A remarkable set of dredge tailings and the remains of the gold dredge that formed them would be destroyed by a dam on the Nevis, archaeologist Gillian Hamel says.
She told the Nevis River tribunal yesterday she believed the heritage values of the Nevis were so significant they were an important part of the argument for banning major modifications to the river.
Intact systems were important for both practical and philosophical reasons.
"Using examples from the Nevis landscape, if a reservoir and a set of sluicings are linked by a water race, we can assume that all three were built by the same people at the same time and that they formed a working functional system," Dr Hamel said.
Then one could investigate what the builders of the system understood about hydraulics - whether they developed an effective working system - and look for the archival records of their mining claim and water rights, and try to understand the background knowledge the men had, she said.
"The linkages have a very practical use. The Nevis Valley is well supplied with sites that link up into whole systems and with archival evidence about named people associated with those sites."
The saying, "those who ignore their history are doomed to repeat it" could be validated, Dr Hamel said.
"I think that, as managers of Otago's water resources, the [Otago] regional council, for instance, should be taking a wary look at the effects of 19th-century miners' activities.
"Miners shifted and diverted large amounts of water in highly unnatural ways.
"In 1866 there were, in the Nevis alone, 130 sluice boxes spouting sediment from their lower ends and 87 miles of water races in action."
The Nevis was unique in Central Otago in providing a place where baseline studies about the effects of this movement of water could be researched, without later overriding influences of residential development, intensive horticulture and irrigation that had all occurred on other gold fields, she said.
The area of land which would be covered by a dam on the Nevis contained a remarkable set of tailings and the remains of the dredge that created them.
"Such an association anywhere in New Zealand is very unusual."
The dredge was designed and produced in New Zealand and was even exported to places like Russia, Dr Hamel said.
"It is also the only dredge I know of that worked continuously through both major eras of dredging, early in the 20th century and the 1930s. There were probably some years when it was the only working dredge in the South Island."
- lynda.van.kempen@alliedpress.co.nz
