Late Middle Ages · Oceania · Exploration

1376

Maori settlement of New Zealand advances

1376

By the late fourteenth century the descendants of earlier Polynesian canoe voyagers had spread along the coasts of both major New Zealand islands, hunting moa to scarcity and establishing pa fortifications on defensible hilltops. A distinctive Maori culture with its own carving traditions, warfare practices, and oral genealogies had diverged from its ancestral Society Islands roots.