A team of conservators set up an archaeological dig on a remote Southland peninsula 57 years ago. They had to work fast but still managed to extract 11 tonnes of material. Now, finally, that is being analysed and catalogued, and proving to be a treasure trove.
More than 600 years before there was an aluminium smelter at Tiwai Point in Southland there was an ancient Māori manufacturing workshop, but artefacts from the workshop weren’t discovered until building on the smelter had started.
In 1961, plans for an aluminium smelter become public knowledge and surveys undertaken at the time by archaeologists for sites of significant cultural interest found nothing.
Seven years later, staff from the Southland Museum discovered the workshop and urgent archaeological excavations were set out to recover ancient Māori artefacts before the construction of the Tiwai Aluminium Smelter destroyed the remnants of the ancient site.
Nine weeks of excavation took place over the course of a year and eleven tonnes of material were removed and put into storage. Now the collection is finally being catalogued.
“Tiwai Peninsula has been a place where our people have lived,” said Dean Whaanga, project representative for Te Rūnaka o Awarua, the local Ngāi Tahu tribal authority.
“They’ve been manufacturing our tools and taonga over there for probably as long as we’ve been on this landscape.”
Taonga that have been recovered include hand-crafted toki, or adze, used to chop and carve wood, hammerstones, and sinkers. Whaanga said the area is known for its pakohe, or argillite, a “fine metamorphic rock” that Māori used to create tools, weaponry and taonga to wear.
Some of those ancient, hand-crafted tools are on display at Te Rau Aroha Marae, home base for the rūnaka, but the full extent of Tiwai’s early history as a Māori tool-making factory is being explored two hundred kilometres away in Dunedin.
Excavating and cataloguing taonga from Tiwai Point
Chris Jennings, senior archaeologist at Otago University, and president of the New Zealand Archaeological Association, said the most interesting thing about ancient site was its scale.
“We’re talking full industrial scale. You don’t get sites like this everywhere but because it was on the back door of all this rock it kind of allowed that to happen.
“But we do have some very interesting artefacts made at Tiwai Point and some of them are very unique to that area and don’t look like artefacts from anywhere else in the country.”
Jennings said the 1968 excavation that took place at Tiwai Point was likely to be the one of the early salvaging projects in the country.
“Members of the Otago Anthropological Society and the Anthropology department then here, got together and decided that somebody should get out there and rescue whatever they could before they put the smelter on top of it.”
The dig included staff from Comalco, from the Southland Museum and lecturers and students from the University of Otago.
“I think it might have been a total of nine weeks over three different seasons. They didn’t have long and they didn’t have money.”
Some of the artefacts were displayed in the years after, but only now is the full collection – fragments, tools, and bones – being analysed and catalogued, thanks to funding from Rio Tinto.
Jennings said they have now managed to catalogue “maybe 15%” of the eleven tonnes of material that was recovered.
His favourite piece is of a large, broken fragment of a larger adze or toki. “They hit in the wrong place a little too hard and the whole end fell off. You can imagine their heartbreak of spending this long making something just for it to split in half.”
There’s no real understanding of what the scale of production that occurred, said Jennings.
“How much stuff was there, what type of material was there, what they were hunting, what they were eating, what they were making.
“So, this is an inventory very much designed to answer those questions and give the rūnanga a sense of mind of what is actually there. And the rest of us too.”
Led by Te Rūnaka o Awarua, the project is a collaborative effort between the University of Otago, Te Kupeka Tiaki Taoka Southern Regional Collections Trust (formerly Southland Museum), Rio Tinto (formerly Comelco) and the Otago Museum.
Whaanga said through their collective “strength and knowledge” they would be able to understand what took place.
“It’s great that we now have the support and the knowledge from all the groups to bring that collection to life, understand it, find out what it’s all about and then learn from it, and then eventually put it in its appropriate place rather than back in storage.”
He said putting the collection on display would be a great outcome of the project.