Life, Death and Care on the Otago Goldfields: A Preliminary Glimpse (original) (raw)
Related papers
Life and Death in Early Rural Otago.
Life and Death in Early Rural Otago., 2022
This book describes the investigation of St John’s Cemetery near Milton in Otago, southern New Zealand, that was carried out in 2016 as part of a wider study of early settler graves in the region. The cemetery was opened in 1860 and has been disused since 1926, and contains the burials of some of the first European (predominantly British) settlers in the area. In collaboration with a local group of descendants Petchey and Buckley carried out an excavation that located and investigated 25 unmarked graves containing 27 individuals. By combining archaeological, historical and bioarchaeological approaches a detailed picture of the lives of these people has been built up, giving insights into the experience of leaving the Old World and emigrating to New Zealand in the mid nineteenth century. This is the first detailed investigation of this nature to have been conducted in New Zealand, and provides a unique insight into the settler experience.
Death on the Goldfields: Preliminary report on excavations at the Drybread Cemetery, Central Otago
Journal of Pacific Archaeology, 2024
In 2020 and 2021 archaeological excavations at the Drybread Cemetery in Central Otago, New Zealand, investigated 13 unmarked graves. Six Chinese burials were examined, one of which had been historically exhumed for repatriation to China. One grave had encountered bedrock and never been used. The other graves were a mixture of adults and infants, all of whom had lived in the Drybread area in the late nineteenth century. This paper outlines the preliminary results of the investigations, and describes the funerary traditions and basic details of the human remains.
Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 2020
During the nineteenth century, New Zealand was promoted as a land of plenty, promising a 'better life', to encourage families to settle and develop the growing colony. This paper characterises the life-course of early settlers to New Zealand through historical epidemiological and osteological analyses of the St John's burial ground in Milton, Otago. These people represent some of the first European colonists to Aotearoa, and their children. The analyses provided glimpses into the past of strenuous manual labour, repeated risk of injury, and oral and skeletal infections. Mortality of infants was very high in the skeletal sample and the death certificates outlined the varied risks of infection and accidents they faced. Osteobiographies of seven well-preserved adults demonstrated the detailed narratives that can be gleaned from careful consideration of individuals. The skeletal record indicates childhood stress affecting growth and risk of injury prior to migration. However, the historical record suggests that occupational risks of death to the working class were similar in the new colony as at home. The snapshot of this Victorian-era population provided by these data suggests that the colonial society transported their biosocial landscape upon immigration and little changed for these initial colonists.
Life & Death on the Otago Frontier: Preliminary Report on the Lawrence Cemeteries
Archaeology in New Zealand, 2018
In April 2018 archaeological excavations were undertaken at both the 'old' and 'new' cemeteries of the historic goldfields town of Lawrence in Central Otago, New Zealand. The aim of the excavations was to examine the remains of 1860s goldminers, and in particular Chinese goldminers, in order to determine how they adapted to life on the goldfields frontier. This preliminary paper presents a description of what was found and some preliminary observations.
Journal of the Polynesian Society, 2020
Mortuary archaeology in New Zealand is a tapu 'sacred, prohibited' subject due to the special place that koiwi tangata 'human skeletal remains' hold in Maori culture. Recognition of Maori rights over ancestral remains led to a near cessation of published studies in recent decades. But koiwi tangata are frequently uncovered accidentally by development or erosion and, in collaboration with Maori, recorded prior to reburial. The resulting pool of unpublished data presents an opportunity to advance our currently stagnant archaeological understanding of the burial practices of past Maori communities, particularly given that some sites are demonstrating a higher level of complexity of burial process than has hitherto been discussed archaeologically. Although still a highly charged subject, there exist a number of examples of Maori groups voicing support for respectful, collaborative study of burials. As time and tide continue to expose koiwi, it is time for appraisal of the archaeological literature on this subject. This paper reviews the history and current practice of mortuary archaeology in New Zealand, highlighting how current bioarchaeological perspectives offer valuable potential. In particular, the concept of the burial rite as an ongoing process, the various stages of which can result in different forms of burial, and the application of the principles of field anthropology (anthropologie de terrain) to identify stages of mortuary activity offer new frameworks for exploring the variety evident in Maori burial and the social and conceptual insight this can offer.
“Improving Our Condition” An Archaeology of Improvement in Taranaki, New Zealand, 1841-1860
This research uses archaeological means to investigate the materiality associated with the ethic of Improvement as it is reflected in the everyday lives of two settler families to New Plymouth in the mid-19th century. The Jury and Autridge families, from North Cornwall in Britain, arrived on a free passage emigration scheme as members of the ‘labouring classes’. They arrived amongst the first flurry of organised emigration to New Plymouth in 1841, the year after the Crown signed the Treaty of Waitangi with Māori, forming the basis of the colonial nation of New Zealand. Within this transformational period in New Zealand’s history during the 1840’s and 1850’s these families purchased land and settled themselves at Omata, to the south of New Plymouth, until the first Taranaki war beginning in 1860 saw them leave their farmsteads and their homes destroyed. This doctoral research tracks the lives of the two families from what is known of their lives in Britain through to the final destruction of their small farm cottages, and reveals, through archaeological excavations on both sites, how they lived out their vision for a better life. Members of the ‘labouring classes’ were otherwise largely invisible in the historical record and the Jurys and Autridges were no exception to this. Many of this group of first emigrants did not leave written records, and archaeology now provides what is largely the only material evidence of their lives at this time. While the 1860-61 war in Taranaki caused anguish on both sides, these same wars left behind a valuable archaeological resource in the form of the remains of the farmsteads of many of these early European settlers, as nearly 200 buildings were destroyed across the district. The short term occupation of these sites provides a rare and unique opportunity for a closely contextualised and fine-grained analysis of the material remains associated with these particular families. Using a lens of Improvement through which to contextualise the aspirations of the settlers, finely detailed and nuanced understandings are gained into the daily lives of the settler farmers, and how the motivations and values of the settlers may have been expressed through the acquisition, use, and discard of material culture, and through the landscape of the family farm. The history and the archaeology of the two households reveals the processes of Improvement relating to factors such as emigration, working on the land, improving the house and the domesticity within, children and education, attitudes to alcohol and tobacco consumption and also health and hygiene.