The history of the Canterbury Region of New Zealand dates back to settlement by the Māori people in about the 10th century. Pre-1840 Māori period Introduction Probably no more than 500 Māori were living in Canterbury when European settlement began in the 1840s. They were part of the Ngāi Tahu tribe which occupied the South Island of New Zealand, remnants of a more numerous population which may have numbered between 3000 and 4000 people at the beginning of the 19th century. Decimated by civil wars from 1810 to 1815, they were almost exterminated between 1830 and 1832 in attacks by the northern Ngāti Toa, led by Te Rauparaha. Early Moa-hunters The earliest settlers in Canterbury appear to have been the people described as the Moa-hunters, arriving about the 10th century near the time of the traditional discovery of the South Island by Rākaihautū. Traces of the presence of these people are found in camp and burial sites near river mouths, the northern valleys of Banks Peninsula and on Hikuraki Bay. The burial sites of the Moa-hunters containing moa eggs, ornamental artifacts and whale's tooth pendants show that their culture differed from that of the later Maori. South Island tradition however gives no account of the Moa-hunters. There is the legend of a shadowy aboriginal people known as "Te Kahui Tipua", or 'the band of ogres', who were destroyed by later arrivals called Te Rapuwai. Archaic Māori period It appears likely that not only Te Rapuwai, in whose time the forests of Canterbury were said to have been burned and the Moa exterminated, but also the Waitaha, who followed them in the earliest period, were established in the South Island long before the arrival of the first waves of the 14th century Polynesian 'fleet' in New Zealand. The Waitaha who at that time were occupying the Eastern districts of the South Island, appear to have been a numerous people, with a large Pa near Mairangi and Kapukariki and other settlements on the banks of the Rakaia River. One of these people, Te Hau, is credited with having destroyed a large bird of prey, which nested on one of the large spurs of the Torlesse Range. The reference to this bird is interpreted as being a composite memory of the extinct swan (Chenopis) and the extinct eagle (Hieraeetus moorei) which were contemporaries of the moa in the pre-fleet era. In North Canterbury