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At first New Zealand was administered from Australia as part of the colony of New South Wales, and from 16 June 1840 New South Wales laws were deemed to operate in New Zealand. [68] This was a transitional arrangement, and the British Government issued the Charter for Erecting the Colony of New Zealand on 16 November 1840.
Modern New Zealand archaeology has clarified the origin and dates of the earliest migrations, establishing firmly that there is no evidence that anyone settled New Zealand before Māori. As far back as the 19th century, any claim to the contrary has been considered to be pseudohistorical due to a lack of evidence.
Any reference to New Zealand in a legal rather than geographic sense before 1840 is complex and unclear. When the British colony of New South Wales was founded in 1788 it nominally included a claim to New Zealand as far as 43°39'S (approximately halfway down the South Island). In the years before 1800 there was little interest shown by ...
The original Māori society of New Zealand was based on a collective identity found on the iwi and hapū. [1]: 20 Iwi are the largest social units in Māori society.In Māori iwi roughly means "people" or "nation", [2] [3] and is often translated as "tribe", [4] or "a confederation of tribes".
For example, in the South Island there are 550 rock art sites and 107 in the North Island and 6956 Pā in all New Zealand. [ 54 ] [ 4 ] The types of features present in New Zealand pre European archaeology are pā, storage pits, gardens (stone rows and banks), house floors, terraces, trenches, umu (earth ovens), middens, quarries, rock art and ...
New Zealand's population density of around 20 inhabitants per square kilometre (or 51 per sq mi) [69] is among the lowest in the world. [71] New Zealand's peoples have been defined by their immigrant origin, the ongoing process of adaptation to a new land, being changed and changing those who came before.
Pottery art from Fijian towns shows that Fiji was settled before or around 3500 to 1000 BC, although the details of Pacific migration remain vague. It is believed that the Lapita people or the ancestors of the Polynesians settled the islands first but not much is known of what became of them after the Melanesians arrived; they may have had some influence on the new culture, and archaeological ...
The natural history of New Zealand began when the landmass Zealandia – today an almost entirely submerged mass of continental crust with New Zealand and a few other islands peaking above sea level – broke away from the supercontinent Gondwana in the Cretaceous period. Before this time, Zealandia shared its past with Australia and Antarctica.