Otaraia Pa site – visit to an unmarked village

At one stage in its journey, this Ruamahanga River-side sheep grazing paddock was home to 94 villagers, who grew maize, wheat and potatoes, fished the river for tuna/eels, sailed boats and paddled waka up and down the waterway, often 12 kilometers to the river’s mouth.

So explained local archaeologist Prof. Foss Leach, who used the visit of some 30 people to the Otaraia Pa site on March 17 to paint a picture of what was once a “substantial Maori settlement” on the banks of a meandering Ruamahanga. 

Settlers like William Colenso _ who recorded 19 visits to the Pa in the 1840s and 50s _ recorded  that among the villagers were 30 males, 50 wahine and at least 12 children. 

Some 17 of the adults could read and write polished English _ in the late 1840s.

The first Pakeha school opened in the Wairarapa in 1856, the first Maori school at Papawai in 1860.

Elsdon Best described the Otaraia Pa settlement as belonging to Rangitane iwi, while Colenso recorded the village having “palisades” or defensive fences in 1846 _ but “foresaken” or abandoned by 1853.

The villagers even had a sandy beach for picnicking right across from the Pa site, painted by both William Fox (twice) and Charles Barrand _ with painting copies on hand for the weekend visitors to appreciate.

One by Fox shows a Pacific-style sailboat on the river as well as a waka crossing the stream.

Yet a painting by Barrand in 1863 shows the site devoid of  buildings/whare, fences or even the tall pou/poles recorded at the village site by Fox on earlier forays, Leech noted.

One visitor records the villagers growing 14 acres of maize _ their main crop _ five acres of wheat and two acres of potatoes. Another that in some 15 houses at Otaraia Pa there were 17 inhabitants fluent in reading and writing English.

The paintings show the Ruamahanga in Leach’s phrase “as similar to today” at the bend which became the Pa site. He noted that “as far as Otaraia is concerned there is no source of information on when a permanent village may have been first established there, but is most unlikely to have been before (circa) 1820. 

“No useful excavation has been carried out along the course of the Ruamahanga, so this is unknown.”

Leach said with no archeological excavation at the site, even the location of the Pa’s urupa/burial ground is not confirmed. A Greater Wellington Regional Council plan/map has “the urupa in the wrong place – it does not look correct.”

But in a 2015 aerial photo of the area one “can clearly see burial (pit) slumps” of the ground _ with a farm fence running through the centre.

“We’re standing on a place which was important to a lot of people for a long period of time,” Leach told his audience as they stood in the shadow of a large macrocarpa tree.

“Most Pa sites should be left alone – we (archaeologists and other researchers) learn little from them,   except when they are connected (adjacent) to a swamp,” where villagers can dispose of rubbish.

Leach instanced a Tauranga Pa site next to a swamp where, for example, more than 100 indigenous hair combs have been located, among a great pile of other artefacts and rubbish.

“The humble midden (rubbish pit) is where the archaeologist learns the most,” he added.

Visits to other local Pa sites are planned over the next two months. 

ends 

Caption:  Near the Otaraia Pa urupa/burial ground, looking back towards the pa site. Prof. Leach sits on a stool