Marae

A marae's defining feature is the ahu, a raised platform, usually of stone, set at one end of an open court that is itself walled, paved or otherwise marked off from ordinary ground. Patrick Vinton Kirch's archaeological survey of the Pacific describes marae ranging from small single platform structures serving one family to vast stepped and terraced complexes, built without mortar from fitted or piled stone, that organized the ceremonial life of an entire district or island. Unlike the roofed temple architecture of much of the world, a marae's ritual space is open air, and its architecture is defined by what it excludes and demarcates rather than by what it encloses.

Construction and use followed local custom rather than one Pacific wide standard: some marae included carved images, upright stones representing gods or ancestors, or ovens for offerings, while others were austere platforms with almost no additional structure. What is common across the region is the underlying logic, a bounded, elevated, deliberately non domestic space set aside for contact with gods and ancestors, distinct from a heiau in name only, where Hawaiian tradition uses that separate term for the same functional structure.

What a marae was used for, and by whom, changed dramatically with colonization and has changed again since. Across most of Polynesia the arrival of Christian missions in the nineteenth century ended state sponsored temple cult; many marae were abandoned, dismantled for their stone, or left as archaeological sites rather than as active ceremonial ground. Taputapuatea, on Raiatea in French Polynesia, is the clearest case of both directions at once: its priesthood and its dedication to the god Oro ended under mission pressure in the nineteenth century, yet the site has become the acknowledged centre of the Pacific voyaging revival that began in the 1970s, when crews rebuilt double hulled canoes and sailed them by traditional navigation to demonstrate that Polynesian settlement of the Pacific was deliberate seamanship. Kirch's account of that revival is explicit that the crews themselves describe their landfalls at Taputapuatea as a return rather than a claim of unbroken ceremonial descent.

In New Zealand the word marae took an entirely different path, coming to mean the community meeting ground and its meeting house rather than a stone temple platform, and remaining, in that sense, the working centre of Maori communal life today rather than a historical structure. Whatever ceremony an active or reactivated marae holds today belongs to the community that maintains it and is not described here.