Ao-tea-roa (the long white cloud) was the name that the Maori captains gave their new home as their fleet of swift catamarans approached their island destination. But what appeared to them as an unbroken cloud bank was, in fact, a range of snow-clad mountains that dominated the skyline of the land that, many years later, white men would name New Zealand. The men and women aboard the fleet had only a few weeks earlier departed tropical isles to the northeast. Their new home would provide not only opportunity but also hardship--the challenge of survival would require all of their skills of adaptation and innovation. In time, they would fashion a new society, a new technology, and a new artistic tradition as unique and intriguing as any to be found in the vast South Sea island world.
This art tradition, when viewed from an ecological perspective, might best be labeled "the art that history and climate fashioned." Certainly it is impossible to appreciate the Maori artistic tradition--its forms, function, meanings, or dynamics of growth--without first reviewing Maori prehistory, especially the saga of migration through the insular Pacific world.
Over thirty-five hundred years ago, the ancestors of the Maori moved out of Southeast Asia and began settling the islands now known as Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa. These people, who had already perfected the double-hulled seagoing canoe, the catamaran, are today known as the Lapita people, a term actually assigned to their style of pottery. The people of Samoa and Tonga lived in relative isolation, evolving what is today referred to as Polynesian culture. Then around A.D. 500 they began moving eastward and northward--to the Cook and Society islands, to the Marquesas, Australs, Tuamotus, and to the islands of Hawaii. As they journeyed from island to island, their collective knowledge of navigation, boat building, and seamanship increased along with their courage and curiosity. By the eighth century, nearly all of the islands of the Polynesian triangle--from Easter Island in the east, to Hawaii in the north, and to New Zealand in the southwest--had been settled.
The Origins of Maori Art
New Zealand was initially settled by migrants from the Society Islands around A.D. 750 to 800. These people, commonly referred to as the Archaic Maori, or the Moa Hunters, subsisted by hunting the ostrich-like moa bird and fishing in the coastal waters. They established small communities, but did not develop either a very sophisticated political organization or an elaborate art tradition. Then, in approximately A.D. 1350, according to currently popular theories, the mass migration from central Polynesia, mentioned above, arrived in New Zealand. Tradition has it that a fleet of named catamarans (each ancestral name related to a Maori tribal unit) arrived from a distant region to the east known as Hawaiki (not to be confused with the Hawaiian Islands). The more important canoes were Tainui, Te Arawa, Aotea, Tokomaru, Takitimu, Kurahaupo, and Matatua--names that even today have territorial and genealogical significance for Maoris.
These people are believed to have brought an agricultural economy--arriving with a large variety of plants such as taro, kumara (sweet potato), yams, and gourds, and with the dog as their sole domesticated animal (pigs and chickens, characteristic animals found in most Polynesian societies, were initially absent). Anthropologists have labeled these secondary
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