Human geography

They shaped these landscapes profoundly: terracing the slopes for cultivation, digging pits to store kumara, establishing middens, and fortifying the summits as pā (defensive posts) with ditches and palisades. Cones were often divided into wedges from the summit downward, ensuring each hapū had fair access to coastal areas, defensive high points, and the broader region. The evidence of this occupation, shells, bones, and oval-shaped storage pits, can still be found in the volcanic soil today. More information is available at the Tūpuna Maunga Authority website.

When European settlement began in earnest in 1840, this carefully inhabited landscape was increasingly treated as a resource to be exploited. The city’s 38 scoria cones and 16 explosion craters were quarried for road-building stone, drained for sports fields and highways, and repurposed for industry and recreation, from water skiing in maar craters to vineyards in old explosion pits. Some early conservation efforts preserved a handful of cones as parks, but the demand for land and building materials proved overwhelming.

Some volcanoes have been so heavily quarried that their central cones have disappeared entirely, including Maungataketake, whose name ironically translates to "everlasting mountain" in Māori. Efforts to restore damaged landforms are underway in some locations, using biosolids and other materials to reconstruct original shapes, but destruction has far outpaced preservation.

Near Maungataketake, the Ihumātao area became the focus of a significant multi-year protest, successfully preventing a housing development on land confiscated from Māori in 1863, the government ultimately purchasing it back for $30 million NZD. Fourteen of Auckland’s volcanic maunga are now under the care of the Tūpuna Maunga Authority, a statutory body established in 2014 to restore and protect these ancestral mountains. A UNESCO bid has also been submitted to recognise the Auckland Volcanic Field as a Mixed Cultural and Natural Heritage site, and researchers are mapping volcanic sites as educational destinations, small but meaningful steps toward ensuring that what remains of this extraordinary landscape is valued before it is lost.