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Otago Daily Times

Family's find joins artefacts

Tūhura Otago Museum kaupapa Māori curator Dr Gerard O'Regan holds a moa bone and partly formed stone tool, which were collected by the McFarlane family at Tiwai Point in the late 1960s. PHOTO: PETER MCINTOSH An extensive archaeological dig at Tiwai Point before the aluminium smelter was built was complemented by some extra treasure hunting. Those extra artefacts, mainly stone tools from hundreds of years ago, were intriguing to a youngster or two making discoveries in the late 1960s and they ended up in family storage for decades. During the weekend, they were laid out on tables at Tūhura Otago Museum in Dunedin and the public was invited to view the cataloguing process. The artefacts — such as partly formed tools and a few moa bones — were recovered by the McFarlane family. Margaret McFarlane was at the museum on Saturday. She said her father was a civil engineer in Invercargill in the 1960s. Her older brother, Grant, sometimes tagged along, she said. "So probably Grant was bored, and he was poking around while Dad was doing stuff, and he kept finding things and showing Mum and Dad," Ms McFarlane said. That led to a substantial 1968 excavation and the material from this is now at the University of Otago, which has begun to assess and catalogue 11 tonnes of stone artefacts and faunal material. Previous research on the site indicated about 600 years ago the Tiwai Point settlement was focused on production of toki, or adze, a stone tool used for cutting or carving. Museum kaupapa Māori curator Gerard O'Regan said taoka, or treasures, had been looked after by the McFarlane family for decades, but they wondered about finding them an appropriate long-term home. "We had this almost like a meant-to-be moment when Margaret's family, the McFarlane family, got in touch to say, 'well, look, we've got this collection. What's the appropriate thing to do with it?'," Dr O'Regan said. "It coincided with this opportunity with New Zealand Archaeology Week to bring these taoka out, lay them out on the tables, and have people come and see us doing the actual cataloguing." The artefacts would be in a condition ready to go to Te Rūnaka o Awarua and could join the Tiwai collection at Southland Museum, he said.