Māori migration canoes
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Māori oral histories recount how their ancestors sailed from their homeland to New Zealand in ocean-going canoes. Some of these traditions name a homeland called Hawaiki. The canoes were probably twin
Departure of the Six Canoes from Raratonga for New Zealand, AD1350, a 1906 painting by Kennett Watkins depicting the imagined Great Fleet leaving Rarotonga in 1350
Ipanitika
Wa'a kaulua
Paraw
Since the early 1900s it has been accepted by archaeologists and anthropologists that Polynesians were the first ethnic group to settle in New Zealand. Before that time and until the 1920s, however, a
Māori migration canoes
…within New Zealand. It is now understood too that the Moriori are an isolated offshoot of Māori who settled the Chatham Islands around 1500 CE, not a pre-Māori ethnic group of New Zealand. The historian Rawiri Taonui accuses Smith of falsification: "The Great Fleet theory was the result of a collaboration between the 19th-century ethnologist…
Statue of the legendary explorer Kupe
Ethnographers Elsdon Best and Percy Smith, the two most prominent academic proponents of pre-Māori settlement.
The Kaimanawa Wall, a natural outcrop of ignimbrite with regular joint sets, which are interpreted by some to be man-made