Archaeologists unearth local history

FORMER Wanganui mayor Thomas Bamber ate a lot of beef and probably smoked a clay pipe.
This is becoming clear as a team of archaeologists excavate his former house site in Rutland St, next door to what is now Chronicle Glass. The team of 12, from private Auckland and Hamilton-based company CFG Heritage, have been painstakingly digging at the site since the middle of last week.
Their job is to find and record every trace of the past still captured in the ground under Whanganui Ucol's future building site They will be finished by Christmas, archaeologist Mat Campbell said, and any remaining traces will be destroyed during the building process.
What the team has found so far is colonial-era rubbish ? a lot of bones (mainly beef), broken bottles and dishes, a few military buttons and broken clay pipes. Everything is to be taken back to Auckland for sorting and analysis, then offered to Whanganui Regional Museum.
There are also traces of former structures on the large site: a well, fireplace foundations and post holes.
Gushing out of the ground is water from the artesian bore used by an early bottling factory. Mr Bamber, Wanganui's mayor from 1878-80, was a blacksmith, and the digging has unearthed wrought iron pieces he may have been intending to melt down and re-use at his forge next door.
Old photographs of the area show early wooden buildings, including Wanganui Hotel and the Bamber house. What was there before them is a mystery the archaeologists may be able to solve.
Mr Campbell said it was unlikely there had ever been Maori settlement at that place as the area was sandy and Maori preferred the other side of the river because it was more stable and less flood-prone.
The archaeological dig aimed to find out more about how the city's early European settlers lived ? what they ate, what crockery they used ? things they might not have bothered to mention in their journals if they did keep journals.
This would be compared with information from similar sites elsewhere in New Zealand.
The archaeological team was staying in the Ucol hostels in Dublin St, Mr Campbell said. It would be returning to Wanganui when the Backhouse building in Taupo Quay was repiled, to check for historic traces before they were destroyed.
Because the site is in Wanganui's Old Town an archaeological authority and investigation was necessary before earthworks for the new buildings began.
An initial study was done by Michael Taylor and Annetta Sutton, of Wanganui's Archaeology North.
It was unlikely that any human remains would be discovered, Mr Campbell said. But if they were work would stop immediately and the archaeologist would liaise with tangata whenua, police and the Historic Places Trust.