1 00 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



upper part of this conglomerate belongs to the earliest period of occupation, I 

 would hesitate to say that the middle and lower parts do, as the vicinity of an 

 oven, dug into the underlying sands, may account for the charred wood and 

 bones. But the human bones were found in a purely undisturbed locality. 



The conglomerate was overlaid by what, in order to distinguish it, I have 

 called the dirt-bed, consisting of charcoal, chips of wood, fragments of nets and 

 matting, tools of wood and stone, quantities of grass and fern, altogether form- 

 ing a matted compound well deserving the appellation. Many bones of various 

 birds, Moa included, were found in this bed ; and, as we neared the mouth of 

 the cave in the progress of the excavations, polished stone tools of high finish and 

 keen edge were found in such positions as would lead to the inference that 

 they belong to the bed in question, and are therefore contemporaneous with 

 the Moa, whose bones are found in the same bed. In the north-east and 

 further end of the cave, surrounding and underlying an immense rock fallen 

 from the roof and resting on the drift-wood, were found many Moa-bones, and 

 various Maori appliances for obtaining fire, and near an oven dug through the 

 conglomerate quantities of Moa egg-shells were found. 



Near the middle of the cave the conglomerate had evidently been cleared 

 away and a house erected, of which three posts burned to the level of the dirt- 

 bed were in place when the excavation was made. In front of where the door of 

 this house should have been, in a small hole dug through the dirt-bed and under- 

 lying conglomerate, lying directly on the sands, I found a well polished stone 

 chisel, and near the same place several broken adzes in the dirt-bed in the close 

 vicinity of Moa-bones. Six or eight feet from the western wall, and about 10 

 feet from the line of fallen rocks in front of the cave was found a fragment of 

 a highly polished adze, and between that and the wall two pieces of sandstone 

 much grooved as though by the sharpening of a narrow tool. 



Here were heavy fire-beds with many Moa-bones of the largest size, and 

 several stones like oven-stones, but not enough wherewith to line an oven 

 of size sufficient to cook a Moa in. This leads me to suppose that the 

 Moa-hunters cooked their repasts outside, and only occasionally had meals in- 

 side. Otherwise how shall we account for the comparative scarcity of bones 

 inside and their comparative abundance outside the cave under circumstances 

 much less favourable for their preservation. 



A notable feature of this dirt-bed was the almost entire absence of the 

 remains of shell -fish which are so plentiful in the overlying beds, a peculiarity 

 so striking as to be evident at a glance in the sectional trenches cut across 

 the principal chamber of the cave. 



A bed of loose shells, mostly freed by means of fire from extraneous con- 

 sumable matter, having in places beds of earthy lime, the result of their 



