Culture

Culture

Introduction

One of the Austronesia Languages, Maori is spoken where it is as the result of one or more migrations up to 1,100 years ago, from eastern Polynesia to the previously uninhabited islands now called New Zealand (Waitangi 1986). When Europeans first came to New Zealand, Maori was spoken, in several dialects, in both North and South Islands. According to oral tradition there was continual travel and contact among speakers of the different dialects, extending to both islands, and this certainly helps to explain why dialect differences were rather minor considering the length of time over which they had been able to develop.

South Island Maori is now extinct; Maoris from North Island conquered South Island in the early 19th century, killing many speakers and absorbing the remainder into their own tribes. Remaining North Island Maori speakers number about 100,000 - all of them bilingual in English - though three times as many people identify themselves as Maoris. Numerous New Zealand place names are of Maori origin. North Island Maori is divided into western and eastern dialects. South Island Maori is extinct, as is Moriori of the Chatham Islands, which appears to have been closest to the eastern North Island dialect of Maori. Rarotongan or Cook Islands Maori (40,000 speakers, more than half of them settled in New Zealand) is close enough to Maori for some mutual intelligibility (Macalister 2000), suggesting a historical link between the two populations.

In this paper, we will be discussing various characteristics of the culture in terms of foragers, horticulturalists, pastoralists, emerging agriculturalists, agrarian states or industrialists, social organization, economic organization, gender relations, beliefs and values, and social change.

Discussion

Foragers

The archaeology of New Zealand's South Island better suited the requirements of the culture-historical approach than did that of the North Island. On the South Island, which lies beyond the climatic limits of tropical Polynesian food crops, there are multiple early sites defined in terms of a distinctive archaic artifact assemblage (tanged adzes, harpoon points, ornaments, and one-piece fishhooks), and they often have cooking and refuse dumping areas that contain moa remains.

Following the demise of the moa, the hunting and foraging economy of the South Island was reorganized to concentrate on shellfish, fish, and sea birds. Finally, archaeological and ethnographic evidence document the intrusion of classic culture from the North Island in terms of people, ideas, and artifacts—plain adzes, composite fishhooks, nephrite ornaments, bone flutes, toggles, and defended sites (Chrisp 1997). The South Island evidence points to the agricultural North Island for the origin of classic Maori culture, and this clear indication (of diffusion) made the difficulty of archaeologically defining the classic phase on the North Island even greater.

Horticulturalists

They had a well-developed maritime technology, were expert fishermen, and also were horticulturalists that raised pigs and chickens. They developed sophisticated exchange networks, transporting goods across long distances. Some 600 years later, another migratory group from the west, with different traits, reached Fiji to mix with the islanders and become ancestors of the Fijians (Cooper ...