Jan 4, 2017

Sidestep: Middlemarch

In 1951 two separate discoveries of Maori material, a pair of wooden bowls and a bundle of dog skins, were made on the property of Mrs. A. W. Kidd, at “Glenavon,” near Sutton, on the road to Middlemarch, Otago. Sheep have run on this land for about a century. It seems surprising that the Maori material had for so long escaped discovery until it is noted that the run includes northward- and eastward-facing slopes of the Lammermoor Range composed of schist rock in which are countless holes, cavities, and natural cupboards. The caches were in two of these.

The Kidd homestead is three miles from Sutton school and seven miles from Middlemarch. From the house a creek valley runs into the Lammermoor Range. About a mile up it forks, and the rock in which the bundle of skins was found is beside this fork, about a chain back from the stream bed. James Eyles and John Harding, to whom I am indebted for photographs and for an account of local topography, state that the countryside is littered with rocks full of holes equally suited for stowage, but that the actual rock in which the bundle was concealed is conspicuous since it measures some thirty feet from base to summit, and being the highest rock in the immediate neighbourhood could be easily returned to. It is just over the road from, and directly beneath, the artillery target on the hill. Fig. 1 shows the view looking N.E. from the rock platform beside the niche in which the dogskin bundle was found, the niche being below the overhanging rock in the centre of the picture. The hole which actually faces S.W., measures 3 feet 6 inches across the mouth and 2 feet 6 inches from front to back wall. Seven long stones, placed across the top of the bundle, afforded some additional protection and prevented it from being blown away. The bundle was found by W. J. Kidd, who brought it to Otago Museum intact, and left the unfolding of the skins to - 131 me. The upper or outer skin formed a close pad and was folded thus, the hairy surface of the skin facing inwards

In the lower skin was a bowl formed of the right side of a human cranium, sex not determinable, age 50. Lying in the skull-bowl was a bundle of koromiko sprigs carefully tied up, two of them tied with unspun threads of human hair and three with unscutched flax. Part of the bundle was a Muehlenbechia vine which seems to have acted both as an item in the bouquet and as its tie. In the skull-bowl were fragments of plaitwork which were at first thought to belong to a maro similar to that represented by a fragment found in the Takiroa cave, described and discussed by Dr. Duff. 1 However, Mr. Kidd in a re-examination of the site, recovered from the floor of the niche the remains of a small beautifully plaited flax kit, from which the plaited fragments in the skull-bowl appear to be derived. How the fragments had come into the bowl is not known; it is possible, though unlikely, that they had been blown in. The kit contained red feathers of kaka (or possibly kea) and a lock of black human hair carefully tied with a very slender tendril. On the floor of the niche, outside the kit, James Eyles found some small perished pieces of tapa cloth, the texture of which suggests that they were locally made from the inner bark of houhi (lacebark). All specimens of New Zealand tapa known to the writer have been found in inland Otago.