The Southern Cemeteries Archaeology Project is a colonial bioarchaeology research project. It’s run by a multidisciplinary team of researchers led by the Department of Anatomy at the University of Otago.
In the first research-driven work done into colonial New Zealand, their goal is to shed light on the day-to-day lives of early settlers to New Zealand. It was sparked in 2016 by the Tokomairiro Project 60 (TP60) group, a genealogy group based in Milton – a small town half an hour’s drive south of Dunedin that grew during the goldrush of the 1860s – who were interested in learning more about their ancestors in the local cemetery.
Professor Haillie Buckley, co-director of the project, tells Critic Te Ārohi that their goals were to “help characterise the lifestyles of these early settlers and goldminers by examining the biological tissues left behind and in particular to give a voice back to those who were lost in history - usually the marginalised, including women and children.” Dr Charlotte King, one of the researchers on the team, says, “The project ultimately is looking to discover lost and unmarked graves from the colonial period in New Zealand – especially the gold rush in Otago – to identify the people who lie within them, or at the very least to tell their stories to their descendant communities.”
One of the biggest things about their findings is the diversity in the goldfields. Like most, Charlotte’s initial impression of Otago was of Scottish heritage. However, she excitedly tells us how analysis of chemical isotopes from settlers’ remains shows that “people are from all over the place”. Chinese settlers, for instance, often go unacknowledged in our picture of Otago past despite being “a really important part of the gold fields,” says Charlotte. “There are people from really far afield, actually… We have one person who comes from somewhere tropical.”
This picture of diversity in the colonial period of Aotearoa New Zealand to Charlotte is “a really important thing for New Zealanders to know about,” especially in the context of the supposedly “modern” multicultural melting pot. “That’s not actually new, you know?” she says. “And people worry about the dilution of New Zealand culture and immigration. But it was always like that from the colonial period onwards. There have been people coming here from all over the place.” The diversity of our ancestry in Aotearoa is something the researchers are able to explicitly show with their data. “Ships records are really good for understanding broad trends,” says Charlotte, however they are still woefully incomplete.
Charlotte describes the buried individuals as cold cases: “Like, really cold cases.” The process of identifying them, then, is like detective work for the researchers. Through the analysis of remains like bones, hair, teeth, nails, and artefacts found in the graves, the team can figure out where settlers came from, what their diet was like, and different stressors they endured. In a lot of cases, Charlotte says that this is the limit to what they can understand from the remains. However, in certain cases, they are able to use the scientific data in conjunction with historical records to give individuals back their names.
“So, for one individual, we found that he had massive trauma [on his bones],” says Charlotte. “He’d been in a really serious accident around time of death, and we were able to match that back to death records and find accounts of the death of one person, Joe Hogan, who died in a rockfall while mining.” From the coroner’s report, they were able to match the injuries seen in his skeleton to the injuries that were recorded at time of death to identify him. “And so, for him, he would never have been identified without that kind of forensic analysis. Now we’re able to mark his grave.”
For Charlotte, it’s stories like Joe’s that make the research worthwhile. Current records “don’t actually talk much about the everyday people,” she says. There’s a huge range of experience in the people they’ve seen: some people had tumultuous childhoods they moved to New Zealand to escape from, while the biochemistry of others have revealed the day-to-day stresses that were experienced on the goldfields. “To me that’s the theory of what we do – it adds flesh to those stories and talks about the people who most of us are descended from,” she says.“We’re not descended from the fancy people who wrote the records. We are descended from the everyday grassroots people who had tough lives in most cases and just made out a living in New Zealand. I find that really valuable because I can relate to those people a lot more.”
The idea of digging up graves hasn’t been received well among all, however. Their initial proposal to dig up unmarked graves in 2015 was denied by the Central Otago District Council (CODC) who expressed concerns that the exhumations would be disrespectful. Charlotte says that any opposition to their research has always been respected since everything they do is in consultation with the community: “And so there might be portions of the community that would really like the project to work in their area, but if there are people who say ‘no’, we don’t work there.” She wants to be clear about one thing, though: “It’s not grave robbing… We are not doing it without a reason for it.”
In fact, the process of exhumation to reburial aims to give more respect to the people buried there. “If you know that there’s a person in a grave and don’t know who that person is, then how do you give that person respect and mark them appropriately?” poses Charlotte. For the communities involved, it’s about trying to identify those people and reconstruct who they are so that, when they are eventually reburied with the proper funeral rites according to the identity of the person, their graves can be marked and honoured. “We achieved what we set out to do and located the graves of nearly 70 people whose burial places were lost,” says Haillie.