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The ancestors of the Māori were a Polynesian people originating from south-east Asia. Some historians trace the early Polynesian settlers of New Zealand as migrating from today's China, making the long voyage traveling via Taiwan, through the South Pacific and on to Aotearoa ( New Zealand).
The anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, on the other hand, claims that the Polynesians arrived in the Pacific from America, rather than from the East, as other scholars claim. Heyerdahl bases his theory on the fact that the kumara, staple cultivated food crop of the pre-European New Zealand Māori, originates from central South America.
Around thirty thousand years ago, Polynesian forbears inhabited the Bismarck Archipelago, to the east of New Guinea. These people had a Lapita culture, of which earthenware pots, distinctive and highly coloured, were a characteristic. This particular pottery was given the name of Lapita Ware, after an archaeological site in New Caledonia.
The Lapita pottery first appeared around the mid-second millennium. It can be traced through Melanesia to New Caledonia and then east to Samoa. It was in Fiji, Samoa and Tonga that the Lapita potters became the founding population. During the first millennium BC, many features of the typically Polynesian culture developed here.
The use of pottery appeared to have disappeared by the time that New Zealand was discovered. Other crafts took over, such as the stone fabricated adzes and fish hooks. These tools can be traced to New Zealand from Eastern Polynesia.
Around 3500 years ago the Polynesian culture began to expand eastwards from the Bismarck Archipelago. The exact reasons for this expansion are as yet unknown. Some Polynesians remained in the central south Pacific, while others moved on past Tahiti, and almost certainly arriving as far as South America, home of the kumara.
The exact date of Polynesian settlement of the islands of New Zealand is also unknown. Although previously thought to have been between 950 -1130 AD, scholars now debate both the time and circumstances of first Polynesian settlement.
The mythical Polynesian navigator, Kupe, was estimated by ethnologists in the 19th and early 20th centuries as having arrived around 925. By the same scholars, the mythical Māori figure Toi was estimated as having visited New Zealand in 1150.
The Great Fleet, considered to be the first mass arrival of Polynesian settlers, was estimated to have arrived in 1350. Modern scholars are now questioning not only the exactitude of the above dates, but also the Great Fleet theory itself. The debate continues today.
The Great Fleet forms part of the Māori canoe tradition, handed down orally from generation to generation. According to this tradition, the canoes of the Great Fleet arrived from the mythical homeland of Hawaiiki, known as the ancestral homeland, and generally considered as being somewhere in Eastern Polynesia.
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