Otuataua Stonefields

**Polynesian horticulturalists adapt to colder soils
By Gavin McLean
**Archaeologists still debate how long people have lived in New Zealand. Unfortunately radiocarbon dating is better for hundreds of thousands of years than hundreds. Some have suggested that rats may have accompanied people here 2500 years ago but, even if that is correct, it almost certainly did not produce continuous settlement. More people date ongoing East Polynesian settlement from about 850 years ago but precisely where is a mystery. Most say Northland, but some suggest the South Island. Wherever the first seafarers fetched up, they probably soon moved north along the coast to save tropical plants such as taro, yam, aute and ti that would never have survived southern frosts.

The Otuataua Stonefields show how those first tropical colonists adapted to their new environment. New Zealand’s shorter growing seasons and colder mean temperatures ruled out many Polynesian staples. The settlers salvaged only a few crops — kumara, taro, yams and gourds — all plants with short growing seasons and small or tough leaves. In the inland Bay of Islands, Palliser Bay and parts of the northern South Island they gave their crops further assistance by nurturing them in neatly laid-out stone-walled gardens. The stones warmed and mulched the soil, extending the growing season by up to a month. Two centuries ago, Maori were still cultivating 8000 hectares of volcanic stonefields around Tamaki-makau-rau, the Auckland isthmus. Now just 160 remain. They largely fell into disuse after the early 19th-century inter-tribal Musket Wars and were swallowed up by urban sprawl.

Conservationists had to fight hard even to save Otuataua’s 100 hectares, bought by the Manukau City Council with help from the Department of Conservation (DOC), the Lotteries Commission and the Auckland Regional Council. On 10 February 2001, one of the New Zealand’s oldest sites became its newest reserve, the Otuataua Stonefields Historic Reserve. Here you can see Polynesian house sites, storage pits, cooking shelters, terraces, mound gardens, garden plots and garden walls as well as some 19th-century European dry-stone farm walls.

Copyright 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

The reserve is at Ihumatao, Quarry Road, Manukau, Auckland. There are several council managed walking paths through the reserve.

Further reading: Janet Davidson, The Prehistory of New Zealand, Longman Paul, Auckland, 1984.

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