Heritage on the highway: roadworkers unearth lost villages along Kaikōura coast

Thursday, 30 November 2017

NCTIR workers have found a fully-intact stone oven at The Pines, just south of Clarence, while excavating to rebuild State Highway 1 north of Kaikōura.

Remnants of coastal communities, some believed to be more than 600-years-old, have been found along State Highway 1, north of Kaikōura.

As the quake-damaged highway is dug up for road repairs, North Canterbury Transport Infrastructure Recovery (NCTIR) roadworkers have unearthed several items of archaeological significance.

NCTIR environmental manager Manea Sweeney said evidence of villages were discovered between Clarence and Kaikōura, at The Pines, Waipapa Point, Rakautara and Hāpuku.

She could not describe them in detail until more was confirmed about their origins but they covered 'a really diverse range of heritage', Sweeney said.

**READ MORE:

A rock found at the site of an unearthed stone oven is blackened and cracked by heat.

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A team of archaeologists at a controlled dig at Waipapa Point, north of Kaikōura.

* The Sandpit and the Pines: The rise and fall of a highway**

'We're talking early 14th to 15th century through to the 17th and 18th century,' Sweeney said.

Members of an archaeology team sift dirt through sieves stuck to scaffolding to check for smaller items of interest.

'This coastal corridor is just so rich in history, and there are just so many important sites. It's just such a fantastic way to learn about those communities and confirm practices of how they lived.'

Some of the finds even revealed the social and community organisation and the day-to-day patterns of the group, Sweeney said.

'You can tell if they're sedentary, and that's where they lived for a period of time, through to more mobile hunter-gatherer sites.'

NCTIR was already aware of nearly 200 archaeological sites along the coast before work began.

If an area was known to be of high or medium archaeological significance, up to 12 archaeologists would be on site during excavation, Sweeney said.

New discoveries included a stone oven at The Pines, just south of Clarence.

NCTIR field archaeologist Dr Jeremy Habberfield-Short said the completely intact oven was 'a rare find'.

'The rocks are pretty much where they were placed and haven't been disturbed. In areas where people were settled for a period of time, we normally find that ovens have been raided of rocks to re-use in another oven close by.'

Excavator operators called in archaeology support if they saw signs of archaeological significance, such as a 'tell-tale layer' of dark, charcoal-rich soil, which would indicate a cooking site or rubbish pile.

'We respond to call-outs throughout the NCTIR project and assess whether we need to investigate in more detail, and help form a strategy that will allow construction to go ahead with the least impact on heritage sites,' Habberfield-Short said.

'One of the first things we do is look at a rock and ask whether it's been cracked manually, by machine or by heat, so that we can effectively distinguish between an archaeological or non-archaeological site. We can then carbon date materials from the site such as shellfish, bone and charcoal to find out when the area was inhabited.'

Displaced earth was passed through sieves hung from scaffolding to ensure smaller pieces were found.

Sweeney said NCTIR was implementing the largest archaeological strategy in the country, in terms of area covered.

'The archaeology community in New Zealand is not huge, so there's a mix of companies providing resources to us. We have a large amount of archaeologists from Christchurch, and from the North Island.'

The archaeological team would write a report on their findings for Heritage New Zealand once the road repairs were finished, Sweeney said.

'That's going to be a huge task for the team, just because of the scale of the project. It's a pretty big undertaking for a normal project, let alone one of this size.

'It wouldn't surprise me if this generates a lot of interest in the archaeological communities.'