Contact - Chinaman's Gold

Television (Full Length) – 1981

When gold fever hit Central Otago in the late 19th century, hundreds of Chinese immigrants were among the hopeful prospectors. They were a quiet community scraping a living in harsh conditions, hoping to save money for families back home. This report for Contact follows the work of archaeologist Neville Ritchie, who in 1981 led one of Aotearoa's "biggest archaelogical operations" yet — an excavation of Cromwell's Chinatown, the makeshift village left to nature after the last miner died. It was part of wider research of the area, before new dams put some of the history underwater.

There's a popular misconception about archaeology that it's a sort of glorified treasure hunt, that we do it a little neater and a little slower than anyone else, but I think that's wrong. It's a time proven system whereby different cultural assemblies found in different sites are compared and contrasted with each other and so the items that are found on site aren't looked at in isolation.
– Archaeologist Neville Ritchie talks about his work