The First Migration: Māori Origins 3000BC – AD1450

by Atholl Anderson

Thousands of years ago migrants from South China began the journey that took their descendants through the Pacific to the southernmost islands of Polynesia. Atholl Anderson’s ground-breaking synthesis of research and tradition charts this epic journey of New Zealand’s first human inhabitants.

Taken from the multi-award-winning Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History this Text weaves together evidence from numerous sources: oral traditions, archaeology, genetics, linguistics, ethnography, historical observations, palaeoecology, climate change and more. The result is to people the ancient past: to offer readers a sense of the lives of Māori ancestors as they voyaged through centuries toward the South Pacific.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

164 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2016

Reviews

[Liv Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviewing this now to inspire me to finish it tonight. Cool kōrero and whakaaro but bro it’s just too much of a meaty read and I don’t know why I keep going back to non-fiction. Maybe to fill the void in my heart that my father left me with

[Ellie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was super interesting but very academic and it felt like it was missing a bit of context, like it was presenting a whole heap of information on a debate without explaining the question at the heart of the debate or why the question matters.

[Daniel Headifen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The piece on comparing oral history to written is really enlightening. Comparing Oral accuracy with statistical maths theory, rather than historical accurately- a really useful approach.

[Simon Mee · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s okay.

I do appreciate a lot of points made in the book. It avoids oversimplification, such as the concept that Māori are directly descended from indigenous Taiwanese who upped and got themselves across the Pacific with minimal intermixing.

…but, there’s too many endnotes. Sort of. The most obvious offender is using teology in the main text, with a endnote explaining what it means. Otherwise there’s pages of references to particular debates around every sentence in the main text.

It is important to have citations, and maybe this is my fault for having the wrong conception of these BWB texts were meant to be – however it does not feel very welcoming for a layperson, more a shot across the bows about pretending to know more than you actually do – there are serious depths to the matter.

So I appreciate the level of work that has gone into this book, but it did feel like work. If the BWB texts are consistently like this, I may revisit and up the rating – even then it still feels like it is a little too academic.

[Elliot Powell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very well written look at Māori history, both archeologically and through oratory. Anderson's unpacking of various theories, historical and modern, is thorough. A number of sections do start to feel repetitive, though I acknowledge this is largely a bi-product of necessary citation.