Maori, the name of New Zealand's first people, literally means 'ordinary'
In the Maori language, maori means normal or natural. Oral traditions used it to set ordinary mortals apart from gods and spirits, and wai maori is fresh water rather than salt. It descends from a Proto-Polynesian word meaning true or genuine, and only after European contact did it become a name for a whole people.
New Zealand was among the last major landmasses humans reached. Radiocarbon dates on bones of Polynesian rats and on seeds they gnawed suggest arrival around 1280, and a 2022 study placed North Island settlement between 1250 and 1275. Firm archaeological traces begin only after the Mount Tarawera eruption of about 1314, and the main influx seems to fall in the first half of the 14th century, matching traditions of planned voyages in ocean-going waka around 1350. The settlers' Austronesian ancestry reaches back some 5,000 years to Taiwan.
The earliest phase, running to about 1500, is sometimes called the Moahunter period: settlers feasted on moa, other large birds and seals that had never faced a hunter. Sites from this era, notably Wairau Bar in the South Island, show elegant reel necklaces and a striking absence of weapons and forts. Wairau Bar is also the only known New Zealand site holding the bones of people born elsewhere. A colder climate from 1500 and the extinction of the moa ushered in the Classic period of greenstone ornaments, carved meeting houses and fortified pa. Around the 15th century, some voyagers moved on to the Chatham Islands and became the Moriori, whose culture prized pacifism.
European contact brought trade and catastrophe. Abel Tasman arrived in 1642 and left after two days of deadly misunderstanding; Cook came in 1769. Maori rapidly adopted writing and the potato, but muskets fuelled the destructive intertribal Musket Wars, and introduced diseases killed an estimated 10 to 50 per cent of the population. In 1840 more than 500 chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi, although the Maori-language version did not cede sovereignty and an 1877 court dismissed the treaty as a nullity.
Recovery began in the early 20th century, and a cultural revival gathered pace after a protest movement emerged in the 1960s. The 2023 census counted 978,246 people of Maori descent, 19.6% of New Zealanders, and more than 170,000 Maori live in Australia.
Source: Māori people
