HS-3: Water Infrastructure as Cultural Heritage — Indigenous and Colonial Water Management in Aotearoa New Zealand

Pre-European Māori communities in Aotearoa New Zealand constructed water infrastructure at scales and levels of sophistication that qualify as hydraulic engineering: canal networks spanning 19 km with consistent cross-sections, managed wetland landscapes of 280 ha, ditch networks integrating irrigation, reticulation, and drainage across more than 50 ha, and geothermal water routing across thermal fields of 12 km^2. Colonial land policy classified these managed landscapes as waste land and converted them to pastoral farmland, destroying the physical evidence along with the systems. This paper presents the first systematic catalogue of these systems framed explicitly as engineering heritage, drawing on primary…