The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces.
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
Situated approximately 5kms from the posted coordinates in the Cairnmuir Mountains there is a place of historical interest, the Hawksburn Moa Hunting Site which was a camp established by the Māori.
Moa hunters journeyed into the Otago interior on a seasonal basis following ancient trails, hunting moa and other birds. Beside the Hawksburn Stream in the Cairnmuir Mountains a camp was established about 600 years ago. It had 3 dwellings. Here the people butchered and cooked more than 400 moa. The 4 types of moa were the South Island giant moa, the stout legged moa, the upland moa and the heavyfooted moa. Moa were probably hunted with dogs and killed with clubs or spears. Mostly the legs were carted off to the ovens and the rest discarded. After cooking, many of the leg bones were smashed possibly to extract the fat or marrow.
At Hawksburn there was a band of ovens, 18 in all, of a diameter of around one metre and up to 60cm deep, along the edge of the creek and suggestions of a rough semi-circle of round huts on the river flat.
Excavations at Hawksburn have revealed that to one side of the ovens was a bone dump and behind that a butchery floor. Some distance away was a row of hearths, the remains of small brushwood shelters, and between these and the base of the hills are areas where implements were made.
A variety of stone implements were found on the site: small sharp knives for skinning, heavy cleavers for jointing, long saw-toothed knives for cutting flesh and sinews, scrapers for a variety of tasks including both the removal of fat from skin and the smoothing of wooden implements such as spear shafts.
The illustration of the site by Chris Gaskin gives us an impression of what it may have been like over 600 years ago.
*NOTE: The Moa Site itself is on the Hawksburn Station and not readily accessible by the public.
*NOTE: Best to enter Hawksburn Road from the Bannockburn end which is a well maintained gravel road. The alternate way from Clyde is a much longer drive, a mixture of mainly 4WD gravel road, some tar seal, also some very steep climbs.