Title: Ngā Tohuwhenua Mai Te Rangi: A New Zealand Archeology in Aerial Photographs

Author: Kevin L. Jones

Publication details: Victoria University Press, 1994, Wellington

Digital publication kindly authorised by: Department of Conservation

Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

Conditions of use

Protection of the historic landscape

At Nukutaurua on the Māhia Peninsula, we looked (in chapters 11 and 16) at a conservatively managed pastoral landscape where there is no risk of urban encroachment. Preservation seems assured—or is it? Judging from what is happening today, what will such a landscape look like in the future? Never having made a thorough visit to the Māhia Peninsula before, and after writing about Nukutaurua, I felt the need to fly over it and to visit the sites on the ground. In mid-winter of 1992 the light was cold and at a low angle, showing up detail of sites with little surface relief. We flew over Ōraka Beach, landing place of Tākitimu, at the northern end of the Peninsula. Above the old nineteenth-century settlement at Whanga-wehi and again on the high terrace at Kahutara, Table Cape, most of the pā on the headlands had their ditches and banks bulldozed through for a fence line. Maunga- page break

The stream bed at Nukutaurua

The ditch and bank fences run across the slope, foreground, and again at right angles from bottom centre to the stream bed. The stream-eroded pits lie in the centre of the land area. At top right is an urupā in a fenced enclosure, and just outside that, to the right, is a rectangular depression, site of a house or perhaps an early church. A distinct ploughing pattern is at bottom left. The view is to the north-east.

kahia, which Kahungūnu had defended centuries ago, was still intact; its interior ditch and bank showed clearly, but more finely detailed features such as house floors had been ground down over the years by the grazing sheep. North-west of the bay, the pā, Pari o Kena, where the road reserve had cut around the point, had been dug away for road metal on its seaward flank. However, the pā was still largely intact.

Two days before the flight, on the coastal strip at the foot of the high terrace, I had been able to see and measure the ditch and bank fences. ⁶ They, too, were being heavily worn down by stock, particularly cattle. The early aerial photographs showed that the ditch and bank fence had at one point intersected with the kūmara pits by the Wainui Stream and I was interested to look at the nature of that intersection. Had the pits been cut into by the fence? If so, the pits must have preceded the fence and were therefore of an earlier age. When I got to the pits by the stream, I found that the steep stream banks had long been bulldozed for a ford, but the pits had been missed. Natural forces were at work, however. The pits had been cut by the stream meander acting from the seaward side, so that they were half-sectioned and I could see their relationship with the fence in the soil layers. Later, the stream here had been dammed and diverted so page 270 that it no longer cut into the pits. Towards the ditch and bank, an earlier group of pits had been filled in. The ditch of the fence had been cut into the filling of these earlier pits. To complicate the picture it appeared that a house floor had been constructed over the same pit fill but before the ditch and bank. However, I could determine that the ditch and bank fence was later than the pits since it had cut into them.

Here, then, a sequence of historical activities was established. A pre-European gardening and pit-storage site had been built by the stream banks to gain the advantage of drainage in an otherwise boggy, toe-of-slope location. Perhaps as early as 1840 the pits and house floor had been abandoned and a ditch and bank fence constructed. All the time the stream was at work, working back and forth in its course, so that without the bulldozer cutting the ford and diverting the stream, nothing would have survived and only an aerial photograph almost five decades old could have attested to the presence of pits.

What will the landscape be like in future? There can be no doubt that the ancient cultural features of our landscape are rapidly disappearing. Only in conservatively managed land such as Nukutaurua is it now possible to see sites as they may have been when abandoned, passing out of use, as little as 150 years ago. Physical destruction has increased greatly in the modern era with the much greater capacity for using machinery and vast amounts of energy from oil. Until about 100 years ago, physical work on the land was done by hand or by draft animals (horses, oxen). This limited the size of the changes that could be wrought on the landscape. A human being might be able to shift a maximum of 3 m ³ of soil in a working day. The ability to destroy what had gone before was less. Today a bulldozer or hydraulic digger, in a minute, can do—or worse, undo—the work once done by a human being in a day.

Nature also plays its part. A site by the sea or a river may be eroded by the action of waves or the current. The pits at Nukutaurua were eroded by the action of the stream; the pā, Marama Tāwhana, on the Uawa River, Tolaga Bay (illustrated in chapter 1), has been almost completely carried away in the 300 or so years since it was built. Today it survives only as a scrap of the outer ditch and bank. Everywhere, sheep and cattle trample over the surfaces of sites, especially around fence lines, so the surface features become rounded and eventually disappear.

For several reasons this book has closely discussed Māori fortifications of the New Zealand Wars—they too have been poorly preserved. Few examples of Māori fortifications survive in the Waikato in a form recognisable from the surface. The preservation of rifle trench outworks has fared very poorly. It is as if the new military settlers of the 1870s had sought to purge the land surface of the massive fortifications that had been built there—unwelcome memories perhaps. In many photographs dating back to the 1940s scanned for this book, covering Gate Pā, Meremere, Rangiriri, Pāterangi and Ōrākau, there was little or no trace of these remarkable fortifications. Even where the Māori dead were buried, the ruins have been chipped away by agriculture or roading, as at Rangiriri where, in recent decades, the human remains had to be exhumed for reburial elsewhere.

European fortifications, strictly defined, have fared better. One reason for this is strategic: European fortifications continued to be used for 'pacification' after the fighting while the fortifications of Māori, the defeated, were destroyed to prevent further use or occupied for European use. At Rangiriri, the surviving parts of the fortifications may appear to be of European origin but these are in fact simply European modifications of the earlier Māori fortifications. Furthermore, in remote areas the land enclosing fortifications was surveyed as reserves for police purposes; fortifications were built or maintained by the Armed Constabulary. When the police function became unnecessary, many were created historic reserves. Examples are Tapuaeharuru Redoubt at Taupō, Fort Galatea near Murupara and the Runanga Stockade on the Napier-Taupō Road.

In areas that are intensively farmed, with high values of land and farm production, that destruction will continue—however much archaeologists may regret the loss. Can we stop that destruction on lands managed for conservation purposes, such as reserves and national parks? Unfortunately, these are, with few exceptions, economically marginal lands, with the historical cultural values confined to landscape markers such as Hikurangi on the East Coast. With a few exceptions such as Taranaki and the northern regions, conservation lands have only a small proportion of the archaeological evidence of human settlement. In this book, for example, there is not one photograph of a site in a national park, although there are photographs of sites in historic reserves—for example, Ōtātara, Onāwe or the Northburn tailings. Scenic reserves also have a reasonable number of sites; illus- page 271

Rangiriri Redoubt, Waikato

This is the British position, reworking the earlier Maori rear position at Rangiri. The British engineers have formalised a pattern of projecting angles to offer enfilading fire along each flank. It is the most significant extant earthwork of the engagement here, but does not survive in its original Maori form. An historic reserve managed by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust, the area is grazed by sheep which are creating some tracks but otherwise keeping the site in clean, visible condition. The view is to the north-west.

trated in this book are the pā at South Bay, Kai Kōura. Land valued in the past, for access to the sea or for horticulture, is land valued in the present, and development pressure is unstoppable. Only tiny fragments such as narrow points in terrace lands remain untouched by ploughing. Even on land exploited in the past for minerals, leaving spectacular historic landscapes, we can see re-working for minerals or redevelopment for farming. At Northburn near Cromwell the tailings lie in a reserve but the original miners' head races have been turned to the new purpose of irrigation and border-diking has been installed. Many important technical features of the gold-mining system have thus been lost.

In future, we may have to look to two sources for a feeling of what the land once looked like. The first sources are the regional parks and reserves, such as Maungakiekie in Auckland, provided they are sympathetically managed for their ancient cultural values. These are places accessible to urban populations where the pressure is on local government to protect and to provide finance for an adequate programme of well thought-out care. The statutory protection for archaeological sites and other historic places that exists on private land is valuable, but in designing and implementing those controls we need to consider the reactions of the people who are page 272

Two pā near Otorohanga, southern Waikato

Both pā form simple double rectangular enclosures, about 65 m long and 12 m wide, on high points in the ridges.

Left. The near end of the pā has used a strong natural defensive position at the head of a steep slope, but with a weak point on the near ridge (sloping down to the left). This had been defended by a double ditch and bank. The farm road has been constrained to enter the pā at this point, rising up to the platform, and cutting through the middle and far transverse ditches. Clearly there was no option for the road to go to the right around the pā, but perhaps it might have been better routed by the prominent fence running from lower left to the far left corner of the pā?

Below. The pā has been built on country in which a satisfactory farm-roading solution has been possible. The ridge is broad, although narrowing to the right, and the road has skirted the pā almost in its entirety. The road may have cut through and obscured a double ditch on the narrow ridge at right.

page 273 controlled by that law. The law may be thought by Māori, asserting an interest in self-government, to be an imposition. The farmer, secure in the landowner's power to manage the land purely for economic farm returns, may also resent it. However, that duty to protect for a wider public interest still applies, even if the law in these cases may act simply as an admonition, as it so often does in the environmental area, ⁷ without effectively controlling or preventing destructive activity.

For a sense of the past, we will also have to look to remote New Zealand—Fiordland, Kāwhia, Tihirau mai Tawhiti (Cape Runaway), Ahipara—to small, isolated, usually coastal and usually strongly Māori local communities and their settings. This places a duty on those communities, over and above the burden of economic difficulty that they already bear. These will also be the communities that most fiercely resist the outsider gazing in, with or without advice on 'conservation'. Here too, genuine local oral tradition about the setting, refreshed on occasion by reference to published histories such as Tainui, ⁸ or works like the recent Māori Oral History Atlas, are passed on. ⁹

We have seen in chapter 9 examples such as the Maketū Peninsula where sites have disappeared rapidly, to judge from the systematic aerial photographic coverage that has been gained and archived since the 1940s. There, both farming and housing development have encroached on formerly large pre-European pā which covered much of the coastal terrace-lands. By contrast, at Nukutaurua, on the small privately owned plots of Māori land on the coastal strip, leading members of the family have returned and built in recent years; in building they have in a large part respected the cultural values of the land. The duty to protect, motivated by improved knowledge of and sensitivity to those values, bears on all New Zealand citizens. Occasionally, the issues and techniques of protection are complex and may require technical or professional advice. On most occasions, however, the solutions are simple and need not cost money. Just because a hill is steep, that is no reason to plant it in trees, obscuring archaeological features and ultimately destroying them. The road planned to go along to the very end of the ridge could easily stop 100 m short and protect the pā constructed there 300 years ago. The fence line does not need a bulldozed track to level its line; there must be techniques for filling undulations in its path with longer battens, or a reorientation of its line.

Whatever the future of the New Zealand historic landscape, and whatever techniques we use to protect and to interpret its meaning, they need not be determined from outside New Zealand. They may not even be determined by national programmes of education and legislation. We have our own indigenous landscape traditions to which archaeological sites can, and indeed should, be referred— Māori have long had ways of referring to their particular cultural landscapes. Even so simple a matter as naming of places can only be done by reference to Māori sources, unless historical mapping is available. This is not to deny a role for archaeologists or to offer them a secondary role. In this book, at places as diverse as Kapowairua (Spirits Bay) and the Māhia Peninsula, it has been possible to analyse the texture of Māori tradition (at a general level), archaeological evidence of Māori settlement, and their relationship to a later or sometimes contemporaneous European history.

This book is not the rigorous systematisation of knowledge called for by Peter Fowler. There is no seamless account of the past, and there are many points of deep ambiguity of meaning for us in the present—for example, in how to give a balanced account of military engagements between Māori and between Māori and European. Publication may provoke a call for a more specifically Māori interpretation of the same landscape features. Māori have always taken up elements of European culture and transformed them to political and cultural needs. This book has depicted historical subjects which range from the apparently trivial—ditch and bank fences—to the profoundly difficult in historical memory—fortifications. Archaeology and archaeologists should maintain independence but they cannot stand completely removed from the transformation of historical fact to social and political agenda.

Katikatiaka, north Taranaki, a pā with a severe erosion problem

The pā on the far ridge is in three segments, each defended by a transverse ditch, with a double ditch at right. At centre is a further unit of the pā built on another piece of ridge. Built on clay ash and older marine sediments, the pā is being rapidly eroded by the sea and is particularly vulnerable to erosion by animals, even by sheep. This photograph, taken in bright overcast conditions, shows the erosion of the banks of the pā in particularly unflattering fashion. Within 100 years, there will be nothing to show for this site, last occupied and defended by Ngāti Mutunga in the 1820s. The view is to the north; a view to the south-east is in chapter 3.