overlying prehistoric deposits (Green and Pullar 1960). This project was followed by investigation of the British army’s mid-nineteenth-century Paremata Barracks just north of Wellington (Davis 1963), but most excavations during the 1960s were on Maori sites (Smith 1991). Many of these were investigated as part of projects led by archaeologists Les Groube in the Bay of Islands and Peter Coutts in Fiordland. These projects were concerned with documenting and explaining the processes of change in early historic Maori culture brought about by contact with Europeans. However a substantial number of the Maori sites were excavated by Trevor Hosking as part of the Tongariro Power Project, the first major development project in New Zealand to involve archaeological mitigation work. The high proportion of historic sites encountered during this project was one of the factors that lead the New Zealand Archaeological Association in 1966 to modify its national site recording scheme to include historic as well as prehistoric sites. With the major emphasis of this period on indigenous responses to culture contact, sites of immigrant cultures received minimal attention. Excavations were restricted to two examples of agricultural features and an armed constabulary redoubt while other research included the first recording of sites connected with the gold-mining industry.

During the early 1970s, attention began turning to the sites and material culture of the European colonists, and there were investigations of mission stations, whaling stations, early farmhouses, and sites of the forestry industry. However, the most significant developments took place in the second half of the 1970s when there was dramatic growth in the number of both excavations and publications in historical archaeology. One stimulus was the Historic Places Act of 1975, which gave protection to all archaeological sites 100 years or more in age. This act provided the means by which developers could be made to pay for site investigations and required the government-funded Historic Places Trust to take greater cognizance of historic sites than it had previously.

Two landmark projects in the development of New Zealand historical archaeology also began at this time. In 1977, archaeologist Nigel Prickett commenced a program of survey and excavation of fortifications associated with the Taranaki wars of the 1860s and 1870s (Prickett 1981). This was the first substantial attempt to excavate a coherent set of European sites and to describe and analyze the resulting material, and it also set out to place the Taranaki evidence within the broader contexts of imperial expansion and developments in the technology of warfare.

In the same year, archaeologist Neville Ritchie began the archaeological component of the Clutha Valley Development Project. Continuing for ten years, this project contributed the first detailed survey of one of New Zealand’s major historic gold-mining areas as well as excavations at some twenty-five historic period sites and a smaller number of prehistoric ones. These investigations focused on the archaeological remains of Chinese gold miners in the area and produced detailed descriptions of their living sites, material culture, and diet, which permitted assessment of the conservatism and adaptations of this discrete ethnic group (Ritchie 1986). This project is by far the largest yet undertaken in New Zealand, involving almost 20 percent of all the historic period sites excavated up to 1990 and just over 20 percent of all the publications on historical archaeology (Ritchie 1990).

With those two projects came an increasing institutional involvement in historical archaeology. Prickett conducted most of his research from the Taranaki Museum while Ritchie was employed by the Historic Places Trust and funded by the Ministry of Works and Development. Both men developed their research into doctoral dissertations, at Auckland and Otago universities respectively, and some of their excavations were used as field training schools for students from those institutions. However, apparent resistance from the academic community delayed the introduction of formal university courses in historical archaeology until the late 1980s.

The first half of the 1980s was the single most productive period so far in New Zealand historical archaeology, in large part because of the continuing activity of the Clutha Valley Development Project. Although there was some