When I was a boy, I loved dinosaurs, but we didn’t have much
information about them back then. Palaeontologists sometimes
wrote stories, and there was a man whose books I was mad about Roy Chapman Andrews. He worked at the American Museum of Natural History in New Yor . During the 1920s, Andrews led an expedition to Mongolia to dig up dinosaur fossils. He wrote about his amazing adventures: being chased by bandits across the Gobi Desert, shooting from the back of the car ... that kind of thing. It was like cowboys and Indians and, of course, that suited me. I thought, ‘I’ll be a palaeontologist and dig up dinosaurs in remote places, too.’
There was one snag. Dinosaurs had yet to be discovered in New Zealand. (Joan Wiffen didn’t find New Zealand’s first dinosaur fossil – a vertebra from a theropod – until 1975.) It was a big snag, so Atholl thought maybe he wouldn’t be a palaeontologist after all. Luckily, he was also interested in history. He could be an archaeologist!
Palaeontologists and archaeologists do pretty much the same thing.
We excavate material that gives us information about the past. The main difference is that palaeontologists want to learn about animals and plants, whereas archaeologists are interested in people. We want to know how people lived, what they ate, what they did each day. To find answers, we dig at the sites where people once lived.
THE PAST BENEATH
We also look for middens. These ancient rubbish dumps contain fish bones, bird bones, shells, broken tools all kinds of treasure!
OUR FEET BY ROSS CALMAN A midden unearthed in Takapuna
There are thousands of clues about the past buried in the earth. Some may be right beneath your feet. Ngāi Tahu archaeologist Atholl Anderson has spent his life excavating these clues and working out what they tell us. For him, it all started with dinosaurs.
8 Atholl’s main focus has been tracking WHAT IS RADIOCARBON DATING? early human migration across the oceans Radiocarbon dating is a method scientists use to estimate the age of biological and finding the sites where people landed. material – something many artefacts are made of. This material, such as wood, These sites were the beginnings of new shell, and bone, was once part of a living thing, so it contains an element societies, and this idea has always been of called carbon. As they grow, living things absorb a form of carbon from great interest to Atholl. He studies how the atmosphere known as radioactive carbon. When an animal these new societies changed over time. or a plant dies, it stops absorbing radioactive carbon. Because Atholl’s great-great-great-grandmother radioactive carbon decays at a known rate, scientists can work was a Ngāi Tahu woman who married a out when the living thing died. They can tell how old an artefact sealer living on Whenuahou (also known is by the amount of radioactive carbon it contains. as Codfish Island), a small island off the west coast of Rakiura/Stewart Island. Because of Atholl’s Ngāi Tahu whakapapa, learning about the first Māori in Aotearoa Radiocarbon dating can tell us when the first people arrived, has special significance for him. but it can’t tell us where they came from. So how do we know Among the earliest sites of human the first New Zealanders came from East Polynesia? Again, habitation in Aotearoa, Wairau Bar near Atholl says that artefacts provide an important link. Blenheim is the best known. The first people arrived there from East Polynesia Two fish-hooks found in the Some of the things found at Wairau Bar were around 1270 to 1300. We know this because middens at Wairau Bar very similar to artefacts of the same age from archaeologists have used radiocarbon dating Tahiti and the Cook Islands. The stone adzes, for Archaeologists digging at to work out the age of artefacts found at Wairau Bar in the 1960s example, were exactly the same shape in all three the Wairau Bar site. places. The whale-tooth necklaces were also very alike, made in the same way. Artefacts are often the connection across different societies. They are like clues from the past.
Wellington
Wairau Bar Blenheim A whale-tooth necklace found in a midden at Wairau Bar 11 Hawai‘i
Atholl says that archaeologists have lots
of ways to establish connections between EAST POLYNESIA societies, such as looking at language. Among East Polynesian languages, te reo Māori is closest to Tahitian and Cook Islands Māori. Atholl has a story about this: WEST POLYNESIA Tuvalu When Captain Cook visited New Sāmoa Zealand in 1769, he brought with him a Tahitian named Tupaia. Tupaia Niue had no problem communicating with Tahiti Tonga Māori, despite the fact he’d never Cook Islands been here before. So that definitely Rapa Nui tells us something. Kermadec Islands In the same way, te reo Māori SOUTH POLYNESIA is similar to the language spoken by Moriori on the Chatham Islands. These languages Tahitian, Cook N Islands Māori, te reo Māori, and Moriori are so similar it suggests W E Chatham Islands I think that the waka Polynesians the people who speak them must S Auckland Islands used to make long journeys could share common ancestors. only sail with the wind behind them. This was unlike European sailing ships, which could sail to a limited extent Archaeologists also use genetics to prove connections against the wind. During the 1200s, between different groups of people. They are especially the wind blew mostly from the north- interested in dentine, a source of DNA found in human teeth. east, down from East Polynesia They compare DNA from teeth found in archaeological towards New Zealand. That’s the time sites in Aotearoa with DNA from sites in East Polynesia. we believe settlement occurred here. Genetic similarities can prove that people were related. By the late fourteenth century, the
Another area that provides valuable information is wind patterns had changed. There were more westerlies. That’s the palaeoclimatology. This is looking at climate change over the wrong direction if you’re trying to centuries. Because the first migrants arrived here by boat, get here from the north-east! After studying wind patterns is especially valuable. It can tell us that, New Zealand became a lot where people came from as well as when. more isolated for a time.
12 13 Archaeology has given Atholl the opportunity to visit lots of interesting places. He’s been to Madagascar, off the east coast of Africa, and the Galapagos Islands, off the west coast of South America. But no matter where the work has taken him, Atholl says it’s all been about building a picture of the past. He believes that learning about our past is essential because it helps us to understand the present.
GLOSSARY To know ourselves properly, we need to think about where we’ve come from. We need to understand how our different societies artefact: an object made by a person, have changed. Take Māori, for example. How have their beliefs, such as a tool or work of art customs, and language changed over the decades and centuries? DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid): the Then you need to think about why these things have changed. genetic information in a cell that tells You have to know where Māori have come from in the the cell what it is (such as skin, hair, broadest possible sense to understand Māori today. bone) and how to grow element: a substance that can’t be broken down into anything else because it is made from only one kind of atom genetics: the study of inherited characteristics and their variation between people migration: the movement of people from one place to another vertebra: one of the small bones that make up the spine
A midden like those
found at Wairau Bar 15 The Past beneath Our Feet by Ross Calman
For copyright information about how you can use this material, go to: http://www.tki.org.nz/Copyright-in-Schools/Terms-of-use Curriculum learning areas English Science Published 2016 by the Ministry of Education Social Sciences PO Box 1666, Wellington 6140, New Zealand. www.education.govt.nz Reading year level Year 6 All rights reserved. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Keywords ancestors, Atholl Anderson, archaeology, artefacts, carbon, DNA, first people, genetics, Māori, middens, migration, ISBN 978 0 478 16630 9 (online) Ngāi Tahu, palaeontology, radiocarbon dating, Wairau Bar Publishing Services: Lift Education E Tū Editor: Susan Paris Designer: Jodi Wicksteed Literacy Consultant: Melanie Winthrop Consulting Editors: Hōne Apanui and Emeli Sione
