A Feast of Moa

We always knew the deep oven pit filled with bones was going to yield a few surprises, but even the experienced archaeologists here at Wairau Bar were amazed at what lay at the bottom of it. Last  time I updated you about Area #4, we were digging through the top layer of broken bone fragments, dense with the discarded scraps of 700-year old feasting. All the bones we were finding had been smashed, or broken open to get at the nutritious marrow inside, or snapped to make artifacts like the Haast’s Eagle bones.  As the hole got deeper, the “rubbish” got denser and more full of interesting things, to the point where it was just solid bone and shells without any soil in it at all – and everything started to get bigger.