What lies beneath?

How an archaeologist cracked the puzzle of The Squircle A ditch that was neither square nor circle. A dig that revealed bottles, matchboxes, a mouth harp, and more. What happened here? Richard Walker reports.

It could have been a report filed by a detective piecing together the scene of a crime, perhaps the removal of a body.

‘‘Clear spade marks were visible in the floor of the ditch. The spade marks resembled something having been removed using a spade as a leverage. If this interpretation is accurate it is likely to have been a heavy and/or large item. The trench must have been infilled shortly after as the spade definitions were not heavily weathered.’’

But these are the words of an archaeologist. So this is not about a body. But it is about a mystery. Holes and trenches in the ground. A concrete block with an M. Bottles, matchboxes, machined nails, the detritus left behind by humans who have long since departed. Layers of history. What happened here? Today the archaeologist who wrote those words, Sian Keith, is keeping an eye on the scraping and digging going on at a site beside the Hamilton expressway before its opening in mid July.

The site is being prepared as a cultural reserve close to the southern State Highway 1 entry to the city. Uppermost in mind as the project nears completion are some metre-deep holes being opened up for the planting of mature trees. Keith watches one being dug near a corner of the site. Nothing turns up of interest.

But areas of interest were found a few years ago. About nine bowl-shaped depressions marked the sites of borrow pits excavated by Mā ori gardeners who would probably have been growing kumara and taro. The pits are small quarries, with the gravel and sand in the ground removed and then mixed with soil to help with gardening.

Keith’s investigation even showed the draglines as the sand was hauled from the bottom of the pit. No bobcats or wheelbarrows back then and the gardens would have been nearby – potentially right beside the pits. It is not surprising they were here; they are part of an extensive cultivated area stretching from Huntly to Piarere. Of the borrow pits, one is left to help reveal the story of the area. The others have been obliterated by the expressway build.

The concrete had been poured in situ. Carved into the concrete was an M signature, although whether this was intended to be a letter symbol is not known.

Development is good for archaeologists. All that environmental destruction in the name of progress perversely also provides a golden opportunity to probe the past and reveal more of our history. Put simply, Keith would not be out there digging up stuff if the road wasn’t coming through.

A related point is made by the expressway tangata whenua working group representative Harry Wilson who says the build has given manawhenua the chance to reconnect to sites which had been unavailable to them since they were forced out by European settlers.

‘‘The biggest thing for me was actually returning back again, and getting access on to these grounds that we knew about but were not actually able to come and physically touch again,’’ says Wilson, whose hapū is Ngaati Korokii-Kahukura.

But in 2018, the expressway build also revealed human remains, kō iwi, of at least seven people including children, about

200 metres from the cultural reserve. Wilson says the normal protocol when bodies were found was to do the tangihanga and then put the bones straight in the ground. In this case he wanted to know more, so those remains were tested, including carbon dating.

The bodies were dated to the mid 1700s and the examination threw up a surprise. Contrary to belief, the people were vegetarians. ‘‘So that kind of

threw our theory out that a lot of our people were eating birds,’’ he says. ‘‘These guys really, I suppose, tripped us up.’’

Productive gardens, then, would have been crucial.

Archaeological investigations prompted by the building of roads such as the expressway typically start with a desktop assessment of the likes of historical aerial photos and survey plans, followed by field surveys and on-site digs where required – before the road’s destructive arrival.

Keith says it is called preservation by record and it is bread and butter for consultant archaeologists like herself.

The idea is simple: to get as comprehensive a record as possible of archaeological sites, while preserving where possible when it comes to deciding a new road’s route.

But there was a time when roads were ploughed through whatever was in their way without a thought for what was being lost.

Whakatā ne-based Lynda Walter, who is president of the Archaeological Association, says things started to change in New Zealand in the early 1960s, when universities started teaching the discipline, although a Historic Places Trust Act had been protecting heritage since about 1955.

The age of the amateur was set to end. By 1975, archaeological sites were given formal protection and in 1980 penalties for damage to archaeological sites were introduced. In 1993, further legislative change meant the Historic Places Trust could start contracting out, leading to the rise of consultant archaeologists.

That legislation also said anything earlier than 1900 met the definition of an archaeological site if it was intact and could be investigated using archaeological methods, Walter says.

So the Heritage New Zealand Act 2014 is the most recent variation of legislation that has actually been around since 1955, she points out.

Before then, however, a farsighted initiative had begun.

Amateur archaeologists and historical society members recognised in the early 1950s that significant sites were being destroyed by land development.

Walter says they started mapping sites in what was called the archaeological site recording scheme. In 1954, when the association was formed, the scheme became a national system of recording archaeological sites that still exists today, administered by the association. She says it has about 72,000 records of archaeological sites throughout the country, a number that is rising potentially by several thousand a year. ‘‘As part of the Heritage New Zealand Act, when you go through the archaeological authority process, you are required to record any new sites that you encounter into that database.’’

Walter describes archaeology as more vocation than career.

In her case, it started young. The daughter of a lighthouse keeper, she can recall as a 4-yearold being shown a midden, or food refuse site, by her amateur archaeologist mother on Portland Island off the Mā hia peninsula in Hawke’s Bay.

‘‘I can remember my mother taking me along the shore and showing me the shells and charcoal and hā ngī stones in the bank, and explaining to me what I was looking at,’’ she says.

‘‘I guess my imagination was just caught by that.

‘‘For a little kid that was a revelation to realise there had been generations and generations of people living there.’’

A lifetime of archaeology awaited, including a memorable investigation at Cook’s Cove near Tolaga Bay. ‘‘What was special about that place was that people had been visiting that bay probably for as long as people have been in New Zealand.’’

The midden there was a microcosm of early fauna.

They were digging out, as she puts it, the remains of people’s dinners, and she remembers paua shells the size of dinner plates, along with the remains of sea mammals and bush birds.

‘‘It was obviously a really rich environment that people were living in.’’

And then Walter strikes a sombre note. Most of the Cook’s Cove site has gone now, washed away by erosion in a process accelerated by climate change.

‘‘We are losing a lot of these very early sites at a terrific rate, particularly in the Gisborne district and on the East Coast.’’

Vanessa Tanner, archaeology manager at Heritage NZ, says climate change is an increasing

‘‘The biggest thing for me was actually returning back again, and getting access on to these grounds that we knew about but were not actually able to come and physically touch again.’’

Harry Wilson

‘‘Every human being on this planet has the same length of history, right? We all come from the same place originally . . . So there is no difference in any human being’s history on this Earth.’’

Sian Keith