Papamoa Hills Regional Park

Papamoa is a nationally significant pa complex where people lived for 300 years from about 1400.

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A walking track now traverses the pa sites; at the same time providing magnificent views of the Bay of Plenty. To reach the summit takes about 45 minutes. The return trip over the full track about an hour and a half. There is little shade after the track emerges from the plantation forest so if it is summer and the day is hot be prepared with water, a hat and sunscreen. Look for the sculptures by Regan Gentry at the entrance.

Several Heritage Registered sites are upon the hills, the site of Te Wharo Pa, associates storage pits, and Te Uku o Takakopiri/Te Rae o Papamoa. Gavin McLean will explain:

A Nationally Significant Pa Complex
By Gavin McLean

At least since the time of the Takitimu waka, the Western Bay of Plenty has been an abundant food basket. The evidence for this lies here at Papamoa where a nationally significant pa complex straddling ignimbrite hill country once watched over fertile coastal dune plains and rich coastal fisheries. If radiocarbon dating is correct, settlement began on the plain about 1400. For the next 300 years the people prospered, harvesting their crops and fisheries, occupying and abandoning sites in accordance with the kumara cycle and soil fertility. Today’s subdivisions and sprawl are oozing their gimcrack way over an ancient palimpsest of kainga, garden soils and swamp pa. But look to the hills. Here, as elsewhere in the North Island, Maori fortified their settlements as competition for resources intensified. The Bay of Plenty still has fine examples of ancient hill forts at Maunganui, Mangatawa and Papamoa. The Papamoa Hills offered good views in all directions at an inevitable point of intertribal tension between Ngaiterangi and Arawa. Archaeologists have located about 60 sites — pits, terraces and, of course, pa. Pa range from a massive seven hectares (Wharo pa) down to 0.15 hectares. The oldest was begun some time after 1460 and they were all built by 1700. The scientists have given them numbernames that make them sound like U-boats but the two largest pa also have proper names. The largest, Wharo (U14/166,167), on the spine of a ridge with three ‘limbs’ on side spurs, has nine separate defended units. Karangaumu (U14/238) probably the earliest and full of large storage pits, has eight defended units, sits atop the summit of Papamoa Hill and may have been rebuilt at least once. At the other end of the scale, little U14/1660 occupies a knoll on a ridge below Karangaumu. But this sprawling cultural landscape is more important than its individual components. Here on the coastal plain and along the rolling hillsides of Papamoa is the record of that lengthy evolution from Polynesian colonists to the Maori who would encounter European society. Late in 2000, in the face of the threat posed by soaring land values and development pressure, local authorities conditionally approved the creation of a regional park in the Papamoa Hills to continue to tell that story to future generations.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Nigel Prickett (ed.), The First Thousand Years, Dunmore Press, Palmerston North, 1982.

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