Polynesian settlement of New Zealand
Permanent Polynesian settlement establishes ancestral Māori communities in Aotearoa
View full image ↗ How was this image made?
The creative brief sent to the image model. These are instructions, not a record of what actually happened.
Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗The date on this entry is the upper end of a radiocarbon range for one cooking-and-discard feature at a single village — not a dated first landing anywhere in the country.
What 1350 is measuring
The year 1350 is the top of a date range for one activity feature at Te Pokohiwi-o-Kupe/Wairau Bar. It is not the best current estimate for the latest likely settlement of New Zealand as a whole.
There was no single datable settlement day. Polynesian voyagers established sustained communities in Aotearoa New Zealand across the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century.
Archaeology cannot identify one arrival day, one canoe or one nationwide founding event.
Two islands, modelled separately
A 2022 nationwide radiocarbon analysis describes mid-to-late-thirteenth-century settlement as unambiguous. It models settlement in the North Island at AD 1250–1275 and in the South Island at AD 1280–1295.
Site-specific work often places Wairau Bar itself in the first decades of the fourteenth century, so the national model and the individual sites do not line up neatly.
Ash from the Mount Tarawera eruption around 1314 — the Kaharoa tephra — gives a dated layer against which archaeological and environmental deposits can be compared.
What the settlers changed
At Wairau Bar they built a permanent village with deep-water access, burials, food remains and artefacts demonstrating direct connections with tropical East Polynesia.
By about 1300, widespread charcoal and vegetation changes indicate that permanent settlers were burning forests for cultivation, living space and bracken growth.
Kiore, the Pacific rat, could only have reached New Zealand with people — though the very early rat-bone dates once proposed have proved controversial.
Sources
- Magdalena Bunbury, Fiona Petchey and Simon Bickler, "A New Chronology for the Māori Settlement of Aotearoa"
- Richard Walter et al., "Mass Migration and the Polynesian Settlement of New Zealand"
- Te Ara, "When Was New Zealand First Settled?"
- Richard Holdaway et al., "An Extremely Low-Density Human Population Exterminated New Zealand Moa"
Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 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
- Archaeology cannot identify one arrival day, one canoe or one nationwide founding event.
- The 2022 large-dataset model favors North Island settlement in AD 1250–1275, while site-specific work often places Wairau Bar in the first decades of the fourteenth century.
- The listed year 1350 is the upper end of a date range for one Wairau Bar feature, not the best current “latest likely date” for settlement of New Zealand as a whole.
- Calling the first settlers Māori is understandable but slightly retrospective; archaeologists often call them ancestral Polynesians because Māori culture developed in Aotearoa.
Checked against
- Magdalena Bunbury, Fiona Petchey and Simon Bickler, “A New Chronology for the Māori Settlement of Aotearoa”
- Richard Walter et al., “Mass Migration and the Polynesian Settlement of New Zealand”
- Te Ara, “When Was New Zealand First Settled?”
- Richard Holdaway et al., “An Extremely Low-Density Human Population Exterminated New Zealand Moa”
- George Washington’s Mount Vernon, “Fort Necessity”
- George Washington’s Mount Vernon, “Ten Facts About Washington and Slavery”