The First Migration - a new BWB Text by Atholl Anderson

The First Migration - a new BWB Text by Atholl Anderson

Some five thousand years ago, the people who would become the Polynesians moved from South China through the Asian archipelago, eventually pushing out into the Pacific Ocean. New Zealand was the last place to be settled, by the people who ‘became Maori’ over the following centuries.

Stories of this ‘first migration’ have lingered in Māori oral traditions ever since. These are the narratives of first canoes, ‘the Great Fleet’ that came to New Zealand over seven centuries ago, the furthest reaches of an extraordinary migration.

These traditional histories have been recorded, revered and challenged throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And in this BWB Text, Atholl Anderson makes some remarkable connections between these narratives and more recent scientific explorations of the past. For the latest research, using techniques such as radiocarbon dating, genetic analysis and paleoanthropology, offers some striking level of convergences between the knowledge carried by oral tradition and that offered by scientific and historical evidence.

Now presented as an accessible BWB Text, these chapters from the award-winning Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History (BWB, 2014) set out to tell us broadly what we know, and how, about the early origins of tangata whenua in New Zealand.

The first half of The First Migration offers an empirically-inflected version of this history, touching on diverse sources of evidence such as the chromosomal resonances of Māori in Southeast Asia, the impact of sailing technology, the insights of linguistic analysis, and the origins of the ubiquitous kumara.

The second half of the book takes the reader closer to the Maori world and traditional knowledge. Setting out some of the ways in which oral tradition and whakapapa offer reliable accounts of the past, Atholl Anderson offers glimpses of a world in which a focus on place and person builds a historical narrative that can be passed on from generation to generation.

At a time when Māori and European cultures are still learning to find a way forward, this is a timely demonstration of how these cultures can find ways to understand the past that draw on different cultural perspectives.

ENDS

© Scoop Media