Page:Old Westland (1939).pdf/24

the Maori occupation of Westland has been treated so far as though it were the first, there can be no doubt that the human occupation of New Zealand is of much greater antiquity than this. Discoveries have been made of stone implements far below the present level of the soil. The most careful and scientific description of such a discovery is given by Sir Julius von Haast. A partly finished chert adze and its sandstone sharpener were found by a party of gold miners at Bruce Bay, South Westland, a few days before he arrived on the spot in 1868. The implements were lying on a floor of pebble-studded clay, and more than fourteen feet of strata of humus, sand and shingle had to be cut through before they were reached. Totara trees four feet in diameter had to be felled before the surface could be broken; there were also huge trunks that had been prostrate for generations, and moss grown moulds of others that had decayed centuries before. The place was five hundred feet above high water mark, with the usual three belts of driftwood sand without vegetation, rush-and-manuka-covered sand, and low scrub. It had clearly passed through these three stages, and its foot of humus must have taken many generations if not centuries of herbage to form before the forest giants could root themselves in it. The various accumulations and the ancient growth of the forest belt take us back undoubtedly several thousand years, and even then we have