Photos: Voyaging conference explores Bay's historic sites

More than 120 people took part in a Voyaging Wānanga at the Copthorne in Waitangi during the weekend with three days of academic papers and wānanga culminating in a field trip on Sunday aboard the catamaran Te Maki.

During the cruise, which was also open to the public, academics, kaumatua and local experts offered commentary on sites significant to the first Māori in the Bay of Islands and later to the explorers Cook and Du Fresne.

Heritage NZ Northland manager Bill Edwards said focus of the wānanga was Polynesian voyaging but delegates also discussed the interactions of Cook and Māori, with research presented by geneticists, navigators, kaumatua, archaeologists, historians, private researchers and astronomers, among others.

It was striking that science, oral history and traditional knowledge were all saying the same thing about New Zealand's first human arrivals, Edwards said.

''The speakers gave some pretty clear indications of how people got here, when people got here, and how they changed once they got here. It was a coming together of matauranga Māori and science, with each learning about the other."

The conference was coordinated by Heritage NZ archaeologist James Robinson and held under the auspices of the Arakite Charitable Trust, which earlier this year led a ground-breaking archaeological dig on Moturua Island in the Bay of Islands.