THE MOA

Hokitika Guardian, 20 September 1929, Page 1

THE MOA

INTERESTING RELICS

SEARCH IN OLD CAVE.

DUNEDIN, Sept. 18

Among the relics of a past civilisation, stored at the Otago University Museum, there are none more interesting than those which relate to the moa. The material that has been collected over a long course of years enables an excellent idea to be formed of the size of this huge bird, and in its variety and extent it is incomparably the finest collection of this material in any museum in the world. An important addition was recently secured by a member of the Museum staff who, in the course of investigations that go on unremittingly, found on an old Maori site an almost complete moa eggshell.

The Museum staff has excavated a smali cave in the, low cliffs south of the Taiori river mouth. This cave appears to have been shut off from the sea and rendered capable of human occupation by a landslip about the time when the first moa hunters —the earliest New Zealand ancestors of the Maoris—arrived in the district. On the sandy floor of the cave .were found fragments of moa eggshell, theegg in all probability ' having been carried into the cave by some oldtime Maori and eaten there. Other discoveries which were made give rise to romantic speculation concerning the history of Otago before the arrival of Europeans. At the same level as the eggshell, and in the five feet of stratified debris above it, some fragments of a moa bone were found. At the very top of the debris was a broken clay pipe, a relic, doubtless, of the whaling days. In the lowest layer immediately above the sand, were found the broken fragments of a human skeleton. There were no hones of the skull present, and presumably the body had been decapitated before being brought into the cave. A cannibal feast had apparently been held, and then the long bones had been broken into pieces for use in making fish hooks, bird spear points, and other small implements. Most of these had doubtless been carried away. A flue bird spear point of human bone was found, and there was also another fragment slightly ground from which a similar point would probably have been fashioned.