Otago exhumations lead to international digs for archaeologists

Sunday, 13 January 2019

The University of Otago archaeology team will resume their dig of Lawrence cemeteries this summer, which will take them further afield to overseas digs.

Pioneer grave exhumations at Milton and Lawrence have given an Otago University archaeological team the opportunity to take on similar projects in Australia and the United States.

As a result of their work, the team had been granted Marsden Funding, which would allow them to branch further afield, and do similar projects in Victoria and California, a university spokesman said.

University researchers were awarded a total of $28.5 million from this government fund administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

The anatomy department would received about $826,000 over three years, to further study based on the Chinese skeletons exhumed at Lawrence that illustrated life, hardships and death on the Otago frontier.

* Archaeologists exhume three bodies in Chinese section of Lawrence cemetery

* Exhumation at old Lawrence cemetery reveals surprising finds

* Milton burial project 'a work in progress' to reveal the lives and deaths of early pioneers**

On Monday, the team would resume the project it started in April in the south Otago town's 'old' Ardrossan St cemetery, which closed in 1867, where eight graves were found that had been left behind when the 'new' cemetery opened in Gabriel St.

The team also exhumed three unmarked graves from the Chinese section of this cemetery as part of an archaeological and bioarchaeological joint project that studied the lives of some people in the 19th century Otago goldfields, and in particular the Chinese and other marginalised individuals.

This excavation would be the second phase of a research programme led by Dr Peter Petchey of Southern Archaeology and bioarchaeologist Professor Hallie Buckley of the University of Otago anatomy department that commenced at St John's Cemetery in Milton in 2016.

This was project was designed to give insights into the health and wellbeing of New Zealand's earliest European pioneers to Otago and their funeral traditions.