A New Cave.

Manawatu Herald, 6 July 1899, Page 2

A New Cave.

Mr John Thacker writes to the Akaroa Mail as follows: — It may interest you and some of your readers to know that during last week we discovered in a cave near the western point of Little Okain's, and partly unearthed the camping, or perhaps more correctly speaking, the former abode of a tribe of Maoris. The dis» covery was made by my brother Christopher on Sunday, June 18, when] he found lying near a heap of shells! and isbes a bone^ook with part of at

flax line attached, and the idea suggested itself to him that possibly beneath the accumulated debris there might be more curios. He and I and one of our men, L. Grant, went there on Thursday afternoon, taking shovels and crowbars with us, and we had not long been at work when we came to the conclusion that we were on the scene of a Maori habitation of longstanding and extent. We continued operations with the aid of another man, Robert McKnight, on Friday and Saturday, and were rewarded by finding quite a collection of Maori implements and belongings, including adzes or tomahawks of greenstone and another kind of stone, greenstone ear pendants, earrings of human teeth, bone and wooden hooks (some with flax lines attached) bone and wooden spear heads, bone and wooden needles, pieces of sandstone worn in the shape of a mortar, vessels of what appears to be kelp drawn into the shape by pieces of wood and flax, wooden clubs, sticks that have been used to make fire and on which the char still shows, a paint brush made of long fibres enclosed in twigs and then bound round with flax and still tinged with a reddish colour, close to a shell that has contained the same red substance, numerous pieces of matting, network, ropes, lines, etc., which appear to have been a headgear made with bands of ribbon-wood fibre, and decorated with feathers, a knife with a white pine handle through a hole in which a flax cord had been tied, the blade of a carved paddle, the skull of a animal with teeth like a dog but with a different shaped head, bunches of hair done up in neat parcels and tied with flax, etc. The work of excavating was made extremely difficult owing to the site being covered up by an old landslip and large fragments of rocks broken away from the precipice, so that we have not made a very exhaustive search, and have no doubt that if the whole of the debris were cleared away a very valuable find would be secured.