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.