A judge has told the Crown it cannot draw a line around the pieces of a centuries old ocean going canoe it has already dug out of a Chatham Islands sand dune and call that the end of its responsibility. The rest of the vessel, still buried and still at risk from the next big storm, is covered by the same legal duty.
The ruling came from Māori Land Court Judge Michael Doogan and was reported by RNZ on Sunday. It is the latest turn in a case that has run for almost two years over what is arguably the most significant archaeological find New Zealand has seen in a generation.
The canoe was found in August 2024 on a farm on the northern coast of Chatham Island, known to Moriori as Rēkohu. Vincent Dix and his son Nikau came across worked timber while looking for driftwood on their property after heavy rain flooded a nearby creek and cut into the dunes. They recognised what they were looking at and alerted authorities.
What followed was a rescue dig rather than a full excavation. Work funded by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage concentrated on the parts most likely to be washed away, and wrapped up in February 2025 with more than 750 pieces recovered and placed into storage. Only 55 square metres of a site thought to cover about 1,100 square metres was funded to be excavated.
Lead archaeologist Dr Justin Maxwell of Sunshine Archaeology told the court that less than 10 percent of the canoe has been lifted out of the ground. The remainder is still sitting in a dune on an exposed coast in the middle of the South Pacific, with nothing much between it and the weather.
“Engineering solutions, such as sandbags and the like, are unlikely to prevent large-scale loss of the waka if there is a substantial storm event on the north coast of Rēkohu,” Maxwell said in evidence to the court. Waka is the Māori word for canoe.
He has described the site as one of the most important ever encountered in New Zealand and the wider Pacific, and told the court that “it cannot be overstated what an immense loss to culture and heritage it would be if more of this site and the waka itself were lost to a storm”.
That assessment is not really in dispute. What has been in dispute is money, and who is on the hook for it.
The Crown filed memorandums with the court saying it did not have the funds to keep digging, putting the estimated cost of a full excavation at roughly $3.5 million. It argued that only the parts actually lifted from the dune had been “found” for the purposes of the Protected Objects Act, and that everything still underground amounted to predictions of what might lie below the surface. On that reading, the government’s obligations stopped at the edge of the trench.
Doogan did not buy it. “I do not accept this characterisation of the facts,” he wrote, finding that “what has been ‘found’ are not just those parts of the waka seen or recovered, but also those parts of the waka that remain buried in the dunes”.
He was also pointed about the timing of the government’s change of tack, noting that “it was only once the scale of the find (and associated cost) became apparent that the Crown’s position has become more ambiguous”.
The judge has directed the Crown to come back to the court with memorandums setting out how it proposes to examine, care for, record and keep custody of the material still in the ground. He also declined to settle ownership now, holding that the question of who the canoe belongs to should be worked out once the whole thing is out of the dune rather than before.
That matters because the Crown had wanted an ownership order first, on the reasoning that whoever was declared the owner could then go and raise the excavation money themselves. The court has effectively reversed that sequence.
The archaeology is what makes the argument worth having. Interim radiocarbon results released in November 2025 dated short lived plant material from the site to between 1440 and 1470, with cordage fibres reaching back to around 1415. Because trees can live for centuries, the team deliberately avoided dating the timbers themselves.
“Testing short-lived plant materials is important to get accurate dates for a find such as this. We don’t want to date the timbers because trees can live for a long time,” Maxwell said at the time.
The vessel is a pre European sailing canoe built with planks stitched together, a construction method that points back towards the wider Pacific rather than to anything made locally after settlement. The dig also turned up the first bottle gourd recorded at an archaeological site on Chatham Island, a tropical plant that had to have been carried there. Taken together, the find sits right on the question of how and when people moved south and east across the Pacific, and it is the reason Heritage New Zealand and researchers offshore have paid close attention to a paddock on a remote island of about 600 people.
Progress has been slow in other ways too. A full archaeological report was directed and was expected to be public by February this year, but it has stalled. An earlier attempt to have the canoe declared European in origin was thrown out by the court in October 2025 as implausible against the expert evidence, and an appeal against that finding was dismissed in February.
For now the practical position is unchanged. Roughly nine tenths of a 1400s voyaging canoe is still in a dune on an exposed northern coast, one serious storm away from being scattered, and the government has been told in plain terms that looking after it is its job. What it does next is due back before the court.
What do you think should happen to the rest of the canoe, and is $3.5 million a fair price for finishing the dig? Leave a comment below and tell us where you stand.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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