Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

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

Potato clamps

Potato clamps

A potato clamp was made by burying a crop of potatoes under a low flat-topped mound, thus sealing them off from the effects of light and frost. The earth came from a ditch, circular in plan, which was dug around the mound of potatoes. The ditch also served to keep the base of the clamp well drained. Such clamps leave a characteristic ring-shaped ditch up to 10 m in diameter, 16 and an example can be seen adjacent to Thacker's redoubt in the photograph in chapter 6. Māori use of the European white potato became common from the early nineteenth century. Māori practices in the storage of white potatoes page break
The beach front and edge of the high terrace at Nukutaurua, Māhia Peninsula

The beach front and edge of the high terrace at Nukutaurua, Māhia Peninsula

On the edge of the high terrace are three pā: Pari o Kena at left, Waipuna at centre, and Maungakahia, a pā defended by Kahungūnu, at right. On the high terrace at left and right of centre are ditch and bank enclosures. At far right on the coast is a landing place of Tākitimu, a whare wānanga site associated with that canoe, and a surviving pūriri tree planted at the time of landing.

The ditch and bank fences and nineteenth-century Maori settlement show clearly. The largest fence enclosure surrounds the site of a kāinga of the 1840s. The earth-walled outline of houses and raised-rim storage pits show within the enclosure. The second, smaller enclosure was probably a stockyard of later age.

page 254 were probably not dissimilar to European, although the crop may also have been stored in variants of the traditional pits.