On close examination the middens vary enormously in content. Some contain the every day debris of the settlement, with stone flakes, oven rake-out, shells, bone fragments and broken oven stones, but others are very specialised. For instance from a midden at Galatea Bay on Ponui Island only the head bones of snapper were recovered indicating the bodies had been taken elsewhere (Shawcross 1967). Seasonal camps where fish were caught, deheaded, dried and taken away to another settlement were probably common around the Hauraki coast.
17