Looters ransack historic site

Bottle fossickers worked overnight to loot a historic dig site in central Christchurch before archaeologists could get to it.

Tiffany James-Lee and Adrian Taylor, both archaeology PhD students from Otago University, arrived at the site of the former Caledonian Hotel yesterday morning to discover the area they had mapped out for exploration had been ransacked.

The area, in the Christchurch suburb of St Albans, was thought to be an old rubbish dump. It had been dug up overnight, destroying the layers of information critical to archaeological analysis.

Old ceramics, including plates and dolls dating back to the 19th century, were smashed by the looters as the site was picked over.

The diggings were pushed back into the pit and smoothed over with a spade, but only broken items were left, and the layering that provides archaeologists with vital context to the artefacts had been lost.

James-Lee said bottle hunters were the probable culprits.

Several "interested" men had been noted hanging around the excavation site the day before as diggers and graders prepared it for development.

The archaeologists had established the area of their pit on Wednesday night from the different coloration of the ground there after a digger had peeled back the earth layer by layer for them.

They tried to make the site look like ordinary dirt overnight, but they must have been spied by a bottle hunter, they said.

Despite the ransacking, the archaeologists were still able to find broken ceramic plates and doll parts, horseshoes, tin matchboxes, clay-pipe stems and roofing slates and slate pencils.

The only intact thing left was a penny inkpot, so-called because they were "a dime a dozen", Taylor said.

Archaeological robbery was, unfortunately, not uncommon, said Historic Places Trust archaeologist Bridget Mosley. A similar theft had take place at a Lyttelton site 18 months ago.

Mosley said it was "disappointing" as anything found belonged to the developers of the site, who were often not interested in artefacts and often let fossickers have things if they waited.

- © Fairfax NZ News