would say this looks like mass migration. 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 Audeiroa, of names like Koupe. Do the stories that survive potentially align with that idea of lots of people coming in a short amount of time? 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, the sort of Viking saga type traditions, whereas oral tradition in New Zealand was probably

more associated with smaller group. 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. 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 text 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, etc. 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. There's a lot of Maori scholars doing exactly this. 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. Yeah, it's very surprising. 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. 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-Raw-Bar, and please forgive me if I get the pronunciation wrong, you can absolutely correct me. But where are we talking with Wairau-Bah? Waira-Bah is located on the east coast of the northeast coast of the South Island. So it's on the Rivermouth, the Waira-Rivermouth, 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. Big flightless bird. 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 artifacts, beautiful artifacts 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.

And for how long have we known about this site about Wairelba? Well, local people were probably fosicking 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 the excavation in the very looser sense of the term. And the material it 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 ornate grave goods, and these artifacts 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 artifact forms, but, you know, the artefacts from Waira and now many of these sites, I often say to my students, if I haven't, an ad, stone ads from say Waira or an equivalent site, quite at the 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. These early ads forms from tropical East Polynesia and New Zealand are extremely well made,

a high point of Polynesian stone working technology. And just to go, so these ads are used for kind of cutting trees, but potentially also a farming equipment too? They're woodworking tools mainly. And they are, Polynesians and Maori were very skilled at stone working. And the stone tools from early New Zealand sites are amongst the finest you get for these,

these type of tools anywhere in the world. Later periods, after 1400 or so, they become much less sophisticated, but this early phase really links tropical East Polynesia to New Zealand, not just the adsors, but also the personal ornaments, the fish hooks, the tattooing chisels, all of these things are just identical. 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 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? 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 artifacts 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 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 I've got in 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've thought about this with me is that it's possible that these large moor hunter sites may have been occupied on and off. People may have moved between a number of these sites for various 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, as what we call hapu or family groups, or even as sub-tribal groups, we don't know. I don't think they're large, complex villages anymore. 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 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? 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 Wairaraba lies well within the horticultural zone. So the Waira 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 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 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 fishbone and moabone, and it's about adses 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, then where they get their food or where they get their tools. So that, right, so a place that way whereby is very much going to 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 they're almost being, I'm presuming, as you've already mentioned, it's difficult to see in the surviving archaeology. But yes, maybe not kind of houses, but maybe a big kind of. of communal area, where they all gathered and did stuff together? I'll just say at the start that there are much bigger sites than Waira, but they have less in them. Part of me thinks that Waira 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 Waira Bhaer is special and may have been a special place, but part of me also thinks that it may not necessarily have been. been. So I think that other sites may also have been similar to Waira Bar. 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 Māori society. But I've done work recently on much smaller sites of a similar age to Wairoba. 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 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. This is what makes New Zealand archaeology so interesting. The answer is we don't know. We have the tools to find out, though. 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 Wyrhul Bar? There's about 40, which isn't big by international standards, but this seems to be 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 Waira, it 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 meters across,

and we excavated a quarter of it. We did the two-by-two-meter unit, an excavator 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 depositor as a single event, or they hadn't accumulated through time. And so we have argued that it's a feasting event, you know, which would be really interesting. That would be a communal sort of activity.

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, etc. Sea mammals, all sorts of bits and pieces. And so it's a very interesting feature. And 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. So do you think they're connected, very much kind of 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 is important, they'd be buried at that site, and then there's a big kind of ceremony surrounding their burial with all of these different animals, these new animals that they're now adapting to eating, quite frankly, you know, it all comes together in the archaeology. Yeah, that's how I've been very tempted to see it. I have suggested in the past that the 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 barriers. So I have been tempted to speculate that it might be a funeral event of some sort, you know, a funeral ceremony. I mean, in Māori society at the moment, we have a ceremony. It's what's called the Tangi or the Tangihanga. 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 tangihanga and there will be feasting over a period of day, whether it'll be food cooked. And today in the large tangi's food is cooked underground in very large quantities. So may be related, but you know, it's only speculation.

I don't know how we could demonstrate that archaeologically. 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 mower, bone, jewelry? They're not just eating these great birds.

They're also then using the bones for their own personal ornaments. 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, 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 the item that seems to have been picked up to replace that for the manufacture of fish hooks and other items is moa bone. So moa became a very important industrial item as well as a food source. So moabar bone artifacts are very, very common in early archaeological sites.

And is this a great example then, Richard, of as you're mentioning earlier, how these early satellites, 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 sort of, of tools, the same sorts of artifacts, but with different materials than they were used to back in the tropics, back where they came from. 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 Polynesia is the pearl shell trolling lure. It's a two-piece hook.

It has 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 artifacts 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. And they used to, I mean, it's like 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 greenstones But it's so unexpected I mean of course I would have used wood

But they really liked I guess the weight And the field 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 artifacts, lots of them at Waira 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 use that in my, which seems to me, which would have been a much more sensible thing to do from the start,

but they really experimented and very successfully with stone. And you find it in a lot of the other artefacts, but not quite so dramatically. 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. 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 the 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 Wirabah from elsewhere in New Zealand from other settlements at that time, obsidian, etc., 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 just how special Yerl Bar was and its purpose is still unclear. I mean, in your mind, Richard, how significant would you argue Yerl Bar is for, and in the future, for trying to learn more about this earliest stage of Polynesian settlement in New Zealand? Wairabar right now is still very well preserved as a lot of intact site there. So it does contain a great deal of archaeological information.

So the answer is it's potentially a very important son. 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 Waira Abar material, but by thinking about it in the wider context of other sites around the country. We've got a hell of a lot of work to do.

Waira Bha. There are other sites contemporary with Wairarabar. There's a couple on the West Coast I've worked on, which just as amazing as Wairaerabar. 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 Wairaba 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. Shall we then briefly highlight, as you've highlighted there, Richard, that there are these other sites contemporary to Wairoa Bar from elsewhere in the South Island and North Island? About 100.

And are they quite varied in what we have archaeologically from those sites? When I say about 100, we have around about 100 sites, probably more, that are contemporary with Waira Abar. We have sites in the South Island that are much bigger than Wairaeraba. What we don't have at the moment are sites that are as well preserved and contain such a rich array of information as Wairaba. And also, as I mentioned before, with some reticence, I do think Wai Raba, Wai Raba 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 Hauaiki has got to be significant. It's the only place where we have a large cemetery site. It's the only place where we have these huge communal

cooking areas. So I am inclined to think it's special. 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 growth in them? What do we know? What do we think we know so far? 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 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 utilizing these large sites anymore.

Now, partly that's because Moa are extinct. Now, they've already made them extinct. Wow. 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? So we don't really know how they went extinct, but to 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.

Now, what we see instead in the southern parts of New Zealand, where I've done a lot of work I've recently, we see by the 1400s, people are folks. 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 seem to be dominant early on. So there's a decline in long-distance communication and a move towards more specialized and smaller settlements. 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 14-1500, 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, 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 potato, 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. 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? Once, yeah. And I went down to Dunedin, Stast in Auckland all the way down. So, Richard, is it fair to say that by that time, can we say that the Maori culture has well and truly emerged?

Yes, and that's a really good point. Often I get asked, where did Māori come from, whether the Māori has come from? And the answer, of course, is they came from New Zealand. This unique Maori society, culture, language, tradition has never existed anywhere else in the world. It didn't come here as a discrete 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 Wairaraba, the people who lived there were 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 used to talk about Britain as the homeland. And it would have taken more than 100 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 1,400. from 1500 and onwards, we're getting a society and culture emerging. We're getting the origins of tribalism, modern Maori tribalism.

I mean, the substance of Polynesian tribal society of chieftain 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, you know, by late 14,500, 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 Māori say we were Maori from the time we stepped off the first caduce. 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 Al-Tero. 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 Wirobar,

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 these new types of animals, the moa and landscapes that they were getting used to,

which is wonderful. 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 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. 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. Right. Well, 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 Autea back in the 13th century and 14th century. So it seems very exciting for the future, Richard. It's going to be fun. Richard, very grateful for your time, dialing in from Dunedin, and the South Island. I know it's late over there, and it just goes for me to say, thank you so much for taking the time for coming on the show.

I'm me. 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 Ancient's HQ, you 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 ancient listener, and you'd like to see us live, well, now is your opportunity. We're going to be talking all things Romulus and Riemus, 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, etc, etc? 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 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. I'll see you in the next episode.