A story of a community taking the lead to investigate their own history. Near the small fishing village of Moeraki, whānau members are doing the work of excavating, sorting, and identifying artifacts from an old Māori archaeological site.

Standing over a stainless-steel sink, spray gun in hand, Robyn Maguigan is ready to wash and sieve a pile of jumbled up bones, rocks, shells and charcoal she has dug up. Items that will help tell the story about how her tūpuna lived.

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Robyn and her whānau whakapapa to Moeraki, a fishing village not far north of Dunedin on the east coast of Te Wai Pounamu. As does archaeologist and Curator Māori at Tūhura Otago Museum Dr. Gerard O'Regan.

So when Gerard spotted a dark line and some obsidian in an eroding cliff face at the edge of the urupā at Tikoraki point on the Moeraki peninsula, he knew he was looking at the remains of an early Māori settlement site.

Digging at the edge of the urupā for a tree planting project organised by Te Rūnanga o Moeraki confirmed this. When fish bones and shells started to surface Gerard realised they had found a midden - an early domestic dumping site where the remains of what people were eating and tools they were using are left.

With erosion threatening the area, and a flourishing rabbit population burrowing into the site, it seemed important to recover and catalogue the material from the midden before the story was lost. Especially when preliminary radiocarbon dating of a pāua shell indicated that it could be from 600 years ago.

But instead of calling in others to do it on their behalf, the community decided to take the lead themselves. Te Rūnanga o Moeraki put out a notice, a pānui, and got warm support from the wider Moeraki whānau, including from Robyn's mum, kaumātua Aunty Reita of the Tipa whānau. With help from archaeologists from the University of Otago, the community have done the excavations at the site themselves - pegging out, digging and sieving to collect the material.

In the next phase the whānau travelled to Dunedin to the archaeology department labs at the University of Otago to wash, dry, and sort through the recovered bones, shells, charcoal and bits of tools.

Claire Concannon visits them in the lab to learn more.

This project is supported by MBIE's Curious Minds Otago Participatory Science Platform funding to enable community involvement. It is lead by Te Rūnanga o Moeraki and Moeraki whānau members, and supported by staff and students from the Archaeology programme at the University of Otago and staff from Tūhura Otago Museum.

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details