Great Mercury Island/ Ahuahu Dig Diaries

Great Mercury Island/Ahuahu

Overview with shearers' quarters

In December a group of us, including Professor Geoff Irwin, Professor Thegn Ladefoged, Dr Rod Wallace, Peter Johnston, Pete Johnston, Alex Jorgensen and myself, headed out to Great Mercury Island. While most of the group had visited the island before, it was my first time out there and the experience was nothing short of impressive. We hitched a ride out on the farm boat courtesy of Sir Michael Fay and were able to stay overnight on the island.

Surveying archaeological features

We walked over some of the areas we are interested in working on during February, in addition to visiting some famous locations on the island. These included one of the earliest documented sites on the island and the very impressive Tamawera Pa. The archaeology of the island is incredible and future research carried out here will undoubtedly be significant to New Zealand prehistory. We are all very much looking forward to the opportunity to work on such an amazing location.

Tamawera Pa

It hardly seems like this year’s field school course has finished and we are back to organizing next year’s project. We will work in a new location next year, so there is a lot of preliminary organization to get on with. At the moment we are working on finalizing all the recording systems and data management strategies to be used. This is a big job because the project is new and we have a lot of people from the department involved, so we need to make sure all the researchers’ needs are met. Fortunately a range of experience and enthusiasm makes this task quite exciting as we think about how we can achieve our research goals from the point of view of the data acquisition. Our next big task is to develop new teaching resources for the course.  These will help the students as they acquire new skills before, during and after the field school. Stay tuned, this should be one awesome field school!

~ Rebecca