"In the past 25 years New Zealand archaeology has undergone a revolution... The focus is no longer on the origins of the Māori, but on the nature and variety of the Maori adaptation to our temperate island world. ... [Today] archaeologists have a major interest in subsistence economics, aimed at filling out a picture of the seasonal round of activity and food supply. Likewise the study of artefacts has moved to embrace not just typological and historical questions, but those of geology, technology and problems of trade and exchange as well. Questions of settlement pattern, the accurate dating of archaeological remains, the geological sourcing of stone tools and waste, and the identitifcation of midden remains and their relation to diet are all subjects of a considerable literature. ... While the entire population from North Cape to Stewrat Island shared in the most characteristic and expensive aspects of being Māori, many of the basic aspects of living varied greatly from region to region according to the wealth and variety of natural resources. Something of the variety of ways the Māori lived and of the archaeological remains this activity has left us are presented in this important work."--Back cover.

"In the last 25 years archaeological research in New Zealand has undergone something of a revolution. Using new techniques and drawing on a wide range of disciplines, archaeologists are now piecing together a new and far more complex picture of the human occupation of this country over the last 1000 years. Until then it was popularly beieved that New Zealand had in the past been settled by two waves of non-European colonisers. It was commonly thought that the "Maoris", the Polynesians who inhabited the country at the time of Cook, had been preceded by a darker, possibly Melanesian and more primitive race called "Morioris". They had been supplanted by the Maoris who had arrived in a "Great Fleet" from their ancestral homeland of Hawaiki some time in the fourteenth century. Today we know this version of events to be wrong -- a myth promulgated by Pakeha researchers at the beginning of the century. Instead, we now realise that this courntyr was probably first settled by Polynesians about 1000 years ago. From this founding population of possibly only a handful of settlers emerged the Maoris -- first as moa hunters, essentially itinerant hunters and gatherers whose impact on the new land was to have far reaching effects. By 500 years ago the changed environment had forced changes upon their economy and lifestyle in favour of more permanent settlements base around a largely agricultural economy. Gradually the classic and familiar Maori culture emerged to be altered and submerged in its turn by the arrival of Europeans 200 years ago. "Unearthing New Zealand" tells the fascinating story of this country's prehistory, reconstructing from archaeological evidence a sometimes extraordinarily complete picture of how these people lived and died. Its emphasis on social aspects -- food and clothing, work practices, burial customs, disease and death -- represents a new dimension in archaeological thinking ..."--Inside front cover.