Polynesian settlement of New Zealand

Permanent Polynesian settlement of Aotearoa New Zealand begins (approximate)

One six-metre-wide oven at Wairau Bar held 1,135 fragments from at least 31 moa eggs — a single cooking and discard event, dated 1320–1350, and the reason this year is on the calendar at all.

Where the year 1320 comes from

No event here can be assigned to a particular day, or securely to the single year 1320. The strongest anchor for that number is one cooking-and-discard deposit at the Wairau Bar village on the northern South Island, radiocarbon-dated to 1320–1350 CE at two standard deviations.

That deposit postdates the village's foundation, so it cannot date the first landfall by itself. A date from one oven, midden or settlement feature is not necessarily the date anyone arrived.

What the archaeology actually supports

Voyagers ancestral to Māori crossed roughly 3,000 km from tropical East Polynesia and established permanent communities in Aotearoa New Zealand. The evidence places that within a late-13th- to early-14th-century interval rather than in a fixed year.

Te Ara summarises permanent settlement as established by around 1250–1300 CE. A 2022 analysis of more than 2,250 radiocarbon dates argued for initial North Island settlement in 1250–1275, earlier than the year listed here.

A 2017 mass-migration study finds the strongest archaeological signature in the early 14th century, but expressly does not rule out earlier visits or settlement.

Wairau Bar and the people buried there

Wairau Bar — Te Pokohiwi-o-Kupe — was an early permanent village connected to long-distance voyaging and exchange, and the 2017 synthesis documents at least 42 burials there. Rangitāne ki Wairau worked with researchers on the study and reburial of ancestral remains from the site.

A shell chisel recovered there came from a tropical species absent from New Zealand waters, so it crossed the ocean with the migrants. Isotope signatures in the teeth of some of the earliest burials suggest those individuals spent part of childhood outside New Zealand.

Different dating analyses place the village's initial occupation near the end of the 13th century or in the first decades of the 14th.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources not yet audited Date disputed

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Date disputed. Sources disagree; the research places it at ~1275.

What the sources leave uncertain

The listed year 1320 reflects one influential interpretation, especially a 1320–1350 date for a particular Wairau Bar cooking event. That event occurred after the village's foundation and cannot date the first landfall by itself.
Te Ara summarizes permanent settlement as established by around 1300, while a 2022 large radiocarbon analysis argues for North Island settlement in 1250–1275.
The 2017 mass-migration study places the strongest archaeological signature in the early 14th century but expressly does not rule out earlier visits or settlement.
Because settlement was a process involving multiple voyages and communities, converting it into a single calendar-year event is inherently misleading.