Professor Richard Walter writes as follows:
New Zealand was the last place on earth to be colonised by humans, and archaeologists sometimes emphasise this fact by talking about the three million year journey from Africa to Aotearoa. But not only was New Zealand the last place settled by people, that settlement event involved what was probably the longest over-sea journey ever undertaken in the preindustrial age. The closest possible origin point for the first settlers of New Zealand lies about 3,000 kilometres to the north east, a bit further than the distance from London to Ankara, and with nothing in between but water. Given the extraordinary nature of the event, archaeologists have long been interested in understanding Pacific and New Zealand colonisation.
Up until the early 1960s archaeologists and historians relied heavily on oral tradition to understand the settlement process. These traditions focused on the arrival of named waka that brought out the founding ancestors of modern tribal groups and confederations, establishing their mana on the new land. The tide turned against the explanatory power of oral tradition from the 1960s as Maori scholars started to critically examine the sources we were using.
Two issues were raised that undermined archaeological and historical confidence in traditional sources. First, it was clear that the sources being consulted had been subject to massive levels of reworking by European writers that seriously altered the form and intent of the original texts. Second, from this it became obvious that if modern scholars wanted to use oral tradition, they needed to be able to read Maori, consult the original texts, and apply appropriate, anthropologically informed, textual analysis theory. This inspired a new group of historians who were confident and capable in working with oral tradition such as Anne Salmond and Michael Reilly. Archaeologists got left behind somewhat.
As archaeologists turned away from oral tradition they tended to turn away too from notions of agency and the role of individual actors in the colonisation process. Most significantly we lost the concept of migration. Once a key notion in any discussion of New Zealand settlement, for the last 20 years or more ‘migration’ has largely been purged from the archaeological literature dealing with the Polynesian settlement of New Zealand.
The three papers offered here are attempts to reposition the significance of oral tradition, and to reintroduce notions of agency into discussions of New Zealand and Pacific colonisation. There are two issues in particular that we are concerned with – globalization and migration.
In the Weisler & Walter 2017 paper (1MB) we start before New Zealand was settled and describe the nature of the Polynesian societies in the fourteenth century AD from where the migrants originated. Abandoning a more environmentally or ecologically determined suite of models to explain the settlement of New Zealand, we show that this was a region of Polynesia, where many of the processes that underpin and drive globalisation were incorporated into the regions social fabric. We argue that the colonisation of New Zealand was part of a globalisation process – not a single, decoupled event.
In the Walter and Reilly 2018 paper (1.60MB) we revisit oral tradition as a way of understanding colonisation. Using a deep reading of the texts we show that there is a consistent meta-narrative that emphasises individual agency and the role of exceptionally charismatic leaders in driving Polynesian migration. We describe how this notion of deliberate migration is compatible with contemporary archaeological findings.
In the Walter et al 2017 paper (1.07MB) we use modern archaeological science combined with genetics and molecular biology to demonstrate that the best explanation for the colonisation of New Zealand is a mass migration early in the fourteenth century AD. We show too how this is compatible with a nuanced reading of oral tradition.
List of publications:
- Weisler, M.I. and Walter, R. (2017). ‘East Polynesian Connectivity’. In, Hodos, T. (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization. London, Taylor & Francis Ltd, pp. 369-386.
- Walter, R. and Reilly, M. (2018). ‘Nga Hekena Waka: Migration and Early Settlement’. In Reilly, M., Duncan, S., Leoni, G., Paterson, L.; Carter, L.; Rastima, M. and Rewi, P. (eds.) Te Koparapara: An Introduction to the Maori World. Auckland, Auckland University Press, pp. 65-85.
- Walter, R.K., Buckley, H., Jacomb, J., and Matisoo-Smith, E. (2017). Mass Migration and the Polynesian Settlement of New Zealand. Journal of World Prehistory, 30:4, pp. 351-376.
