What do moa eggs, seeds chewed by rats and 600-year-old footprints have in common? Lost planes, dog turds and frozen sleeping bags? Archaeologists in Aotearoa New Zealand deal with artefacts like these every day to work out how the people before us lived.

In this book David Veart walks alongside the archaeologists as they dig up the past on top of volcanoes and beneath our city streets, in Maori pa and explorers' huts. He shows us the things they find - obsidian adzes, enamel cups, the carved prow of a waka - and tells us the remarkable stories they have uncovered of Polynesian voyagers and Pakeha sealers, Maori gardeners and Chinese storekeepers.

Looking for ancient DNA, researching your own rubbish (WARNING: stinky work ahead), doing aerial archaeology with Google Earth (better than leaning out of a biplane) - this book will have readers of all ages thinking like archaeologists as it excavates the stories of the past.

 

This book is the winner of numerous awards. It was recognised in the Honour category by the New Zealand Children's Book Award. It was recognised in the Elsie Locke Medal for Nonfiction category by the Lianza Children's Book Award. It also was recognised in the Nonfiction category by the New Zealand Children's Book Award.

This book is part of a book series called Digging Up the Past .

There are 112 pages in this book. This book was published 2011 by Auckland University Press .

David Veart is a Department of Conservation archaeologist with a wide interest in New Zealand's history. He is the author of First Catch Your Weka: A Story of New Zealand Cooking (AUP, 2008).

This book has the following chapters: Introduction: Leave nothing but footprints -- 1. A Nation of Voyagers -- 2. A New World of Meat and Giant Birds -- 3. Archaeological dating and a slight problem with rats -- 4. Kuri: pets, cloaks and four legged fridges -- 5. Archaeological words . When to sight or cite a site -- 6. New land, new gardens (same old veggies) -- 7. Pa and Learning to See -- 8. Wandering Celts meet context and Occam's razor: Archaeology on the Fringe -- 9. Tales from Tools -- 10. In It Up to Your Elbows: Stratigraphy, Midden Analysis and the Archaeology of your Garbage -- 11. Mining the sea, the Archaeology of Sealing and Whaling -- 12. Archaeology on Ice -- 13. All at Sea or The sands of Time -- 14. Excavating Forts and Files; a Story of Historic Archaeology (or) Boeing, Boeing Gone -- 15. The archaeology of not finding what you were looking for -- 16. Now where did all those trees go? The archaeology of Kauri Dams -- 17. Chinese Gold -- 18. Location, Location, Location: Urban Archaeology -- Postscript: Moa under the Minefield.