Using Palaeomagnetic Techniques to Date Indigenous Archaeological Sites in New Zealand

Abstract

Aotearoa/New Zealand was first settled by the Māori people some 800–1000 years ago. Archaeomagnetism provides one of the few means of dating early sites of Māori occupation, particularly when radiocarbon dating is not feasible. This involves dating the thermoremanent magnetization imparted to the heat-retaining stones used in traditional Māori earth ovens, hāngī or umu, at the time of their last cooling. The direction of this magnetization is correlated with the reference curve of the changes in the geomagnetic field direction in New Zealand over the past 1000 years, NZPSV1k.2023. Here, we describe the application of archaeomagnetic dating to indigenous hāngī sampled at two sites in the North Island of New Zealand. The first, in the present-day city of Napier on the east coast, has been studied in detail and is shown to have been occupied, possibly intermittently, over 400–600 years, while the second, in present-day Waikanae on the west coast, is tentatively dated to ca. 1760 AD, just decades before the first European arrival in New Zealand.