KEY POINTS:
It had been 150 years since anyone showed any real interest in the hole in the ground in Pitt St.
Back in the mid-19th century it was a freshly dug well, serving a family which lived beside it on the distinctive Karangahape Rd ridge.
But when water pipes
were laid in inner-city Auckland, the well became defunct overnight, useful only as the family's rubbish dump. It was filled in, built over and forgotten. That was until January when the Chatham Building on the site was torn down to make way for an apartment block.
By law, the developers should have stopped work when they found the well and notified the Historic Places Trust of a pre-1900s site with "historic potential".
They didn't get the chance. There was another group so interested in the well it was prepared to break the law to beat both the developers and archaeologists - the so-called "bottle diggers".
These enthusiasts dig for old bottles then research, display and sell or trade their treasures for hundreds, even thousands of dollars. The Pitt St well was a collector's cornucopia - an early Auckland time capsule containing medicine bottles, baby's bottles, soda bottles and stoneware beer bottles. It was too much to resist. It may even have held one of the greatest prizes - an S. W. Gilbert porcelain toothpaste pot lid embossed with a distinctive Maori chief worth up to $10,000.
The bottle diggers would have watched as the building came down, perhaps sneaking on to the site after-hours to look for signs of a well. They may have been tipped off by someone in the demolition crew or a digger driver, one of the contacts they had built up over the years.
Once the well was found they had to strike before the Historic Places Trust was informed and its archaeologists took control of the site.
The diggers went in on the night of Wednesday January 23. Using headlamps, they dug all night to get two storeys down into the brick-lined well. There might have been four of them, two in the well, two others pulling up the buckets and ferrying the contents to a truck for sorting elsewhere.
It would have been a thrill - good digs always are. They were going against the clock. They were trespassing, there was always the chance police could be called. And if they were caught, they could be prosecuted under the Historic Places Act and fined up to $100,000 for excavating without the trust's authority.
On January 24 the developers found the well covered by a hoarding and called the trust. As its archaeologists prepared to salvage what was left, the diggers had the audacity to return over the weekend and dig out the last 2m of the well. The trust was furious. It had been well and truly done over by the "the Bottle Gang".
The battle over the Pitt St well was part of a bigger war between professional archaeologists and amateur diggers. The archaeologists say the bottle diggers violate the historic sites in their one-eyed hunt for bottles. The bottle diggers say the archaeologists just want the sites to themselves, jealous of the success of Kiwi hobbyists.
The trust's Auckland archaeologist, Bev Parslow, sifted through what was left of the well's contents: some broken pottery, leftover bottles and tea sets.
Holding a candlestick broken in the raid, she could not contain her contempt for the bottle diggers when the Weekend Herald visited. It turned out to be a rare piece by George Boyd, an Irish potter who ran the Newton Pottery until his death in 1886 when his will ordered that it was closed down and his moulds destroyed.
Parslow went public about the raid, labelling the bottle diggers "heritage thieves" and using the broken Boyd piece as an example of the destruction they cause.
She has tried to get police interested and passed on the name of suspects from previous raids. But the case is low-priority. The diggers need to be caught or photographed on site for a conviction to stick.
Parslow says had the historical context of the well not been destroyed, the archaeological investigation could have revealed how the family there had lived, how it survived the Depression. "Instead, they are taking stuff of interest to you and your children and keeping it in the hands of the chosen few."
Did Parslow label them the bottle gang? She doesn't admit to it but doesn't back away either.
"It is a name that's caught on in the sense of the damage they are doing and the way they are stealing heritage from everybody and making financial gain."
The "gang" title riles Adam Archer, Hamilton antiques dealer and president of the Association of Bottle Collectors. He prefers to call the Pitt St bottle diggers "ratbags".
He should know - he was convicted under the Historic Places Trust Act and fined $6000 in 2001 for a dig he took on a pre-1900s site in Taupiri.
He says they did wrong but he doesn't blame them - they were "saving" the bottles.
Archer says with the attitude of the trust leading to convictions like his, bottle diggers have been forced into subterfuge.
But unlike professional archaeologists, they are proactive at "saving" material from sites," he says.
If it wasn't for the bottle diggers at Pitt St, he says, the trust would never have known about the well until it had been worked over by a digger.
"We're a free army for them," he says. "We can run around and look for things. But they don't want that.
"They'll do a numerical analysis saying there's 36 booze bottles, 268 sauce bottles and four pairs of shoes."
He says the haul then gets dumped. "What do they do with all the stuff? Build another building to store it all."
The feud has been running since shortly after the Historic Places Act was passed in 1993. A strict interpretation means you cannot dig for bottles in your own backyard without the trust's authority if you believe there is material pre-1900.
Archer sums up the problem thus: "You guys dig holes. We dig holes. How can we do it better?"
Yet both sides told the Weekend Herald it was the other that had refused to come to the table.
Bottle diggers said they knew who the "ratbags" were who dug the Pitt St well, but would never give them up because of the trust's attitude.
The trust, through its senior archaeologist, Rick McGovern, complained of not having enough power to search the property of a suspect or to stop the trade of bottles taken from historic sites.
And the Pitt St well? It has been built over.
