Although few reminders exist, the history of settlement in the Christchurch area goes back around a thousand years. Some radical historians date it back a further millenia before the settlement of the North Island, but more conventionally it's thought that the Waitaha tribe travelled from the North Island's east coat to Pegasus Bay sometime in the early 1000s, to hunt the large moa bird for food.

Today's landscape is vastly different. Large forests of matai and totara trees once grew along the coast, and the now treeless Canterbury Plains were also partially forested. By about 1450 the moa had been killed off, and large tracts of the forests had been burnt.

Between 1500 and 1700, the Ngai Mamoe from the Napier region, and, later, the Ngai Tahu tribes from the North Island, travelled south and became dominant, either by conquest or intermarriage. By 1800 the Ngai Tahu controlled the coast, with a fortified village (or pa) at Kaiapoi. This was also a major trading centre for greenstone, which was collected over the Alps on the west coast.

Europeans first set foot on the Banks Peninsula around 1815, with sealers and whalers visiting what is now the Lyttleton harbour in increasing numbers. During this time the Maori communities were in crisis, with European diseases and tribal warfare seeing a significant drop in population. In May 1840 the Treaty of Waitangi boat sailed into Akaroa harbour and the Ngai Tahu chiefs signed on behalf of their tribes.

The vast holdings of the tribe were a compelling attraction to colonisers, and throughout the 1840s and 1850s numerous land transactions were carried out. However, from the outset Crown officials failed to uphold their promises in relation to a number of agreements. Kemp's purchase of 1848, which secured 8000 hectares (20,000 acres) of Ngai Tahu land, including Christchurch City, was never settled properly and formed the basis for the Ngai Tahu claim that was finally settled in 1999 under the Ngai Tahu Settlement Act.

Early attempts to establish farming communities began in the late 1830s, and in 1847 John Godley and Edward Wakefield met to plan what was to become the city of Christchurch. Wakefield was a conservative visionary who believed that, unlike anarchic Australian cities such as Sydney and Hobart, towns could be planned before settlers arrived. Village churches, shops and schools would be built along English lines, with imported gentry controlling large runs of land. Cantabrians often fix the town's founding to the arrival in 1850 of four ships that brought the first settlers. By the end of that year around 3000 people had made the journey.