Marae

The Marae’s sacred clearing serves as a gathering place for ceremony and ritual.

The Polynesian communities that colonized the Pacific area at the end of the first millennium BCE brought their ceremonial and religious practices with them. As they settled, they established numerous ceremonial spaces, known as marae, which spread far and wide throughout the Polynesian world. The marae were all laid out along the same basic plan. Built on open land, they consisted of an area of variable shape, surrounded by low walls, where large groups could gather. A house for the gods or spirits, in which bodies were sometimes buried, was built facing the sea, adjoining this area or directly attached to the enclosure wall. Stakes, stones, and sometimes statues, serving as divine and ancestral representations, were erected around the marae or at one end of it. Priests (qariki) oversaw collective ceremonies, harvest celebrations, rites of passage, and feasts. These occasions could bring together the whole population, or be limited to chiefs.