Argillite and artifacts: Onekaka archaeologist keen to keep the history record straight
Jack Walls with an adze found near the Kahurangi River mouth. Its unusal shape makes it almost unique. Only one other like it has been found in the country, in Wairau. Its use was probably in canoe finishing.
Though he was a maths and science high school teacher in Nelson for much of his working life, Jack Walls of Onekaka also managed to develop a parallel career as an amateur archaeologist.
His dedicated work has earned him life membership of the NZ Archaeological Association, and his finds around Golden Bay, from hundreds of locations on mostly eroded beaches and excavated building sites, now fill 13 big boxes. These now reside in the Golden Bay Museum on permanent loan as the “Jack Walls Collection”. They have been carefully catalogued, and are freely available for anyone to view and research.
At the age of 88, Jack’s still a stickler for detail and won’t let anything go unchallenged if he considers it incorrect. The most recent example was John and Hilary Mitchell’s brief history of argillite, published first in The Prow, then in The Nelson Mail on 24 July, which caused Jack to write to the newspaper and correct the record. “There were so many glaring inaccuracies that I just had to write in. The use of fire and water to quarry argillite has long been discredited. They also claimed the Maori used argillite for weapons, but we don’t have any real evidence of that. Even their name for the argillite rock, pakohe, is not a sure thing, and probably refers to greywacke. A possible name for argillite is aropawa—a kind of stone found in rivers in the South Island, that was used for making tools.”
That may seem like nitpicking, but keeping the historical record straight is a serious business to Jack. He worked in the field with archaeological veterans like Don Miller and James (Jim) Eyles, and helped record back in the early 1970s the 16 main argillite quarries and numerous smaller ones that run from northern D’Urville Island through to the Hackett River, near Nelson. These quarries remain our greatest industrial relics, their sloping, flaking floors often measured in hectares, and still so deep with discarded flakes that little grows upon them, even after 500 years.
The basic method of extraction was quite simple. Two or more men would pound the argillite outcrop with a spherical hammerstone (usually a super-hard boulder of granodiorite carted all the way from the Nelson Boulder Bank) to split off large blocks. These would then be further reduced into rough blanks. Smaller hammerstones would then be used to produce rough unfinished tools, which were either traded as they were or worked further into finished polished adzes. Hammerdressing—a technique that knocked off any irregularities—was the first stage in finishing, The adze was then ground on a slab of wet sandstone to create its edge.
These adzes, hard as steel, formed the basic tools for such fundamental woodworking crafts as home carving and canoe manufacture. Apart from adzes, drill points were also made from argillite, which could drill “suspension” holes in greenstone for pendants, or in thongs for weapons. Nothing, however, could drill a hole in argillite; no weapons were made of this rock because it was imperative that any weapon stayed attached to its owner by a wrist thong.
On one site Jack worked on at The Glen, at the northern end of the Boulder Bank, he found some 400 drill points. “These would have been for gift exchange (koha) for such things as obsidian from Mayor Island and Taupo sources, or nephrite from the West Coast.”
Unlike the argillite artifacts found in the Motueka Valley, which are mostly worked from water-worn boulders washed down the river, the pieces that Jack has found in Golden Bay can be traced back to the quarries at Mt Ears and Ohana on D’Urville Island.
He brings out his 1:50,000 scale topographical maps of Golden Bay, on which he has meticulously recorded all the sites where each piece was located.
“You can see that there’s virtually no section of our coast where something hasn’t been found. It indicates the early Maori may have moved from camp to camp in their search for food, essentially foraging and gardening as they went. Kumara and taro were grown on suitable sites. Storage pits for kumara are evident still in many sites around Golden Bay, while the ones for taro are found mainly on the West Coast.”
Jack also has in his possession replicas of two nephrite ear pendants, significant not only because the originals’ likely source was the Dart River in Wakatipu, but also because they were found with the skeleton of a young teenage girl uncovered at the end of Tennyson St, Pohara, during excavation for a motel extension back in 1994. The skull was badly damaged by the builders before they realised what it was.
Jack inspected the remains along with the local policeman, doctor, and iwi representative John Mitchell, and by consent later took all the bones down to the Otago Medical School. There, anatomist Philip Houghton determined from the teeth that the remains were those of a 13-year-old female, and that judging by the femur she was about 155.5cm tall (5”1’). The cause of her early death could not be determined, but the state of her teeth, which showed little wear, indicated that she probably died in early European times (possibly 1800-1820) when softer foods, particularly potatoes, became generally available. Before that time, in the later prehistoric period (AD 1600-1770), people of even her age would invariably show advanced wear on the molar teeth because of their gritty diet, which could include shellfish and fern root.
The girl’s remains were later brought back to Takaka and buried, along with her pendants, in the old Maori section of the Rototai Cemetery. Jack then commissioned Onekaka jade carver Geoff Williams to make replicas of the pendants so that later generations would know what they looked like.
“These sort of finds are special because they give us insights into Golden Bay’s past, how early Maori lived here. We can only be richer for knowing these details.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
