History of Otago

The history of Otago in New Zealand tells the story of human settlement of one of the more isolated outliers of the inhabited earth.

The precise date at which the first inhabitants of New Zealand reached Otago and the extreme south (known to later Māori as Murihiku) remains uncertain. Māori descend from a race of Polynesian sea-wanderers who, in some far-off age, moved from East Asia and south-east Asia to the islands of the Pacific. Tradition tells of their further journeyings from Hawaiki to New Zealand, and some commentators have identified this homeland as Havai'i, an island in the Society Group. Overpopulation, scarcity of food and civil war forced many of them to migrate once more, and New Zealand became their new home. Māori settled New Zealand between AD 1250–1300, and had learnt to hunt the numerous species of moa indigenous to New Zealand. From time to time the people of Tahiti and the Cook Islands continued to make contacts with New Zealand, and migrants arriving in the 14th century knew their precise destination.

The first parts of New Zealand settled by Polynesians were the very far north and the east coast of the South Island where population was initially concentrated. Later the contraction of food sources led to depopulation in the south while the introduction of the kumara led to an expansion in the North Island and the evolution of a different material and social culture. A similar evolution occurred in the south but the greater numbers in the North Island led to migrations from there from late in the sixteenth century.

Tradition speaks of the first inhabitants of the South Island as the Kahui Tipua, a tribe associated with many weird tales and whose members the tales generally classed as supernatural beings, the "Band of Ogres". After these fearsome people came another tribe named Te Rapuwai which has also left very few traces, perhaps because, as Waite suggests, no Māori claim descent from them. On the other hand, Anderson has suggested these are names of earlier assimilated groups whose descendants are still with us but have been re-categorised under the names "Waitaha" and "Kati Mamoe" as Kai Tahu have since claimed those groups as integral to a new one, that known now, in modern standard Māori, as "Ngai Tahu".

But Te Rapuwai left many place names to record their presence, and heaps of shells along the beaches as more tangible evidence. The Kaitangata Lake district, in South Otago, was apparently a favourite haunt, and almost certainly there were settlements at the mouth of the Matau (Clutha).

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