ARTIFACT SALES CAUSE CONCERN

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31934, 11 March 1969, Page 9

ARTIFACT SALES CAUSE CONCERN

Children at Kaikoura had been making money by selling Maori artifacts to a dealer, said the director of the Canterbury Museum (Dr R. S. Duff).

Local residents had also expressed concern that such artifacts in the hands of dealers might be sold at a high profit to tourists, and leave the country illegally, Dr Duff said. When museum staff and members of the Canterbury Museum Archaeological Society were investigating the site at South Bay, Kaikoura, at the week-end, some of the local children were invited to take part in the excavation, Dr Duff said.

“6yt we soon found that they were contemptuous of thig sort of approach, rushing off to secret sites of their own from which they took needles and fish-hooks which a visiting dealer bought at an average of $2 each,’* he

said- The children were aged from eight td 13. “It was distressing to learn that the parents of the children apparently condoned this attitude of regarding a Maori site as a place to be looted for artifacts to be converted into pocket money,” he said. “This emphasises the deplorable lack of protective legislation for sites as a whole, ind in particular the lack of any ban on the buying and selling of artifacts. “By contrast various local residents reported collections which they intended to give to the Kaikeura Museum, if and when it was set up.” Dr Duff said that the Kaikoura County Council’s ban on fossicking on the beach front would continue in force until further notice.