Our excavations in January had already determined the burial sites, which were as close as possible to the original graves without risking disturbing them further. The tupuna were in their original groupings, although exactly how they were related is for the moment lost to the mists of time. A couple of hundred of their Rangitane ancestors had journeyed from all over New Zealand and the world to be here. There will be at least three news crews and a dozen other journalists waiting for us over the other side. By any measure it is a huge day, and by an amazing stroke of fortune I am going to play a much bigger part in it than I’d ever imagined. As I already mentioned, I’m here as a guest, but of course you have ot try and make yourself useful when there’s so much to do. The buses had arrived, everyone was buzzing and we were about to leave. I was putting my shoes on outside the meeting house, when I was summoned inside. The rimu caskets are about two metres long and extremely solid. Each one takes six (?) men to lift, and they need someone to help. Oh my God – I’m going to be a pall bearer! Let me just thank my Rangitane friends at this point because it was an incredible privlige and honour. I fall into place on the back corner of the fourth XXX, heart pounding, and we carefully carry it out to the waiting van. 

It takes about twenty minutes to drive from the marae to the end of Wairau Bar road. Dozens of vecicles are stacked in the parking lot by the dock and across the other side of the river, about 400 metres away we can see hundreds of people and the TV cameras waiting for us. It was a huge logistical job to set all this up – barges and ferries have been brought in from Picton to carry everyone. We will be going over absolutely last, transporting the tupuna across in something that looks like a landing craft from Saving Private Ryan. My crew are the last ones on board, which I suddenly realise means we will be the first to get off on the other side. My pulse rate quickens even more…

We all took a deep breath and stepped off the boat, carefully carrying our precious cargo. The Rangitane women began their waiata, and we moved into the semi-circle of hundreds of people, concentrating on every step and trying to stay in time with the other five bearers.

 From about here, I’m going to let Christine Cornege’s brilliant photographs tell you what happened. Those of us who were there don’t need me to you remind it was like – amazing. The emotion and electricity in the air. The release of sorrow and outpouring of joy and the feeling that this was such a good thing to be doing – returning the original inhabitants of Wairau Bar into the ground to finally rest in peace. The moment the sun came out, right after the last casket was lowered carefully into it’s resting place. For me, to be honest, it was a bit of a blur – I was focussing so hard on my unexpected role that all I could think about was holding on to the ornate brass handle, keeping my corner of the casket steady and level. I still can’t believe that I was there, a very small part of one of the most significant cultural and archaeological events to happen in New Zealand for years. Thank you so much. 

You can see the One News report HERE

The Malborough Express story HERE and reporter Claire Connell’s blog HERE

The Press HERE

and other news stories HERE and HERE

Of course protocol is everything during an event of this magnitude, so by the time we were officially welcomed onto the marae and all sat down for an enormous meal it was 10pm, but everyone had perked up again and excitement rippled around the dining tables as we feasted.

I sat up late drinking cups of tea and yarning to people – everyone was thrilled to be part of these historic events, especially parents who had brought their kids – the next generation of Rangitane who will inherit the guardianship of these ancestors.

By the time I went to bed, I realized I would have to pick my way back to my spot in the Wharenui in the dark through 100 sleeping  people covering the floor of the entire meeting house! Not easy, and my apologies to anyone I stood on, but I made it in the end. It’s a unique experience sleeping in such close proximity to so many other people – a bit difficult because of the symphony of snoring and other bodily noises, but also strangely comforting – everyone is part of this and so we live as a group for the duration of events. I lay awake for a while looking at the beautiful carvings on the ceiling of the wharenui, and then slept really well in the end.

The highway along the Kaikoura coast is one of my favourite pieces of road in all of New Zealand. After a huge breakfast we got back on the buses and headed off on the next leg of the journey. It was a beautiful morning – Wednesday 15th April – as we sped along the rugged coast, seals basking peacefully on the rocky shore, ducking through road tunnels that seem hardly big enough to fit a large coach through. Everything feels a bit squeezed along here – the mountains crowd right down to the ocean, which itself falls away quickly from shore to form an enormous undersea canyon. It’s epic country.

When you first descend into Cloudy Bay, on the main road into Blenheim, you can see Wairau Bar from the main road for a while, but it’s hard to appreciate exactly what you’re looking at – it’s a long way away across flat terrain. But if anybody appreciated the place it’s this bus load of people, and as soon as we see it the buzz on board the bus went up a notch, and the anticipation began to build again. After at least some sleep and a couple of huge meals we were ready for the next stage of the voyage.

We arrived at Rangitane’s Omaka marae about lunchtime, and the tupuna were led into the Wharenui by a rousing and energetic welcome home. Kiley and his warriors led a triumphant procession onto the marae grounds, and they were laid in state for one final night’s rest before the ultimate return tomorrow morning.

There was still a lot of work to be done – tomorrow was the big day, when hundreds of guests, media and VIPs would be present for the repatriation ceremony out on the windswept expanses of Wairau Bar itself. I tried to make myself useful – and in fact work quickly found me, as I was “drafted” by a group of Rangitane wahine and put to work carrying heaps of flax leaves they were cutting from around the marae. The leaves would be woven into traditional mats that the caskets would rest on – and it took a lot of carrying!

 It was an early night for all except the weavers, who ended up staying up all night completing their task – an amazing effort considering how tired they must have been already – great work ladies! (I must admit I could have stayed up all night and kept them amused by letting them tease me, boss me around and call me “Bloggy”, but I sneaked off to bed…).

And so ended day 2 of the trip – the 15th of April. The tupuna were very, very close to being home, but their journey, and ours, would only finish once they were back in the ground on the Boulder Bank  at Wairau Bar at 10 o’clock the next morning…

Many thanks to Christine Cornege, Claire Connell and the Malborough Express for the amazing photos. Please check out their coverage of the journey at Claire’s blog here.

I re-entered the story about three months after I left Wairau Bar and the blog went into hibernation for a while!! On a sunny morning I strolled across Christchurch for the beginning of the end – the first stage of a multi-phase journey to take the ancestors back to their home on Wairau Bar. It was April 14th, 2009 – for Rangitane destined to be forever a historic date. Right now a couple of bus loads of them were heading this way from Blenheim – coming en masse to reclaim the bones of their tupuna from Canterbury Museum for immediate return and reburial at Wairau Bar. They had kindly invited me along, both as a guest and so I could finish the story on the blog. I didn’t really know what to expect, to be honest. I knew it would be emotional, but…

Everybody seemed tense long before it even began. This was a huge day for everybody concerned – Rangitane, Canterbury Museum, Ngai Tahu, who would welcome Rangitane onto their territory, Government Ministers and many many VIPs from around the country. And a blogger, trying to be inconspicuous!

The buses are late – rumours fly that one broke down somewhere near Kaiapoi (ironically a location of much strife – see here and here). There’s a lot of pacing and looking at watches. The media are here in force – film crews and newspaper reporters and photographers – poised and ready and no doubt worrying about deadlines. Suddenly and miraculously, the long-awaited convoy appears, and things really take off. A hundred-strong party of Rangitane have come like a storm –  warriors wielding taiha and wearing angry bands of red pigment across their eyes leap off the bus to confront the crowd outside the museum, including many bewildered tourists who struggle to comprehend what they are seeing. Led by Kiley Nepeia, the warriors execute a lethal mau rakau, or weaponry ritual, to keep the group safe. Off the bus they pour – kids and oldies and in between, many from Blenheim but others from further afield in the Rangitane universe – Levin, Nelson, even Auckland. After a quick catch-up with my old friend Richard Bradley (“Stick with us cuz – we’re going in as a group”), we sweep through the Museum entrance and into a wall of emotion.

The women of Rangitane are all dressed in  black, with traditional mourning wreaths of koromiko twigs, and when they begin to wail I feel like someone has tipped an ice-cube down the back of the my shirt – it’s the most eerily beautiful sound you could imagine – almost unearthly, but grounded in very real grief. It’s impossible not to feel a tight knot form in my throat.

The warriors address their ancestors, declaring they are here to return them home :

Honestly, there was thunder and lightening in the air – I’ve never experienced such an intense emotional atmosphere. There are many tears – even from some of the news crews. The Rangitane women and warriors surround the four rimu caskets that hold the remains of 53 of their ancient ones. They clearly mean business – it has taken 70 years and three generations to get to this moment.

There is a special link between Judith and “Aunty” – the second person found at Wairau Bar by Jim Eyles way back in 1939. Only her skull was removed, and she has been honoured with her own carved wakatu papaku (carved wooden funeral box). If you look closely Judith is wearing an identical replica of the taonga found with Aunty’s grave – an enormous four-piece whale and porpoise bone necklace that is considered one of the most remarkable examples of early Polynesian art ever found.

The crowd bulges forward to hear Rangitane, Canterbury Museum  and Kai Tahu representitives speak, and my adrenaline is pumping. I wish I could understand Maori, I really do, but I’m afraid I don’t and so I’m sure I missed much of the finer detail of what was said by the various speakers. However, everyone’s emotion was so raw, and so projected, that I found I could at least follow the general tone of what was going on – a complex hurricane of anger, pride, sorrow, resolution and apology. Tears were shed and sticks waved. Fingers pointed and voices raised. But at the end of it, once these feelings had been vented and we were all mingling out the back over tea and sausage rolls,  there was great joy and excitement – after so many decades of conflict and controversy over these people, everyone had come together and agreed that they were going home…

You can see the TV1 news story about the Canterbury Museum ceremony HERE

And newspaper stories:

MALBOROUGH EXPRESS (also  this one) and reporter Claire Connell’s blog HERE)

PRESS

TVNZ

TO BE CONTINUED…

It is with a heavy heart that I write this not from my shady media tent on-site at Wairau Bar, but from the “real world” of Dunedin.  Sorry there’s been a bit of downtime between posts – after a mad scramble out of Wairau Bar and Blenheim over the weekend I’ve pretty much been asleep for two days solid – it was a full-on three weeks, but what an incredible experience. It’s going to take a while to process everything that happened, but my time at Wairau Bar has been one of the best experiences of my life, that’s for sure.

Apparently there’s an unwritten rule on archaeological digs – kind of a Murphy’s Law -  the best things are always found at the last minute. This was very much the case on  Friday, the last day of excavation, as all kinds of interesting artefacts began to show up. The most surprising were found in Area 1, the first repatriation site that wasn’t supposed to have anything in it but turned out to contain all kinds of important finds. In one corner, completely out of the blue, we were stunned to find a genuine taonga – the remains of a beautiful necklace of whale bone and dolphin teeth :

Wow – now there’s something you don’t see very often – only a handful of artefacts like this have ever been found. Right beside it were the scattered remains of the rest of the necklace – around a hundred dolphin teeth, some of them burnt, each with a tiny perfect hole drilled in it for threading. How did they do that?

I know they made drill-points out of stone for making large holes, but how would you chip a drill-point to be only a couple of mm across, and then use it to drill hundreds of perfect holes in dolphin enamel, which must be pretty tough stuff? I asked a couple of the archaeologists, and they weren’t sure. The people who lived here 700 years ago were obviously superb craftsmen – if anyone has any ideas how to drill through dolphin teeth with stone tools please share! (no conspiracy theorists).

By Friday afternoon, things were really getting frantic. With only a few hours left on the excavation, there was still plenty of work to do. Archaeologists don’t like to leave things half-finished, so all of the excavation pits (by now there were over a dozen small ones) had to be excavated to a certain level, all artefacts measured by laser, bagged, tagged and the surrounding features drawn and photographed.

The site was a hive of activity, as we had plenty of visitors as well.

A new area (or areas – it all got a bit confusing for a non-archaeologist!) had been opened up just down from where we had found the first structure remains – on top of the highest point of land on the site, a mound named Moua by Rangtane.  It seems “The Mound” may have been the centre of the village’s major buildings – we noticed subtle terracing once the grass was cut, and sure enough the new pit seemed to contain traces of another 700-year old structure – this one even bigger and with more typical house features.

A row of post holes seemed to mark the wall of a building about 5 metres long.

Inside it was the remains of a perfect little hearth – a fireplace with no bones or cooking stones, built inside a whare just for warmth on a chilly Wairau Bar night :

As the team began to excavate the rest of the area around the “house”, artefacts popped up all over the place :

As I’ve said before, the aim of this expedition was not to find artefacts, but to find safe repatriation sites and perhaps learn a bit more about how the ancient residents of Wairau Bar lived. Even so, I could tell the archaeologists were quite excited, and the finds gave everyone a boost after a long hot tiring 3-week excavation. The only trouble was we had to go! At about 4pm on Friday, it was tools down, and we all had to face the fact that our expedition was over.

And as for packing up and leaving…well it’s too sad to write about really! Wayne Abbott, who lives on the Bar and was our excellent host, warmed me right at the beginning that “this place gets under your skin” and now that I’ve left I know what he means. I miss it intensely, and of course living in camp with a group of people for that long means you bond – a big hi to everyone from Rangitane, the archaeological team and support crew – miss ya.

I’ll be back tomorrow with my last post of this phase, a photographic odessy to high altitude, plus some conclusions about the main features of the archaeological work.

Even the shellfish were huge – I’m a big fan of mussels, and I’ve never seen anything like the shells we were finding  :

Apparently all the locals know that when a big southerly storm hits, these enormous mussels (which must be a different species to the normal green-lipped ones we normally eat)  wash up on the beach and there’s a free feed to be had. The early people of Wairau Bar certainly knew this, and obviously feasted on a lot of other kinds of shellfish as well, like pipis, paua and cockles, many of them quite a lot bigger than than ones we see today.

We found a lot of dog bones and skulls, so they were obviously a favourite dish, plus seal and sea lion and of course the ultimate ancient delicacy – moa.

Imagine that you’ve travelled across the vast Pacific ocean from your home islands, where the biggest land animals are pigs and dogs and the largest birds are chickens, and found a strange new home completely different in climate and geography from where you came from, with mountains and glaciers and temperate forests, and it’s full of absolutely enormous birds, twice as high as a person.  What would those people have thought when they first saw a moa towering above them?

We now know that there were 11 species of these bizarre birds, ranging in size from about the same as a turkey, to the true giants and the tallest birds that ever lived – Dinornis (the Giant Moa) which stood around 3 metres high and weighed in at a whopping 250kg or so. Different species lived in different envoronments ranging from coastal plains to high alpine tussock. They belong to a family of birds called ratites, which means they’re related to all the other big birds in the southern hemispehre like ostriches, emus, cassowaries and of course New Zealand’s other weird flightless bird – the kiwi. There were five different species that lived in the top of the South Island, and we’ve found the bones of all of them in this huge hangi pit.

As we got deeper, we began to find whole bones :

Many people have this idea that in places like Wairau Bar huge herds of moa were somehow rounded up and driven into a dead end to be slaughtered, but in fact there’s absolutely no evidence anywhere in New Zealand of this kind of “mass killing”. It seems moa hunting was probably a lot like modern day pig-hunting – groups of hunters heading inland into the bush with their dogs, stalking individual moa, killing and butchering them in the field, and bringing the best cuts back home – which is why most of the bones we are finding in this oven pit are leg bones.  There may have been a few moa on the Bar itself originally , but they would have soon been taken out, and the hunters would  probably have paddled up river in waka into the interior of Malborough to seek moa in the valleys and forest that once covered the whole province.

I’ll post a complete list of the species found in the pit once they’ve all been identified back at the lab in Dunedin, but pretty much every bird species you could think of were found, plus more than a few that unfortunately aren’t around anymore. But the big surprise we found at the bottom of the hangi wasn’t the remains of any animal – it was the pit itself. Once all the debris had been cleared out, the archaeologisats were stunned to see that the huge oven was lined with stone – something that has never been seen on this scale anywhere in New Zealand or the entire Pacific. We dug about a third of the oven out – and it’s estimated the whole thing was over 4 metres across and at least 1.5 deep, all carefully crafted and lined with rocks. Some of the local Rangtiane guys, who know a thing or three about hangis, reckon they’ve been to huis where a thousand people have been fed from pits much smaller than this.

And the truly remarkable thing is we know from the fluxgate gradiometer work that this mega-hangi is just one of six all about the same size, all arranged in a circle on the edge of the lagoon :

The scale of these ovens is just staggering – how many people did they feed? It must have been way more than actually lived at the Wairau Bar settlement at any one time, which raises some intriuging possibilities. Were they for some special occasion, such as a enormous hui, or a very important tangi (funeral)? Was Wairau Bar a hub for the entire population of the country at the time, or the centre of trading? It is after all in a strategically central position in the country, so anyone sailing north or south would be passing by, and we already know there are types of stone here from one end of New Zealand to the other . It’s impossible to answer these questions at the moment, but this stunning discovery just goes to show that this amazing place still has plenty of secrets and mysteries yet to be solved.

Quinn.

Canterbury Museum is where everything that was excavated from the Wairau Bar settlement in the past has been stored and studied, so I thought you might be interested in seeing where they keep it all and how much is there. As well as 147 taonga excavated from burials, there are approximately 2,000 other artefacts from the site included a huge variety of necklaces, bracelets, pendants, fish hooks, fishing lures, stone cutters, adzes, drill points, files, awls, sinkers, needles and spear points, as well as 61 boxes of midden, and almost 4,000 animal bones.

This is going to be more of a photo essay than an article – if you’re interested in finding out more I highly recommend you visit the Museum if you get a chance. Many of the more spectacular artefacts are on public display, but you won’t be able to see most of the items, which are kept safe and secure in a special storage vault. Of course that’s another blogger’s perk – I got to have a jack behind the scenes so I can show you what goes on, plus I tracked down a few other items, not from Wairau Bar, that I thought you might be interested in!

Many thanks to Roger Fyfe and Paul Scofield who hosted me and showed me around – top blokes both of them and a wealth of information.

I just wanted to finish with a special  word for all the Rangitane people out there  – I know a lot of you read the blog from overseas to keep up with what’s going on – many thanks for your feedback and comments. At the moment, Canterbury Museum are in the process of designing (along with Rangitane of course) the wakatu papaku that will bear your tupuna back to Wairau Bar – they’re coming home soon…

kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawa nui

Quinn.

Well, things are moving very fast at the excavations now. We’re into our final week and the clock is very much ticking.  The sites for the April repatriation have been decided and are being explored for archaeological material – and there’s no shortage of that.  Yesterday I showed you how much information can be gleaned from just one small stone adze – imagine what we can find out from a 5×5 metre square. That adze is the only intact one we have found so far, but even a small piece of stone chipped off during adze-making or a blackened hangi rock is valuable in its own way – especially the location in which they are found. Area 1 has become covered in  small flags, tent pegs and rather strangely kebab sticks as the team discover hundreds and hundreds of stone flakes and oven stones and carefully mark the exact position in which each was found.

I thought this was a bit odd when I first saw the archaeologists doing it, but after they explained what exactly they were up to, and what they could tell from this small forest of kebabs it all made sense and turned out to be rather clever. The two main types of things that are being measured are features – like fire pits, the remains of buildings and middens – and artefacts like stone flakes and adzes.  As each layer is uncovered, one of the archaeologists carefully draws the location of each feature, and the exact location of every artefact is recorded using the same laser-guided robotic theodolite (Total Station) I talked about in earlier posts. When all of this information is put together in a computer  and plotted on a map, lots of interesting things emerge.

The hand-drawn diagrams and computer-recorded locations of artefacts are all put together into what’s called a site plan. The latest site plan for area 1 looks like this (click to make bigger) :

As you can see, there’s a lot there! The major feature that runs right up the middle of the map is a really significant find -  an area of round rocks that have been deliberately laid down like cobblestones and used as a kind of workshop surface to make adzes on. As you can see by all the little blue dots, there are thousands of adze flakes lying across it – but although they may look just randomly scattered, there are patterns that can tell us exactly how this “adze factory” was used. Even the blank patch of the right of the plan is significant.

Here’s another version of the site plan with some labels and interpretation (click to make bigger):

If the post holes on the right hand side are joined up, the big blank area is explained – it’s where a building or whare was situated, so that’s why there’s no adze flakes there. The paved area can then be explained as a “paepae” – a platform built around the outside of a house for use as a working area. Paepae are a common feature in East Polynesia, where they are made from coral or rock, but nothing on this scale has been excavated in a New Zealand site before – yet another link between the people who lived at Wairau Bar and their original home in the Pacific. (The word paepae has a slightly different meaning in Maori – it means the bench at the front of a meeting house where people about to speak sit, which I guess is still a kind of working area!)

The main concentration of adze flakes spreads out in a kind of fan, and from that we can make a good guess as to the exact spot where that adze maker sat, 700 years ago, chipping away at his work.  We could even say with some certainly that he was right-handed – adzes are “flaked” by striking the adze with a very hard piece of rock called a hammerstone, which sends large flakes off in one direction, and smaller ones flying in the other. All the big ones are on the left, small ones on the other side so he must have been using his right hand to strike.

Behind the adze maker, at the bottom of the paepae, is a pile of broken adze fragments – either ones that have broken during construction and thrown over his shoulder, or a kind of “recycling bin” of pieces that can be reworked into something else. All the fires found in this area are all shallow pits and have no sign of food scraps, so they were probably just for heat and light. The one  in the middle of all the adze fragments and right in front of where our adze maker sat must have been his desklamp!

What we have found in Area 1 is  exactly the kind of discovery the archaeologists from the University of Otago were after – small but significant details about what day to day life was like for these ancestors, and how their 700 year-old village functioned. Thanks to what we’re finding, this amazing and important community is alive again…

Quinn.

During the slow and careful excavation of one edge of the 5×5 metre pit, we were quite stoked to find the first intact artefact of the excavations – a beautiful little stone adze.

Although a lot of modern archaeology relies on technology and advanced electronics, such has the robotic theodolite and fluxgate magnetometer that I discussed in earlier posts, there’s still no substitute for the trained eye and experience of an expert. No sooner had we freed the adze from where it had lain for seven centuries, then the archaeologists were able to tell me all kinds of details about it, just from looking. For a start, even the location it was buried was significant. It had been deliberately placed at the bottom of a post hole from some kind of structure, probably as some kind of spiritual symbol.

Now to you or I, one rock may look pretty similar to another, but not only could Richard Walter tell me what kind of rock the adze was made of , he could even identity which particular hill it was quarried from! You can’t  make a high impact tool like an adze out of just any kind of rock – most would shatter or crack if you tried to strike something hard with them. The best materials to make wood and stone working tools from are hard, dense minerals that have been forged in the high pressure and temperature of volcanic activity under certain chemical conditions. This  kind of stuff doesn’t occur just anywhere – there are only a few places in New Zealand where ideal adze-making rock occurs on the surface and can be quarried, and often there may only be very small quantities of it available, making this material a valuable resource.

Each source will produce a distinctive and unique type of rock, and by looking at the colour and texture of the adze Richard was able to be pretty sure it was made from Tahanga basalt – a dark, dense rock found in only one location in the country – Tahanga Hill in the Opito region of the Coromandel Penninsula. It’s not that surprising that the stie at Wairau Bar should contain stone from hundreds of kilometres away – based on what has been found before it seems the people who lived here had already thoroughly explored the entire country and its mineral resources within a very short time of arriving. A whole range of “imported” rock types have been found at the settlement – obsidian from Mayor Island in the Bay of Plenty, argillite from D’Urville Island in the Cook Strait, chert from near Kaikoura, pumice from the Volcanic Plateau and perhaps the most sought-after of all – greenstone or pounamu from the West Coast. By using their twin-hulled sailing waka the tupuna would have been able to sail north or south up the coast, or paddle smaller waka up the Wairau River, and reach anywhere in New Zealand within quite a short time, bringing back cargoes of valuable minerals to make their tools from. They may even have established trade networks and had other iwi come to them to barter and exchange local commodities. All of this was possible within perhaps one generation of first reaching and settling in their new home.

After identifying the exact location the adze material had come from, Richard and Chris Jacomb began to tell me about the tool itself. Adzes are one of the main way archaeologists can trace the development of early culture – you can’t use carbon dating or any of those modern techniques to find out when it was made – any date you did get would of course be from when the rock itself was formed – likely to be many millions of years!  However the shape and style of adzes does change over time, and is a useful way to estimate when they were made. This one is apparently a classic East Polynesian design – identical to ones found in areas like the Cook Islands from a similar period. Technically it’s known as a Type 1, meaning it’s quadrangular in shape (in other words the back is narrower than the face). A “tang” has been carved into the butt end – a narrower area to allow a wooden handle to be lashed on.  We can even tell it had been used a lot because this area has been polished extra smooth by the flax fibres that were wrapped around the handle.

At the business end, other details of the adze can be determined. The blade has been deliberately made convex (that is, it curves outwards) to make the tool cut through wood more easily. An adze of this size was probably used for working and smoothing planks of timber, rather than detailed carving, and the convex shape and angle of the blade would have helped lift up woodchips and stop the tool getting stuck in the wood when it was swung like a pick-axe.

We can even predict that at some point, whoever used this tool was probably quite annoyed. There is a small chip out of one corner of the blade, and by looking closely the archaeologists can tell that this happened during use. There are very fine “shockwaves” in the rock exposed by the chip, radiating outwards from a single point right on the corner of the blade. This shows the impact that caused the chip came from the cutting edge, rather than any other part of the adze, and this must have happened while it was at work.

So just from one small adze, a whole story emerges. Some time around seven centuries ago, a block of basalt rock was quarried from Tahanga Hill in the Coromandel, and sailed down the East Coast to Wairau Bar. It was made into an adze, attached to a wooden handle, and used to shape timber and planks, for use in buildings and waka. At some point, the user swung it at a log, a small chip was knocked out of the blade, and they were probably not very happy that a favourite tool was ruined! Rather than repair or rework it, they decided to bury it in the foundations of a new building for spiritual protection or luck, where it lay for 700 years until last Saturday afternoon. Impressive!

This is just the beginning of what the excavations at Area 1 can tell us  – I’ll be back soon with more.

Quinn.

On a lighter note, most of the team got their 2 seconds of fame and made it into the news items – including me by accident. I generally prefer to remain of the other side of the camera, but if you look carefully at the very beginning of the TVNZ story,  there’s some dude sitting next to Alexi O’Brien in the boat wearing a funny hat – yours truly. My Mum was very excited!!!. There was a flurry of phone-calls  from lots of other proud Mums and family to everyone else as well, which we all got a giggle out of.

Geoff Moffett from Radio New Zealand was also here – he will be on the radio on Monday morning doing a story on us during the Summer Report segment.

Have a great weekend everyone,

Quinn.

You can find the TV3 news story here

One News here

a segment on Te Karere in Maori here

and the Prime news story here (we’re about 7:49 into the bulletin)

Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was the largest bird of prey that ever existed on Planet Earth – an enormous raptor with a wingspan pushing 3 metres (that’s 10 feet) and claws the size of a tiger’s (around 75 mm or 3  inches long). Actually they were basically flying tigers in a way – top of the food chain predators that hunted and killed another giant New Zealand bird – the moa. The largest moas were over 3 metres tall and weighed around 250kg, yet they were easy prey for Haast’s Eagle  -  enormous moa pelvis bones have been found with twin sets of claw marks in them – proof that  Haast’s Eagle could take down anything that walked through the forests of New Zealand – including people.

The giant eagles must have terrified the first people to land on these shores, especially since there would have been nothing even remotely like them back in the islands of Polynesia. Those early settlers must have quite literally not known what hit them. I found a clip of a BBC documentary called “Monsters We Met” on Youtube that paints a pretty vivid picture of what life must have been like sharing a forest with one of these giant  predators : Haast’s Eagle attack

This is a longer version of the clip, which for some reason is dubbed in Spanish and English at the same time -  a bit distracting but you get the general idea :

Scary stuff! We all like to go out into the bush when we can and soak in the beauty and tranquility of New Zealand’s wilderness, but 700 years ago, when people were living at Wairau Bar, the forest must have had a very different atmosphere – people would probably never go anywhere in the bush by themselves, and must have always felt like any second one of these flying monsters was going to swoop down and smash into them at 80 kilometres an hour with eight razor sharp claws.

Actually there’s a story about these giant eagles in the Wairau Bar area that has been passed down through the generations of the Rangitane people. Richard Bradley, the Rangitane representative here at the excavations, told it to me:

When people first arrived in this area,  a terrible flying taniwha called Ngarara Huarau began to attack them  and carry men women and children off to their deaths. A chief named Rongoimai Papa was determined to kill the monster, so his people could safely settle in the area. Rongoimai and a group of his warriors hid in a cave in a small bay just around the coast from here, and enticed the taniwha/giant eagle into landing in the narrow cove. Once it was on the ground (presumably feeding on some kind of bait they had left) the warriors charged out of the cave and Rongaimai broke the taniwha’s wing with his mere (club). Once the creature was crippled, it was swiftly beaten to death, and when its belly was slit open all the taonga (treasures) of the people it had carried away were revealed. It’s feathers were ripped out, and they turned into a special kind of eel found only in this region. With the dangerous monster vanquished, Rongoimai was able to safely build a pa and people could once more walk around without fear of attack from the sky.

If you’d never heard of the giant Haast’s Eagle, you might be tempted to dismiss this story as just a myth, but like many of these old Maori stories, there is no doubt an element of truth to it. When the first people arrived in New Zealand, around 700 years ago, there WERE flying taniwha that killed and ate people! And I would think the only way to kill one would be to get it on the ground when it’s at it’s most vulnerable. What makes this story even more amazing is today we found a taniwha bone!

You can imagine that the remains of these flying taniwha were considered valuable items – by possessing the fearsome creature’s bones, a person would absorb it’s power and mana. The bone we found is part of the ulna, or wing bone, which has been deliberately snapped off and begun to be crafted into an awl – a tool for punching holes in things. Bones like this were found at Wairau Bar during the original excavations in the 1940′s, all similarly crafted.

I’m secretly hoping we’ll find something like a claw, or even a skull, but I’m not holding my breath. Like all large predators such as tigers or Great White sharks, Haast’s eagle was probably never very common – by one estimate there were only around 1,000 of them when people arrived on these shores, and they only ever lived in the South Island. Once an even more efficient hunter arrived in New Zealand – the human – and began to compete for the eagle’s main food, moas, the flying taniwha quickly became extinct, fading from the physical world into a realm of myth and legend.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Haast’s Eagle (and you should be!) try here, here and here. Only three complete skeletons have ever been found, all in natural rather than cultural sites  – Te Papa and Otago Museum both have them on display.

Quinn.

PS keep an eye on the TV news tonight – we’re having a media open day, and there will be crews from TV1, TV3, Prime and Maori TV filming at the excavation site.