Like love
in a cold climate, there may be more of it around than you might think. My initial search of the Heritage New Zealand
database admitted some vagaries - it counted all references to the Katikati-Te
Puna Purchase and included some reports concerning the Te Puna Mission Station
in Northland. My own count of the
‘matches’ it presented found 31 reports of archaeological investigations in the
rohe between the (southern) Wairoa River, along the Minden ridge and down to
the Te Puna stream. All but one of them,
(Motuhoa Island, 1983) were dated after the turn of this century.
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| Harper’s Farm, Munro Road East, Te Puna |
Even before
it became fashionable – or necessary – to establish evidence of prior
settlement, I have long known we had archaeological sites at our front door. As
a child I thought that two hillocks on two neighbouring properties on Munro
Road were “made” – their shapes were too regular, their tops too flat, to be
entirely natural. Celtic myths of the faery
hunt in hollow hills, mixed with tales of waka being hauled into caves,
fed my fantasies. I had to wait some
decades to have the facts, revealed – as is often the case – by plans to
subdivide and develop house plots on what had been open paddocks (and, within
living memory, the site of a 1940’s cowshed).
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| Harper’s Farm map (Real Estate advert) |
The
realtor’s 2016 advertisement disclosed this hill to be a kainga site. It shows as the slightly irregular
pink-shaded circle on the right-hand side of the following image. (The other pink areas were described as
middens and possible storage pits.) In a
map
surveyed after the Te Puna Quarry Reserve was gazetted in 1911, the same area
is labelled, tantalisingly, as a “Village Res.”, indicating at least some
memory of previous settlement. I suppose
(I am not an archaeologist) that this flat-topped knob would be called a
‘platform’. Around 2020 a modern house was
built at the bottom of the slope, its back garden shaving off a small flank of
hillside. The rest of the hill has yet
to attract the attentions of anyone with a trowel, brush and measuring stick,
so material evidence of pre-European habitation remains in the ground. But the patterns of landform and geography –
an undefended, nevertheless dominating, site adjacent to a watercourse and
hillside forest – make it easy to imagine a way of life from 500 years ago.
This is but
one example of the outburst of energies and archaeological attention stimulated
by the growth of horticultural and “lifestyle block” development all over the
western Bay of Plenty. Even more locally, the creation of the
“Minden Lifestyle Zone”
had the effect of intensifying modern settlement across an area that was, as
the result of efforts by the Historic Places Trust and, in particular, post-grad
students from the Anthropology Departments of Auckland and Otago Universities,
much better understood as a landscape richly endowed with evidence of past
existence.
When Mary
O’Keeffe published her thesis in 1991, she could refer to the (then) Tauranga
County as “archaeologically unknown”, until it became the subject of “recent
field work [that] has shown there to be a very large number and a wide variety
of sites…”. Her work was founded on an appreciation of
the qualities that have continued to recommend themselves to subsequent
populations: the benign environment and congenial climate of the countryside
between the coast and the Kaimai range.
Less appreciated, perhaps, is her other salient observation that “many
features present do not show on the surface.”
Maybe it is
a feature of settler society to be unappreciative of anything much below the
surface. Writing in 2002,
Garry Law reported to the Department of Conservation (in respect of a much
larger area, DoC’s Bay of Plenty Conservancy)
that although Māori archaeological sites were better known and recorded
(albeit in somewhat erratic fashion) than “historical” – that is, post-European
– archaeology: “the forestry, mining and
transport history readily seen on the ground”. To this we could add farming infrastructure. The aforementioned cowshed’s materials were
all (except for the concrete milking floor) repurposed. Its floor survived until new foundations were
laid for another 21st-century house.
Even a
cursory analysis of the Heritage New Zealand database shows that, in the tiny
area of Te Puna, there are two main drivers for archaeology: roading and housing. The advent of the Takitimu Northern Link has
generated a significant number of reports across a broad swathe of landforms,
from the Wairoa River floodplain to the rolling uplands of the Minden
Ridge. Because of its scale – at the
time of writing it is the largest archaeological site in New Zealand – it has
revealed patterns of settlement and itinerant activities (including the
unfortunate effects of careless development) from the present day backwards to
about 1350. Already it is altering Te
Puna’s history, as it (we trust) stands the test of time and becomes, itself,
“historical”.
As to
housing: many of the addresses in the database search results were familiar. Building consents, even on ostensibly bare
land in Te Puna, now very frequently require an archaeological report. So I got in touch with Murray Lloyd, who has
lived all his life at 350 Wairoa Road. In fact, the fourth generation of Lloyds now
live there too. Murray’s family,
starting from his grandfather, have been on the property since 1909. “Getting the report done was really pretty
special,” Murray told me. “We always
knew it had been lived on before, being right on the river – the main ‘road’,
so to say – and my dad had a good relationship with Ngati Pango, especially the
Apaapa whānau… we thought it was
important to know where it would be ok to put our houses. It was a bit of inconvenience, but it wasn’t
a surprise, what we found out.”
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Basalt adze found on Lloyd’s Farm, Wairoa Road
Image courtesy of Matthew Campbell, CFG Heritage Ltd |
No-one
should be surprised by the discussion in this essay. Our locality has been lived in, worked over,
and modified for centuries. The powerfully haunting outline of the
Papamoa pa system on our eastern horizon is a constant reminder. My friend Kiritoha Tangitu said once: “Whenever I look at them, I think: the
work! The work!”
So I
approach with humility and admiration the whenua kua ngaro at the corner of my
road. It too took labour to create. I also hope the whānau whose home it once was
had times of peace and plenty before they had to abandon this small toehold at
the foot of Rangituanehu. I’m glad they
left its shape behind them.
References
