Te Ao Tawhito: The Old World

Te Ao Tawhito: The Old World contemplates Māori origins in the ‘blue continent’, the vast Pacific Ocean across which the earliest ancestors travelled to settle these southernmost Pacific islands. Here they organised into hapū and iwi, adapting tropical ways to life in a huge but temperate land, building communities and developing cultures. Early European visitors observed Māori society and changed it too, as more and more Europeans arrived, then stayed. Drawn from the landmark publication, Tangata Whenua: An Illustrated History (2014), Te Ao Tawhito tells the great origin narrative of Māori history from 3000 BC–AD 1830.