Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Ngā Tohuwhenua Mai Te Rangi: A New Zealand Archeology in Aerial Photographs

Waikato

Waikato

The coast and the Waikato River and its basin are the dominant landforms influencing human settlement in this region. 10 Much of the southern area is dominated by a relatively sterile volcanic landscape, derived from catastrophic eruptions from what is now the Taupō volcanic basin. There is little Māori settlement, except near the Waikato River itself. A line running from the low coastal ranges at Kāwhia, down through the King Country and up to about Putaruru on the southern ranges, and from there north to Thames, defines the main areas of pre-European settlement. Settlement is confined in the north by the ranges west of the Firth of Thames and the Hunua Ranges. The Waihou River catchment is linked to the Waikato by the Hinuera gap, 11 a lowland area in the vicinity of Tirau and Matamata, where many pā survive in good condition.

In the wider region, pā and other sites are concentrated along both the Waikato and Waipā Rivers, with a scatter along the ridges of the low foothills forming the basin to the south and the east. There is also a major concentration in the Te Awamutu and Te Kuiti vicinity. These lie in favourable local climates at the southern edge of the swampy, north-facing basin drained by the Waipā River, the hilly western margins of which were the beginning of a major land route from the Waipā River into the headwaters of the Mōkau River and the Taranaki region. Ngāti Raukawa are one of many groups to have entered the south-western North Island through this route in the nineteenth century.

In pre-European times the extensive swamps of the Waikato basin were an important resource base. Many pā are known adjacent to the swamps or in the swamps themselves, where the swamp was calculated to add to the defensive effect of palisades. 12 Swamps also occupied the low ground on either side of the lower reaches of the Waikato up to its northernmost extent, where dunes drifted inland about 10 km from the coast. The basin is narrower here, defined by low ranges to the west towards the coast, and to the east towards the Hauraki Gulf. On ridges running down into the lower Waikato River from the general run of the eastern ranges are many pā. These locations had tactical rather than strategic value in pre-European times, and they should not be read as offering control of the Waikato basin as a whole. Hongi Hika of Ngā Puhi travelled up the Waikato and Waipā in 1822, apparently unopposed, to the vicinity of Pirongia where he successfully attacked the pā, Mātakitaki, at the junction of the Mangapiko Stream and Waipā River. 13 Fortifications built on the lower (northern) course of the river, designed to bar access to the basin as a whole, mark Māori opposition to the encroachment of European military forces later in the century, in the 1860s.