There may have been some exploration and settlement before eruption of Mount Tarawera in about 1315, based on finds of bones from Polynesian rats and rat-gnawed shells, and evidence of widespread forest fires in the decade or so earlier; but the most recent evidence points to the main settlement occurring as a planned mass migration somewhere between 1320 and 1350. This broadly aligns with analyses from Māori oral traditions, which describe the arrival of ancestors in a number of large ocean-going canoes () in around 1350.