Pa (Maori) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The word pā can refer to any Māori village

Village

A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet with the population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand , Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods, such as the West Village in Manhattan, New...

or settlement, but in traditional use it referred to hillforts fortified with palisades

Palisades

A palisade is a steel or wooden fence or wall of variable height, usually used as a defensive structure.Palisade or Palisades also may refer to:-Geology:United States...

and defensive terraces and also to fortified villages. They first came into being about 1450. They are located mainly in the North Island north of lake Taupo. There were no pā during the early Archaic period when most Māori lived in the lower South Island. Similar hill forts were common in the Marquesas Islands and in Tonga in particular.

In Māori society, a great pā represented the mana

Mana

Mana is an indigenous Pacific islander concept of an impersonal force or quality that resides in people, animals, and inanimate objects. The word is a cognate in many Oceanic languages, including Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian....

of a tribal group, as personified by a chief or rangatira

Rangatira

Rangatira are the hereditary Māori leaders of hapū, and were described by ethnologists such as Elsdon Best as chieftains . Ideally, rangatira were people of great practical wisdom who held authority on behalf of the tribe and maintained boundaries between a tribe's land and that of other tribes...

and they were built in defensible locations to protect dwelling sites or gardens, almost always on prominent, raised ground which was then terraced; as for example in the Auckland

Auckland

The Auckland metropolitan area , in the North Island of New Zealand, is the largest and most populous urban area in the country with residents, percent of the country's population. Auckland also has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world...

region, where dormant volcanic cones were used. While built for defence, the main function of most pā that have been studied closely was the safe storage of food in pits, especially kumara. Recent studies have shown that in most cases few people lived in the pā permanently although the nearby flat areas were often primarily residential and horticultural.

Traditional pā

Traditional pā took a variety of forms. The simplest was the pā tuwatawata which consisted of a wooden palisade around a village. A pā maioro was a sophisticated construction using earth ramparts, fosses (ditches), and multiple rows of palisades. The most sophisticated pā was called a pā whakino which included multiple terraces, ramparts, palisades, fighting stages, lookouts of wood or earth, summit areas called tihi, defended narrow passages, a carved entrance and carved main posts but by far the most common feature were food storage pits, indeed some pā consisted almost entirely of such pits. Pā were built on a variety of natural landforms, all designed to give advantage to defenders. These include volcanoes, spurs, headlands, ridges, peninsulas and islands, including artificial islands.

Features

Features often included a storage well for water, a toilet over a cliff face, a lookout stage on the summit. The chief's house was also on the summit and usually stored weapons, mainly the stabbing spear or taiaha. Chiefs' houses were often bigger, some measuring 4.5m x 4 m.

Artifacts

Those excavated in Northland have provided numerous clues to tool and weapon manufacturing including obsidian (volcanic glass), chert and argillite basalt, flakes, pounamu chisels, adzes, bone spearpoints and an abundance of hammer stones which had accumulated over hundreds of years. Chert, a fine grained, easily worked stone, familiar to Māori from its extensive use in Polynesia, was the most commonly used stone with thousands of pieces being found in some Northland digs. Chips or flakes of Chert were used as mini knives or to make small drills for hole making in fish hooks or necklace teeth. Another common find in Northland digs is Kokowai, or red ochre, a red dye made from red iron or aluminium oxide, which is ground up fine and then mixed with any oily sustance like fish oil or plant resins. Māori daubed it over their bodies as decoration and possibly to keep insects away. It was widely used to decorate whare and waka and may have prevented the wood from drying.

Layout

On lower terraces were semi-underground smaller whare about 2.4m x 2m for storing kūmara. These were equipped with racks to hold kūmara baskets at an angle of about 20 degrees so they would shed water. They had internal drains for the same purpose. In many cases kūmara were stored in pits (rua) where the soil or rock was suitable. Ordinary people lived on the lower slopes in small whare sometimes partly sunk into the ground by 300-400mm sometimes within the pā but usually outside. The narrow entrance (ngutu) to the gate was equipped with a low fence to force attackers to slow and take an awkward high step. The entrance was usually overlooked by a raised stage so attackers were very vulnerable.

Most food was grown outside the pā though in some cases there was enough level ground for limited horticulture to take place within the palisades. During times of threat the lookout stages were manned and warning given by the blowing of a shell trumpet. In some rocky areas stones were stored on wooden stages as missiles. Some tribes such as Tūhoe did not build pā during the classic period but relied on using the forest as a place of refuge - sometimes called pā runanga. Fox (1976) has stated that there were about 2000 hillforts in Britain and that NZ had twice that number but further work since then has raised the number of known pā to over 5000.

Pā played a significant role in the New Zealand Land Wars

New Zealand land wars

The New Zealand Wars, sometimes called the Land Wars and also once called the Māori Wars, were a series of armed conflicts that took place in New Zealand between 1845 and 1872...

. They are also known from earlier periods of Māori history but were rare until around 500 years ago, suggesting that scarcity

Scarcity

Scarcity is the fundamental economic problem of having humans who have unlimited wants and needs in a world of limited resources. It states that society has insufficient productive resources to fulfill all human wants and needs. Alternatively, scarcity implies that not all of society's goals can be...

of resources through environmental damage and population pressure began to bring about war

War

War is a state of organized, armed, and often prolonged conflict carried on between states, nations, or other parties typified by extreme aggression, social disruption, and usually high mortality. War should be understood as an actual, intentional and widespread armed conflict between political...

fare and led to a period of pā building.

Fortification

Their main defence was the use of earth ramparts (or terraced hillsides), topped with stakes or wicker barriers. The historically later versions were constructed by people who were fighting with muskets and hand weapons (such as spear

Spear

A spear is a pole weapon consisting of a shaft, usually of wood, with a pointed head.The head may be simply the sharpened end of the shaft itself, as is the case with bamboo spears, or it may be made of a more durable material fastened to the shaft, such as flint, obsidian, iron, steel or...

, taiaha

Taiaha

A Taiaha is a traditional weapon of the Māori of New Zealand.It is a wooden, or sometimes whale bone, close quarters, staff weapon used for short sharp strikes or stabbing thrusts with quick footwork on the part of the wielder. Taiaha are usually between in length...

and mere

Mere (weapon)

The mere is a type of short, broad-bladed club , usually made from Nephrite jade . A mere is one of the traditional, close combat, one-handed weapons of the indigenous Māori, of New Zealand. A mere could be used to split a skull open.- Form :The Mere is a spatulate, leaf shaped, form of short club...

) against the British Army

British Army

The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...

and armed constabulary

Constabulary

Constabulary may have several definitions.*A civil, non-paramilitary force consisting of police officers called constables. This is the usual definition in Britain, in which all county police forces once bore the title...

, who were armed with swords, rifles, and heavy weapons such as howitzers and rocket

Rocket

A rocket is a missile, spacecraft, aircraft or other vehicle which obtains thrust from a rocket engine. In all rockets, the exhaust is formed entirely from propellants carried within the rocket before use. Rocket engines work by action and reaction...

artillery.

Simpler gunfighter pā of the post contact period could be put in place in very limited time scales, sometimes two-fifteen days, but the more complex classic constructions took months of hard labour, and were often rebuilt and improved over many years. The normal methods of attacking a classic pā were firstly the surprise attack at night when defences were not routinely manned. The second was the siege which involved less fighting and results depended on who had the better food resources. The third was to use a device called a Rou - a .5m length of strong wood attached to a stout length of rope made from Raupo leaves. The Rou was slipped over the palisade and then pulled by a team of toa until the wall fell. Best records that there were cases where children were eaten during sieges - as at Te Whetu Matarua pā on the East coast. Gunfighter pā could resist bombardment for days with limited casualties although the psychological impact of shelling usually drove out defenders if attackers were patient and had enough ammunition. Some historians have wrongly credited Māori with inventing trench warfare with its associated variety of earth works for protection. Serious military earth works were first recorded in use by French military engineers in the 1700s and were used extensively at Crimea and in the US Civil war. Māori undoubted skill at constructing earthworks evolved from their skill at building traditional pā which, by the late 18th century, involved considerable earthworks to create rua (food storage pits), fosses (ditches), earth ramparts and multiple terraces.

Gunfighter pā

Warrior chiefs like Kawiti realised these properties as a good counter to the greater firepower of the British. With that in mind, they sometimes built pā purposefully to resist the British Empire's forces, like at Ruapekapeka

Ruapekapeka

Ruapekapeka is a pā 14 kilometres southeast of Kawakawa in the Northland Region of New Zealand. It is one of the largest and most complex pā in New Zealand, that was designed specifically to counter the cannons of the British forces. The earthworks can still be seen just south of Kawakawa...

a new pā constructed specifically to draw the enemy, instead of protecting a specific site or place of habitation like more traditional classic pā. At the Battle of Ruapekapeka, the British suffered 45 casualties, against only 30 amongst the Māori. The British learned from earlier mistakes and subjected the pā to two weeks of bombardment before successfully attacking. Although Hone Heke lost the battle "he carried his point" and the Crown never tried to resurrect the flagstaff at Kororareka while Kawiti lived. Afterwards, British engineers twice surveyed the fortifications, produced a scale model and tabled the plans in the House of Commons.

The fortifications of such a purpose-built pā included palisade

Palisade

A palisade is a steel or wooden fence or wall of variable height, usually used as a defensive structure.- Typical construction :Typical construction consisted of small or mid sized tree trunks aligned vertically, with no spacing in between. The trunks were sharpened or pointed at the top, and were...

s of hard puriri

Puriri

Puriri is an evergreen tree endemic to New Zealand. -History:...

trunks sunk about 1.5m in the ground and split timber, with bundles of protective flax padding in the later gunfighter pā, the two lines of palisade covering a firing trench with individual pits, while more defenders could use the second palisade to fire over the heads of the first below. Simple communication trenches or tunnels were also built to connect the various parts, as found at Ohaeawai Pā

Battle of Ohaeawai

The Battle of Ohaeawai was fought between British forces and local Māori during the Flagstaff War in July 1845 at Ohaeawai in the North Island of New Zealand...

or Ruapekapeka. The forts could even include underground bunkers, protected by a 600mm layer of earth over wooden beams, which sheltered the inhabitants during periods of heavy shelling by artillery.

A limiting factor of the Māori fortifications that were not built as set pieces, however, was the need for the people inhabiting them to leave frequently to cultivate areas for food, or to gather it from the wilderness. Consequently, pā would often be seasonally abandoned for 4 to 6 months of each year.(Sutton, Furey and Marshall).In Maori tradition a Pa would also be abandoned if a chief was killed or if some calamity took place that a tohunga (witch doctor/shaman) had attributed to an evil spirt(atua). In the 1860s, Maori, though nominally Christian, still followed aspects of their traditional tikanga at the same time. Normally, once the Kumara had been harvested in March–April and placed in storage the inhabitants could lead a more itinerant lifestyle, trading, or harvesting gathering other foodstuffs needed for winter but this did not stop war taking place outside this time frame if the desire for utu or payback was great.To Maori, summer was the normal fighting season and this put them at a huge disadvantage when fighting the British army with its well organized logistcs train which could fight efficiently year round.

Swamp pā

Fox noted that lake pā were quite common inland in places such as the Waikato. Frequently they appear to have been constructed for whanau (extended family) size groups. The topography was often flat, although a headland or spur location was favoured. The lake frontage was usually protected with a single row of palisades but the landward boundary was protected by a double row. Mangakaware Swamp pā, Waikato, had an area of about 3,400m2. 137 palisade post holes were identified. The likely total number of posts was about 500. It contained 8 buildings within the palisades, 6 of which have been identified as whare, the largest of which was 2.4m x 6m. One building was possibly a cooking shelter and the last a large storehouse. There was one rectangular structure, 1.5 x 3m, just outside the swampside palisades which was most likely either a drying rack or storehouse. Swamps and lakes provided eels, ducks, weka (swamp hen) and in some cases fish. The largest of this type was found at Lake Ngaroto, Waikato, the ancient settlement of the Ngati Apakura, very close to the famous battle of Hingakaka. This was a built on a much larger scale. Large numbers of carved wooden artefacts were found preserved in the peat. These are on display at the nearby Te Awamutu museum.

Examples

The old pā remains found on One Tree Hill, New Zealand
One Tree Hill, New Zealand
One Tree Hill is a 182 metre volcanic peak located in Auckland, New Zealand. It is an important memorial place for both Māori and other New Zealanders...

, close to the center of Auckland
Auckland
The Auckland metropolitan area , in the North Island of New Zealand, is the largest and most populous urban area in the country with residents, percent of the country's population. Auckland also has the largest Polynesian population of any city in the world...

, represent one of the largest known sites as well as one of the largest pre-historic earthworks fortifications known worldwide.
Pukekura at Taiaroa Head
Taiaroa Head
Taiaroa Head is a headland at the end of the Otago Peninsula in New Zealand, overlooking the mouth of the Otago Harbour. It lies within the city limits of Dunedin...

, Otago, established around 1650 and still occupied by Māori in the 1840s.
Rangiriri (Waikato), a gunfighter pā built in 1863 by Kingites. This pā resembles a very long trench running east west between the Waikato River and Lake Waikare with swampy margins. At the high point was a substantial earth works with trenches and parapets. The pā was bombarded from ships and land using Armstrong Gun
Armstrong Gun
The term Armstrong Gun was primarily used to describe the unique design of the rifled breech-loading field and heavy guns designed by Sir William Armstrong and manufactured in England from 1855 by the Elswick Ordnance Company and the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich...

s.
Nukuhau pā, Waikato River near Stubbs Road. This is a triangular shape pā formed on a flat raised spur with the Waikato River on one side 200m long, a gully with a stream on the long west axis 200m long and two man made fosses on the narrower southern axis, 107m long. The average slope to the river is 12m at an angle of 70 degrees.

External links

Archaeological Remains of Pā (from the New Zealand Historic Places Trust
New Zealand Historic Places Trust
The New Zealand Historic Places Trust is a non-profit trust that advocates for the protection of ancestral sites and heritage buildings in New Zealand...

website)

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.