Little Ice Age Impacts on Traditional Māori Fisheries: Preliminary Results from North Island, New Zealand

Summary

Numerous paleoclimate proxies indicate the Little Ice Age caused marked declines in New Zealand’s atmospheric and sea surface temperatures for much of the period between 1450 C.E. and the end of the nineteenth century. These trends could have keenly affected the productivity of marine fisheries, which have always been critically important to Māori, the indigenous peoples of New Zealand. Considering the close connections that continue to exist between traditional fisheries and Māori economic, social, and spiritual life, it is likely that any changes in fish populations would have had wide-ranging effects on people’s lives in the past. In this paper, I explore the ways that studying the top-down effects of climate change on traditional Māori fisheries shed light on developments in pre-colonial Māori history, and present preliminary results for the analysis of archaeological fishbone assemblages from the northern North Island, New Zealand.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21032