of a small and highly mobile population that was stimulated by the rich environment to live more by hunting than by swidden agriculture, which involved effort in field preparation through cutting down and burning trees.

A major investigation of the various traits used by Duff, Golson, and Green to define their culture periods—e.g., material culture (including fishing gear, ornaments, adzes, and other stone artifacts), subsistence and technology, house and settlement forms, burials, warfare and pa design, and art styles—led New Zealand archaeologist Janet Davidson (1984) to conclude that changes in these traits took place at different times and in different places in response to quite different stimuli. Arguing that classic Maori culture could not have had a single point of origin, Davidson stressed that the polarization of New Zealand prehistory into the archaic and classic periods created insuperable difficulties for the explanation of the changes she had documented.

Thematic and regional projects in historical archaeology have been well documented by Ian Smith. Apart from Groube’s (1965) study of proto-historic settlement patterns in the Bay of Islands, major projects have included the excavation of sites affected by the central North Island Tongariro power scheme carried out by Hoskins, a study of culture contact sites in Fiordland (Coutts 1969), Prickett’s study of historic sites of the Taranaki wars (between Maori and the Crown), Neville Ritchie’s explorations of the Otago goldfields affected by the Clutha dam development project, and, finally, a program on sites affected by urban development in the Auckland region led by Bulmer and others (see I. Smith 1990).

The last two projects were initiated under the Historic Places Amendment Act of 1975, a monument to the work of Green that gave the New Zealand Historic Places Trust control of the destruction of archaeological sites. Since 1975, the number of archaeologists employed by public and private agencies has matched the combined total of archaeologists in the universities and museums (about eighteen). Salvage archaeological projects have resulted in new surveys of remote or forested areas and the detailed archaeological investigation of the layout of fortified, residential, agricultural, and colonial industrial sites (Clough 1990).

Economic and Ecological Archaeology

In an innovative series of studies of North Island shell middens, Wilfred Shawcross combined grahame clark’s economic approach with that of the Californian school of midden analysis (Heizer and Cook 1956). Using the interrelationships among site size, population, and the energy content of shell middens, Shawcross’s work ranged from a study of the length of time a small group might have occupied a site (Shawcross 1967b) to the potential of harbor shellfish resources to support a human population (Shawcross 1967a) to the carrying capacity of both the North and South Islands based on seaboard productivity (Shawcross 1970b) and, finally, to the use of shell middens to construct a thermodynamic model that would allow a comparison of an early and late period midden in terms of work and efficiency (Shawcross 1972).

Detailed investigations of midden content and shellfish gathering practices have also been carried out by Reg Nichol (1988) and Atholl Anderson (1973). Anderson’s study of prehistoric shellfish gathering behavior at Black Rocks, Palliser Bay, represents an early and probably independent use of ecological niche and optimal foraging models in New Zealand archaeology. Since 1978, Anderson has pursued the interaction of the prehistoric human population and moas in New Zealand. The results of this taphonomic and chronological study are correlated with the ecology of the moa and the distribution and contents of early archaeological sites to show the rapid extinction of the moa through hunting between 900 and 400 b.p. (Anderson 1989; Anderson, Allingham, and Smith 1996). Anderson and Smith (1996) argue that the early period of base settlements (villages), supported by localities rich in moas and seals, was a short-lived phenomenon and an unsustainable colonizing strategy. Villages reemerged on the southern part of the South Island in the later part of its prehistory as the result of an intrusion of peoples from the North Island who were equipped with a more highly organized