The remains of 34 unknown early settlers found in unmarked graves will be reinterred in Otago today, and archaeologist say they have learned more about who lived in the area, their health, injuries and where they came from.
The bodies were exhumed from the Ardrossan Street and Gabriel Street cemeteries in the small township on Lawrence.
The Ardrossan Street cemetery was used during the early days of the gold rush, while Gabriel Street had been in use since 1864 and researchers concentrated on an area where Chinese were known to be buried.
Researchers located 51 previously unmarked graves during the excavation.
Southern Cemeteries Archaeological Project co-lead Professor Hallie Buckley said they found and exhumed 24 graves at Ardrossan Street.
One grave contained a woman and a young child.
At Gabriel Street, they found 27 graves, exhumed 21 and found remains in nine, as the other graves had previously been exhumed during earlier efforts to repatriate the remains to China.
Gabriel Read discovered gold near the town in May 1861 and by 1864 about 24,000 people were in the Tuapeka goldfields.
The archaeological dig at an old cemetery in Lawrence. Photo / Supplied
Researchers were able to get a glimpse into what life would have been like on the goldfield, Buckley said.
“We do also know [that] there were people living in the Tuapeka region prior to the gold rush, so some of those buried at Ardrossan may have been pre-gold rush people and we obviously know that there were women, either on the goldfields or with the initial pastoral settlers because of the graves we found of children,” she said.
In addition to the suspected mother and child buried together at Ardrossan Street, they also found the remains of three infants.
“Through archival research we know from the death registers that there were a significant number of people there and a significant number of people were meeting untimely ends through accidents or disease and infant mortality was very, very high,” Buckley said.
“This was the case during this period anywhere, but when you’re living in essentially camp-like conditions in canvas cities, in very cold, very wet environments, then it’s really not conducive to good health at all.”
Research showed the diets of European settlers in the area had worsened in the time relocating to Lawrence, but the Chinese settlers nutrition improved on the frontier goldfields.
Also clear was the danger of the lifestyle.
“We found evidence of traumatic injury, which fits with what we know of how dangerous gold mining was,” she said.
“There was one man from Ardrossan Street who had suffered significant facial trauma months, if not a couple of years, before his death, which had healed but it set up a chronic infection in his face and through his skull. So he would’ve lived with periods of disability, not being able to earn money. And then he sadly suffered another traumatic injury just around his death, so that may have been related to accidents related to mining.”
It also seemed the reliance on horses had created dangerous conditions for the settlers, with significant traumatic injuries caused by being kicked by horses or falling off horses, carts or drays.
Southern Archaeology director Dr Peter Petchey said the area was the seat of one of Otago’s most significant gold rushes and the location of a Chinese goldfield settlement, which grew after Chinese miners began to arrive in Otago from late 1865.
The graves in the Ardrossan Street cemetery were widely scattered, in contrast to the neatly ordered rows of the later Gabriel Street Cemetery, and the depths of the graves varied greatly.
That was a reflection of a frontier society where locals were concerned about gold mining, not town planning, Petchey said.
One surprising element of the research was discovering the variety of places the Chinese population on the goldfields came from.
Chinese on the goldfields were often believed to have come from the same region of Guangzhou, but isotope work showed they probably came from a few different regions of China.
“Interesting artefacts were also found in some graves, with several containing distinctively Chinese artefacts, including a wooden comb and the remains of a Chinese-style tunic or jacket. Items such as these demonstrate how Chinese miners maintained their cultural links and identity in the goldfields,” Petchey said.
The remains would be reburied in the Gabriel Street cemetery on Sunday afternoon.
