V 
( ^FEBl li§|§ 
THE NEW ZEALAND 
JOURNAL OF SCIENCE 
AND 
TECHNOLOGY. 
Vol. l. Wellington, November, 1918. rNo. 6. 
MAORI ROCK-QUARRIES ON D’URVILLE ISLAND. 
By J. Allan Thomson, M.A., D.Sc., F.G.S., Director of the Dominion 
Museum. 
Many kinds of stone were used by the Maoris in olden days for making 
toki (adzes) and other implements, but little has been put on record as to 
the quarries whence the stone was derived. A most interesting account of 
an argillite-quarry at the Rush Pool, nine miles from Nelson, was recently 
published by H. D. Skinner.* It has long been known that the Maoris 
obtained stone from D’Urville Island; so on the suggestion of Mr. E. Best 
I recently took an opportunity of visiting the island and obtaining photo¬ 
graphs of the quarries. I am indebted to Mr. G. Webber, of Emslie Bay, 
French Pass, for information as to their site. Those I visited are on a 
spur between Woodman’s Bay and the small bay nearer the French Pass. 
This spur consists for the most part of serpentine, and the light growth 
of manuka that it carrried has recently been burnt off. Although in this 
latitude serpentine at altitudes of 1,000 ft. and over bears little vegetation, 
the lower slopes of serpentine on D’Urville Island appear to have carried a 
certain amount of scrub and bush. Along the coast at the foot of the spur 
there are other igneous rocks associated with the serpentine—viz., amphi¬ 
bolites derived from doleritic or gabbroid rocks. The rock quarried by the 
Maoris occurs just below the summit of the spur on the north side, and 
consists of a light blue-grey, very fine-grained, and almost flinty stone, 
bearing occasional thread-like veinlets of dark quartz. It is almost cer¬ 
tainly a hornfels, or contact-altered argillite, and owes its hard nature to 
the partial recrystallization induced by the heat of the intrusive peridotite 
now represented by serpentine. A large isolated boulder also used as a 
source for stone, which occurs on the southern side of the spur not far 
above sea-level, is much darker in colour, but otherwise similar. 
It should be noticed that the stone at the Rush Pool quarry, described 
by Skinner as an argillite, also occurs close to outcrops of serpentine, and is 
also doubtless a contact-altered rock. In 1914 I observed a small quarry 
on the sea-coast about ten miles north of Cabbage Bay, on the Coromandel 
Peninsula, where again the rock was a contact-altered argillite of the Moehau 
series, the intrusive rock responsible for the hardening being an apophysis 
of the quartz-diorite of the Moehau Range, popularly known as the Coro¬ 
mandel granite. Where not affected by contact metamorphism, the argillites 
so common in New Zealand are seldom hard enough or sufficiently free from 
* H. D. Skinner, An Ancient Maori Stone-quarry, Trans. N.Z . Inst., vol. 46, 
pp. 324-29, pi. xii, 1914. 
21—Science. 
