Other aspects of Golson’s program were less successful. The contribution of the natural sciences to the problem of chronology has been mixed, and the utility of using tree rings, tephrachronology, pollen analysis, and obsidian dating has yet to fully be proved. Even C-14 dating, which elsewhere has largely replaced artifact assemblages as a way of defining the space and time correlates of archaeological phenomena, has had limited usefulness in New Zealand (Shawcross 1969).

The precise definition of the classic Maori phase, the most recent period of New Zealand prehistory, has continued to be problematic. Owing to changes in Maori artifact curation (preservation of stone tools by the Maori) and site layout, the majority of late period archaeological sites in New Zealand (fortified pa, agricultural complexes of storage pits and terraces, and shell middens) contain few if any artifacts. Consequently, Golson, like his predecessors, had to rely on museum collections and ethnographic descriptions of Maori life to fill the role usually taken by artifact assemblages in the definition of cultures. His espousal of the processes of adaptation as a dynamic explanation for the differences between Maori culture and cultures elsewhere in Polynesia, and for the changes in Maori material culture over time, was at odds with his division of the New Zealand past into two distinct and static phases. Finally, Golson’s excavation of a late period ring-ditch pa at Kauri Point also proved to be inconclusive and revealed a complex construction sequence that did not fit well within the archaic/classic framework.

The archaeology of New Zealand’s South Island better suited the requirements of the culture-historical approach than did that of the North Island. On the South Island, which lies beyond the climatic limits of tropical Polynesian food crops, there are multiple early sites defined in terms of a distinctive archaic artifact assemblage (tanged adzes, harpoon points, ornaments, and one-piece fishhooks), and they often have cooking and refuse dumping areas that contain moa remains. Following the demise of the moa, the hunting and foraging economy of the South Island was reorganized to concentrate on shellfish, fish, and sea birds. Finally, archaeological and ethnographic evidence document the intrusion of classic culture from the North Island in terms of people, ideas, and artifacts—plain adzes, composite fishhooks, nephrite ornaments, bone flutes, toggles, and defended sites—(Anderson 1982). The South Island evidence points to the agricultural North Island for the origin of classic Maori culture, and this clear indication (of diffusion) made the difficulty of archaeologically defining the classic phase on the North Island even greater.

Using evidence for the presence of agriculture on the earliest North Island archaic sites, Golson and English archaeologist Peter Gathercole (1962) argued against Duff’s and Buck’s idea that the change from moa hunter to Maori was also an economic transformation from hunting to agriculture. Golson, however, despite his rejection of Duff’s great fleet hypothesis in favor of local development as the preferred explanation for culture change in New Zealand, still set himself the task of archaeologically documenting the moa hunter to the Maori sequence. This task was all the more remarkable because (in one guise or another) this sequence was formulated prior to the advent of culture-historical archaeology in New Zealand. Duff borrowed the conception from Buck’s The Coming of the Maori (1949), which was first published in 1925 but has antecedents in the works of Elsdon Best and Percy Smith and even back to the eighteenth century (Sorrenson 1979, 13).

Dissatisfaction with the division of New Zealand archaeology into the archaic and classic phases led to a number of reformulations. Drawing together the ideas of Richard Beardsley et al. (1956) on community patterning, paleobotanist Doug Yen’s (1961) sequence for the introduction of kumara to the cool New Zealand environment and paleo-geographer K.B. Cumberland’s (1962) scenario of recent climatic deterioration enabled Green (1963) to subdivide the archaic and classic into early, middle, and late phases.

Green’s six phases, which extended into the postcontact era, attempted to document an independent evolutionary progression for New Zealand. This effort followed robert j. braidwood in advancing through stages from dispersed