87: Pre-Maori evidence

Our dig is all about the heading, that is, finding evidence of tall skeletons whose stature, carbons dating and DNA record will show they were here before Polynesians arrived.

There are many cases but the most extraordinary accounts are what is in the soil - deep beneath volcanic deposits. Here are a few accounts all based around a small area of New Zealand and accounting for an unexplained depth of location.

In 1924 Captain J. Bollons, master of the S.S. Tutanekai, wrote as follows: ‘There is evidence that natives have been in New Zealand for a much longer period (than 800 years)…To give one instance of the remoteness of time when people were residing on Rakiura, or Stewart Island. Some 20 years ago (1905) natives were digging a trench around their whare on one of the small Titi islands, Horomamae/Owen Island, situated of the south east coast of Rakiura. Having cut down to a depth of 6 feet (2 metres) through purely vegetable deposit, they came to a layer of shell sand charcoal, one foot in thickness. Amoungst this, hangi or food debris were found, four stone tools of adze or chisel shape, one being of greenstone, all of similar construction and showing the same method of cutting as tools found on present-day surfaces at other places. The plant covering of this islet is principally that shrub with the thick leathery leaves known as pukeretaiko, or muttonwood of the settler (senecio rounitolina), which sheds it’s leaves very slowly. An idea of the length of time it would take to form 6 ft of deposit can be imagined.

The New Zealand Mines record, August 1897, says at Bald Hill Flat, near the foot of the Old Man Range near Middlemarch in Otago, Maori chizels, wooden bowls and earth ovens were found in the sandstone clay at a depth of 16ft, the bowls being very little decomposed.

The Maoris told me that when the navvies were digging the railway cutting at Puketeraki near Karitane in coastal Otago, they found a shell midden at 16ft below the surface.

MacMillan Brown wrote: ‘That the pre-Polynesian in New Zealand had used steam ovens is evidenced by their having been found as much as 14 ft below the surface of the spoil, as, for example, on the Manuherikia Plains in Central Otago…The slow accumulation of alluvium, wind-blown soil and humus on such high plateaus forces us to place the age of this back into the thousands of years…

Evidence exists that there were ancient peoples here perhaps thousands of years BEFORE the Maori, whose occupation is thought to extend back approximately 1200 years. In terms of occupation of New Zealand, there were those known as the "Moa Hunters," then the Moriori, and then the Maori people. It seems a stone-age people occupied Westland, predating Maori occupation by many centuries. In his book "Old Westland, Mr E Iveagh Lord writes of the careful and scientific description of such a discovery given by Sir Julius von Haast, as follows; ... a partially finished chert adze and its’ sandstone sharpener, found by a party of gold-miners in Bruce Bay, Westland, in 1868. They were lying on the floor of pebble studded clay, and more than 14ft of strata of humus, sand and shingle had to be cut through before this was reached...Totara trees, four ft in diameter, had to be felled before the surface could be broken… and huge tree trunks prostrate for generations, with moss-grown mould of others, were scattered about. The place was 500ft above the high-water mark…with the usual 3 belts of driftwood sand without vegetation, rush & manuka-covered sand, and low scrub. It had clearly passed through these 3 stages, and its foot of humus must have taken centuries of herbage to form before the forest giants could take root in it. The various accumulations and the ancient growth of the forest take us back undoubted several thousand years, and even then we have a neolithic race that polished it’s weapons and had spread far west and south toward the long uninhabited sounds’.

*****

Few Maori would agree that such stories hold any merit and will be put down to being made up and holding no truth. (Yet this is from a people who still teach the old tradition that the north island was a fish pulled bu by one of their ancestors). This is not a beat up but a comparison when one talks of being truthful. European had no reason to lie when discovering items deep beneath the ground but more will be found in time if we are successful because many will come forward with information, photo's or direct evidence. And above is a sketch of the adze and sharpener in question. Where it is physically we do not know at present although we suspect it is in the Otago Museum.

What is clear from the reports (as well as Maori accounts) is that Polynesians were not first, and neither were the Melanesians. Waitaha, here long before the Melanesians were not first, and the group before them are as likely not to be first either. We suggest that many small groups died out in various situations long before others migrated here, the Maori being the third last migration and the most numerous prior to the European and then the more recent Asian immigration. This land has always been in a state of flux. The huge Tsunamis of AD200 from the Taupo eruption and other catastrophes of AD500, AD950, AD1220 and 1280, and AD1450. NZ is long overdue for one more disaster of biblical proportions. However, tsunamis are coastal, and two of the locations above were inland, one at 880m above sea level and the other 450 meters above sea level but 150km inland and behind three sets of ranges.

What is interesting in the above articles are the location. All in Otago, all very deep and ancient and all well before the time of the old rock carving from Otago from a time between 600-1200 AD...all before the Polynesian arrived who had no spiral designs until they got here and copied it from those already living here. We are repeating ourselves in many articles lately, particularly about spirals, but it is all for a reason.

What seems clear is that we will never know who was here before the ones we find, as I do not believe anything older is likely to be ever found in the way of bones, even if old implements do exist.