3-hour Shag Beach Saunter (East Otago) Traditional Cache
3-hour Shag Beach Saunter (East Otago)
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A pleasant walk; a lovely deserted beach; a bit of wildlife (shag jokes optional); and a view of a very important Maori moahunter site.
The walk will take you about 3 hours return. Allow longer for photos and a leisurely lunch. It’s 12 km return trip from the carpark at the end of Andersons Rd to the cache. Kayaking to the cache is another possibility – but you would miss seeing the shags on the beach cliffs during the breeding season.
It's definitely worthwhile visiting the Shag Village display at the Otago Museum's Tangata Whenua Gallery before or after your walk to Shag Mouth site.
Note that the Shag Village moahunter site is partly on private land, a restricted access area and fully protected. The cache is well away from the archaeological site. You're looking for a black 1.6 litre screwtop, just hanging around.
Please view the attached ANDERSONS LAGOON TO SHAG BEACH WALK MAP for details of the route. From the carpark at the end of Andersons Rd, a track leads to Stony Creek beach. Cross the lagoon mouth to the staircase up the cliffs. The first section is a choice between either the safely fenced clifftop track or along Stony Beach (a low tide option only). Then there are three short but steep hills and a couple of boggy streams to cross as the track traverses three bluffs. Finally you walk the length of Shag Beach to the mouth of the Shag.
You will need to plan a mid-to-low tide time to do this walk. At high tide or in stormy weather crossing the mouth of Andersons Lagoon and the Shag Beach section could be difficult. The optional route along Stony Beach is only possible within 1-2 hours of low tide, and will require boulder-hopping unless you choose a very low spring tide.
BE AWARE that because of the cliffs there are very few opportunities to get off the beach if you are trapped by high tide.
Tide info: NIWA Tide Forecaster. This site gives you the actual height of the tide so you can pick exactly which is the lowest tide. This computer model is expected to be accurate to within 0.1 m in tide height and 10 mins in tide time.
• Input Shag Beach coordinates in degrees/minutes/seconds format: Latitude 45 30 20 S and Longitude 170 47 20 E.
• Choose Datum: Lowest Possible Tide.
Public access saga:
Public access to Shag River mouth used to be on an unformed public road starting at Bushey Park. Then, the Bushey Park Estate landowner erected deer fencing over the road so it was impassable (illegal, but effective). The locals complained but the farmer still got the road legally closed. However, a recreational access group negotiated this alternative coastal route to the Shag mouth. Several new sections of public road were gazetted to provide a practical walking route along the clifftop and the Bushey Park landowner was required to provide a staircase for access up the cliff by Andersons Lagoon. This new track isn't so useful for fishers, but it is a boon for walkers!
The Wildlife:
Yes, in summer there are shags nesting on the cliffs. Hence the Waihemo River is also called the Shag. Take your camera and tell us if you saw nests, chicks or fledgings at the time you visited.
And all year round you'll see NZ sealions on the northern end of Shag Beach. The young bachelor males don't realise they're a threatened species - give them space!
Recent DNA analysis has shown that these modern sealions are a different genetic lineage from the ancient sealions hunted by our Shag Mouth villagers. Scientists discover pre-historic NZ sea lion The original mainland sea-lions were wiped out between 1300 and 1500 AD, soon after Polynesian settlement. The extinction created an opportunity for sealions from the subantarctic islands to colonise New Zealand's mainland. Modern NZ sealions also faced extinction in the 1800s when they were hunted for blubber and skins, but since 1997 they have been completely protected and are beginning to breed on the mainland again.
Shag Mouth Village
This was a perfect spot to settle, 650 years ago. Humans had only been in the country for a hundred years. Southern NZ was too cold for kumera cultivation and the only domestic animal was the dog, so Maori were dependent on foraging. Here you find lots of big animals unfamiliar with human hunters… it makes sense to settle in a resource-rich area and exploit it.
Shag Mouth is near a fur seal rookery- that’s important as it’s a reliable food source, though seasonally variable. It's a sheltered place to pull up your canoes. There's great fishing, and whole coast is easily accessible by waka. As well as seals there are sealion colonies, elephant seals, four types of penguins and shags. The hills around are covered in totara and matai forest, with ribbonwood and kahikatea beside the river. Small birds are numerous, including parakeets and NZ quail. The Shag River gives easy access inland where there is relatively open country, favourite habitat of some common medium and large moa species. You can also get silcrete for tools from Central Otago.
Your huts, rectangular framed whare and thatched oval whare porotaka, are built mostly around the edge of the village. Their hearths are usually made from four sandstone slabs. The central open space is used for food processing and cooking. The bone dumps are sited on the western side of the huts, downwind. Your revered dead are buried in the dunes on the seaward side of the village.
There are areas for bone and stone tool manufacture and refurbishment. You have easy access to silcrete and basalt, but you need to take good care of your higher-quality argillite, pounamu and obsidian tools because you don't have many of them. Probably you brought them when you moved here, and because you don't have much contact with other groups and there is no long-distance trade network, you can't get new supplies of those valuable materials.
You have everything you need for work, play and display- stone adzes, silcrete blades, bone fishhooks, sinkers, harpoons, spinning tops, tattooing chisels, ornaments, and a variety of adzes and chisels for carving house panels and canoe pieces. You don't need to preserve seasonal food or carry it from long distances as there's plenty to eat nearby all year round. There are 100 - 300 people living in the village, and life is good.
[There is one impossible thing shown in this Otago Museum diorama of Shag Mouth Village – what is it?]
One day, the Akatore Fault moved and a massive earthquake shook the village. Scary! Ground compaction and increased silt from slips caused a swampy estuary to form. But that had advantages- from then on you ate a higher proportion of estuarine birds and shellfish.
But then, between 20 to 50 years after settlement, the moa and seals are depleted. No one starves- there are still small birds, fish, shellfish, fern root and cabbage tree stem starch - but it’s hard work feeding so many people in one place. So your group moves on and Shag Mouth Village is abandoned.
Time passes. The sea erodes part of the village site, then deposits new sand dunes. When Ngai Tahu move down to the area in the 1750s, they establish a pa site on Shag Point itself (Matakaea, or wandering gaze, recalling the tradition of the Arai Te Uru canoe which capsized off Moeraki). It’s likely the river mouth is used as a temporary fishing camp in the 1800s. European sealers, whalers and farmers follow.
Excavations
In 1872 Julius Haast (Canterbury Provincial geologist) was surveying the Shag Point coal-field, when Mr F D Rich of Bushy Park told him about middens with moa bones on his property. Haast investigated the site in 1874, followed by Bayard Booth (assistant to Hutton, Director of Otago Museum) in 1875. Others also dug and removed artifacts. The major interest at this time was whether the moahunters were Polynesian or pre-Maori Melanesian settlers.
The most extensive digging (literally! with a spade!) was by David Teviotdale between about 1914 and 1923. Teviotdale became interested in moa bones and Maori artifacts while a goldminer at Hyde. After opening a bookshop in Palmerston in 1912, he spent his half-days and Sundays fossicking at Shag Mouth looking for “curios”.
At first I dug out middens, but was not very successful, so searched for signs of huts and then had better luck… The digging was done with no system; any likely spot would be dug over, and then I would move on to another, but as time went on the patches became connected, till practically the whole site has been covered… nearly three acres of ground have been turned over.
From 1920 Teviotdale kept records of his excavations, as advised by Henry Skinner, Curator of Anthropology at Otago Museum. Appointed as Skinner’s assistant in 1929, Teviotdale became a respected archaeologist and eventually Director of Invercargill Museum. His Shag Mouth finds are held at Otago Museum.
The most valuable information about Shag Mouth comes from a large integrated Otago University research programme led by Atholl Anderson. Parts of the site were carefully re-excavated between 1987 – 1989, followed by years of analysis and publication of findings.
The different midden layers show a change from big game (moa and seals contributing up to 90% of the total meat) eaten during in the early occupation, towards small game such as fish, small birds and shellfish (with fish contributing 50% of the total meat) during the later occupations. The earlier species of moa caught were replaced by an inland species, suggesting that longer hunting expeditions were needed towards the end of occupation. The moa parts carried back to the village were used more thoroughly, even breaking open the toe bones for marrow. Seal carcasses were transported by waka, so as food became more scarce the entire carcass was brought back to the village instead of just the best bits. Smaller shellfish were taken as the larger ones became locally depleted. Shag Village, occupied by 100 - 300 people for 20 - 50 years, sometime between 1340 and 1410 AD, is now a textbook example of resource depletion and localised species extinction by humans.
Oddly enough, the last ‘settlement’ at Shag Mouth was when Teviotdale was digging here – the huts where coalminers Messrs Graham, Smith and Hollis lived. Sam Hollis also tried to make some extra money by carting away truck loads of moa bones to be ground up for fertiliser! The miners rowed across the river to work at the coal mines at Shag Point. A concealed branch of the Waihemo Fault line lies along the Shag River, and on the northern side of the fault there is an outcrop of the 75 million year old coal-bearing Taratu Formation.
PS: Probably the first coalmining in NZ was at Shag Point in the early 1830s, when whalers used coal to fuel their trypots. Shag Point Coalfield was worked from about 1848 to 1982, with some 20 mines producing about 1.8 Megatonnes in total. Drives followed the coal seams 1050 feet out under the sea. Seepage was a continual problem! Initially coastal shipping transported the coal to market, then a private Shag Point railway branch line was built in 1879 and ran until 1934.
Information:
- Atholl Anderson, B Allingham & I W G Smith (eds) "Shag River Mouth: The Archaeology of an Early Maori Village" (1996)
- Lisa Nagaoka Thesis "Resource Depression, Extinction, and Subsistence Change in Prehistoric Southern New Zealand" visit link
- David Teviotdale Journal of the Polynesian Society Vol 33 No 129 (1924) "Excavations near the mouth of the Shag River" visit link and Henry Skinner "Results of the excavations at the Shag River sandhills" visit link
- Bruce McFadgen "Hostile Shores: Catastrophic Events in Prehistoric NZ and their Impact on Maori Coastal Communities" (2007)
- Jill Hamel "The Archaeology of Otago" (2001) visit link
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