Mike Butler: Hunting the 5000BC moa hunters

Just down the highway from where I live in Hastings, New Zealand, exists the evidence that people trapped, cooked, and ate giant Moa birds there more than 7000 years ago.

But New Zealand’s “indigenous people” have only been here since 1250 AD, some may say.

Moa hunters in Hawke’s Bay 3000 years ago may seem like a conspiracy theory but I do recall the headline in the Napier Daily Telegraph, on April 5, 1969, which said “Bones show Poukawa was inhabited 3000 years ago”.

Archaeology may be done everywhere, by anyone, and back in the 1960s amateur archaeology was a thing.

For instance, under the soil layer of our back yard on the Napier hill where we lived was a layer of shells and bone fragments about 500mm thick in which Dad found a baked argillite adze about 150mm long, a greenstone chisel about 100mm long, and a small bone fishhook.

A school friend who went on to a career in museums used to spend hours sieving the shells in this pre-contact refuse heap.

Ancient finds were unsurprising as was the Daily Telegraph headline at that time when curiosity could take the inquisitive a long way without repercussions.

Treaton Russell Price was such an inquisitive person.

Price’s story is recounted by researcher Martin Doutre in a five-part documentary series featuring some impressive drone footage. It is also covered well in a feature in Elocal magazine by writer Michael Botur.

Price surveyed Poukawa, 20km south of Hastings, in 1930, to build a canal outflow for Lake Poukawa for flood protection and to reclaim land for pasture.

When digging the drainage channel, Price, found the leg bones of moa, without torsos or heads, standing upright in soil.

Intrigued, he postulated that this was evidence of moa hunters so returned to find evidence. He did exploratory digs in 1956, and a detailed dig in 1962 which was reported to the New Zealand Archaeological Association in 1963.

Two layers of volcanic ash gave immediate clues to the age of the artefacts – the upper layer was from the 186 AD Taupo eruption and the lower band was from the Waimihia eruption (an earlier Taupo eruption) around 1400 BC.

Human bones including skulls with massive jaws were found there and sent to the New Zealand Department of Scientific and Industrial Research for dating.

The Napier Daily Telegraph newspaper headline mentioned above cites DSIR carbon dating tests that showed that moa bones from the site were 3180 years old.

In that news report, Dominion Museum assistant director Dr J.C. Yaldwyn, a vertebrate palaeontologist, opined that Price was “probably right”.

Tools, moa bones with cut marks, other bones, cut timber, and charcoal, were carbon dated by Thomas Athol Rafter of the Institute of Nuclear Sciences in Lower Hutt. The oldest artefacts were broken moa bones that date back to 5200 BC.

Doutre shows a page of the DSIR report that shows that one broken femur, six large pieces of broken moa bone, 22 pieces of broken moa bone, and 11 small pieces removed from the base of the square sinches below the surface of the base were dated at 7170 years (plus or minus 60 years) of age.

Alan Pullar of the DSIR Soil Bureau, verified that Price had found human-related material beneath the ash bands in Pumice Ash Beds and Peaty Deposits of Archaeological Significance Near Lake Poukawa, Hawke’s Bay.

But an internet search does not find that paper. Instead, what the search turns up is a 1978 hatchet job on Price’s work by Bruce McFadgen, of the Maori Studies School at Victoria University, titled The Antiquity of Man at Lake Poukawa, New Zealand.

McFadgen, who also did a dig at Poukawa, simply asserted that all the artefacts that Price found resulted from Maori activity there.

A check of McFadgen’s papers on his Victoria University page shows the extent of his belief that there was no human occupation here before Maori arrived from Rarotonga in 1250 AD.

A series of newspaper headlines record how Price’s research was quietly written out of New Zealand history.

• “Bones show Poukawa was inhabited 3000 years ago” style of headline appeared in a number of newspapers in March and April of 1969. • “Poukawa digger taking a break” appeared on October 13, 1969.

• “Maori artefacts given to Hastings council” in the Daily Telegraph on September 9, 1972, shows the changed narrative in describing the bones as “Maori artefacts”.

• “Archaeological body to hold conference in Hawke’s Bay dated May 3, 1983, has hatchet man McFadgen controlling the Poukawa narrative.

The person who academically buried Price had by then taken control of the Poukawa narrative.

Why the hatchet job? Was there professional jealousy that an amateur made a major discovery?

Doutre includes footage of the rise of groups of brown-skinned Kiwis modelled on the American Black Panthers, suggesting a tide-change in academia.

Was it inconvenient to have “first peoples” in New Zealand earlier than Maori?

Historian the late Michael King was involved in the dig as a member of the Waikato Archaeological Society. He didn’t mention the find in his celebrated Penguin History of New Zealand in 2003.

Farmer Bill Buddo, the owner of the location of Russell Price’s historic dig, reports a steady flow of inquiries and visitors to the site.

The truth will always come out. Bruce McFadgen is still around and is invited to respond.

By the way, you don’t need to visit Bill Buddo at Poukawa to take a look. The drone on Doutre’s doco has done the work for you.

See

Doutre, Martin. Poukawa Revisited part 1 -Poukawa Archaeological Site, Proving Ancient habitation in NZ to 7000+ yrs Part 1 of a 5 part series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ktxAIsh2h4

To DOWNLOAD & VIEW ALL POUKAWA DOCUMENTS, check this link: https://mega.nz/folder/G0xVHaia#LTJ9r...

To DOWNLOAD MOVIE (ALL 5 PARTS IN 1080), check this link: https://mega.nz/folder/bxwznThT#JZkti...

Botur, Michael. Burying the evidence – excavation proves human habitation 3400 years ago. https://www.elocal.co.nz/Articles/2083