Abstract
Archaeological investigations at early New Zealand mission sites provide a unique opportunity to explore a period during which much culture contact occurred between Maori and Europeans. The Hohi Mission Station, for example, was the first permanently occupied European settlement established on mainland New Zealand. Under the protection of Ruatara and the Rangihoua Pā, the settlement was the locus of ongoing exchanges that influenced the development of New Zealand as a nation. While some work has been conducted into mission archaeology in New Zealand, the field is still in its infancy and aspects of it, such as faunal analysis, remain largely underdeveloped. This thesis aims to address this knowledge gap by exploring the diets and subsistence strategies of the European missionaries at Hohi by utilising two methods of enquiry; the archaeozoological analysis of the faunal remains recovered during the 2013 field season and the analysis of the historical documentary record relating to missionaries. Using multiple lines of research allows for the most complete picture of missionary diet and subsistence strategies to be obtained. The historical record suggests that food resources were in limited supply, and much of it came from trade with local Maori. The archaeozoological analysis confirmed this notion, with a limited faunal assemblage providing few individual animals. The primary species mentioned in the documentary record was pig and this agrees with the results of the faunal analysis.