Ngā Tohuwhenua Mai Te Rangi: A New Zealand Archeology in Aerial Photographs
Horticulture
Horticulture
About 1 km up from the mouth of the Whangaehu River is an area where the oldest inland coastal dunes intersect with the high river terraces and the hill country proper. Towards the coast, the river has cut a broad meander through the lines of the dunes. The dunes are old enough to have formed a crust of ash topsoil, and over large areas, this cap of dune soil has been broken through by Māori, for two reasons. One reason was to create storage pits which lie on dune crests within the broad points formed by the river through the old dune formations. Because of the soft sands under the surface these have broken away at the edges and tend to be irregular in plan, at least in the form in which they have survived today. The second reason was to borrow sands to add to soils for gardening, much as was discussed in chapter 4. This may have been the practice on the points themselves, and it seems also to have been the case where the dunes are adjacent to the older high river terraces. 7 pā containing many storage pits have been created on points at the edge of the high terrace; a particularly fine example occurs by the Whangaehu River bridge on State Highway 3. There are other fine examples of pā and pits further up the river.
Pā and storage pits on old dunes near the State Highway 3 bridge, Whangaehu River
The edge of the river terrace shows at right with the pā on the hilltop right. Circled by the farm road, the pā is defended by steep natural scarps to either side (left and right), and terrace scarps on the ridge with many pits facing the camera. By the river terrace, foreground, the line of a dune provides a contrasting landform to the hill country beyond. On the surface of the dunes are many rectangular pits. The view is to the north-west, and State Highway 3 and the Whangaehu River are just to the right out of the image.
Detail of the pā. There are no recognisable defensive ditches and banks but the sides are very steep and the repeated scarps of the terraces provide a deliberate defensive effect enhanced by carrying the scarps around to the steep face nearest the camera. The pā is about 130 m long by 30 m wide. The rectangular pits are 3 by 3 m in plan.
Garden stone rows along the coastal strip near Ngāwīhi, eastern Palliser Bay
A very high marine terrace shows at top left and right. Because of its height and exposure to wind, and the existence of a usable coastal strip more or less at sea level, this high terrace was not much used for settlement. The stone rows run down the slight slope in the foreground from the edge of the fan of debris from prominent gully, right, down on to an uplifted beach ridge. The rows are about 200 m long and 1 m high in their present state. The view is to the north.
Extraordinarily well-preserved examples of stone rows survive at Okoropunga Stream, just to the south of Castle Point on the east Wairarapa coast, and were illustrated in chapter 4. 11 The fullest investigation of such stone walls and their associated gardens, using aerial photographs as a primary mapping technique (the first such instance in New Zealand), was conducted by Helen Leach on the Palliser Bay coast. 12 She concluded that the gardening systems could only have been used for the Polynesian crops brought to New Zealand, kūmara in particular. She also proved that the first use of the walls was as early as the twelfth century, although the bulk of the radiocarbon dates place the walls in about the fifteenth century. The stone row areas on the Wairarapa coast appear to have been abandoned in pre-European times, 13 for reasons which were discussed in chapter 4.