Aotearoa tradition spot on

By SIMON COLLINS

New scientific findings have backed traditional Maori accounts that New Zealand was settled about 30 generations ago.

An international team led by Associate Professor David Lowe of Waikato University has pinned down the timing of the country's biggest volcanic eruption in 1000 years, at Mt Tarawera, to the winter of 1314, give or take a dozen years.

The eruption spread a layer of ash from Northland to Hawkes Bay. There are signs that people may have begun to burn forests just before the eruption, but no human artefacts have been found below the ash layer.

Professor Lowe's team has concluded that people cannot have settled in New Zealand more than about 50 years before the eruption - that is, before about 1250.

This is later than most experts had thought. A survey at the 1988 conference of the New Zealand Archaeological Association found that 95 per cent of archaeologists believed people probably arrived here before 1100, with a median estimate of 800.

A repeat survey last April, published in the latest edition of the NZ Journal of Archaeology, found that the median estimate was 1150.

But Professor Lowe's date of 1250-1300 is more in line with what early Maori scholars estimated on the basis of whakapapa, or genealogies, which recorded between 18 and 25 generations from the first canoes to the 19th century.

Geneticists led by Professor David Penny at Massey University have also calculated, on the basis of genetic diversity among Maori, that at least 100 to 200 founding settlers, including at least 50 to 100 females, were needed to reach the estimated population of around 100,000 by the time Europeans arrived around 1800.

This implies that the founding settlers came in several canoes, possibly spread over many years - again matching iwi traditions around the country.

An expert on the country's early ecology, Dr Matt McGlone of Landcare Research, said there was now accepted evidence that Pacific rats reached New Zealand as early as 2000 years ago, implying that humans visited well before they settled permanently. Again, this matches Maori traditions of early visits by Kupe and later by Toi.

Some scientists say the evidence of forest fires suggests that some of these early visitors stayed.

Two research projects led by Dr Mike Elliot, now a teacher at Whangarei Boys' High School, found forest fires evidently caused by people occurred from about 1000 in the Bay of Islands and from as early as 550 in Hawkes Bay.

However, Dr McGlone said Dr Elliot got the date wrong in the first case, and in Hawkes Bay simply found the delayed effects of the eruption of Lake Taupo in about 200.

He agreed with Professor Lowe that permanent settlers did not arrive until just before the Tarawera eruption. "Nearly everyone accepts that there was earlier contact. We are really just arguing about the details," Dr McGlone said.

"One of the really exciting things is that the more the work has gone on, the more it's confirmed a commonsense interpretation of what the Maori traditions were saying."