Life and Death in Early Rural Otago: The archaeology and bioarchaeology of St. John’s Burial Ground Milton, Otago, New Zealand

This book describes the investigation of St John’s Cemetery near Milton in Otago, southern New Zealand, that was carried out in 2016 as part of a wider study of early settler graves in the region. The cemetery was used between 1860 and 1926 and contains the burials of some of the first European (predominantly British) settlers in the area. In collaboration with a local group of descendants, Petchey and Buckley carried out an excavation that located and investigated twenty-five unmarked graves containing twenty-seven individuals. By combining archaeological, historical, and bioarchaeological approaches, a detailed picture of the lives of these people has been built up, giving insights into the experience of leaving the Old World and emigrating to New Zealand in the mid-nineteenth century. This is the first detailed investigation of this nature to have been conducted in New Zealand and provides a unique insight into the settler experience.