A Land of Plenty? Colonial Diet in Rural New Zealand

Abstract

Colonial New Zealand was built on the ideal of creating better lives for settlers. Emigrants came looking to escape the shackles of the class system and poor conditions in Industrial Revolution–period Britain. Colonial propaganda claimed that most emigrants achieved their aims, but the lives the colonists actually experienced upon reaching New Zealand remain relatively unexplored from a biosocial perspective. In this article we present a pilot study of stable-isotope test results of bone collagen from seven adults interred in St. John’s Cemetery, Milton, New Zealand (ca. 1860–1900). We interpret the diet at Milton and broadly compare our isotopic results with contemporaneous samples from Britain. We show that, as in contemporary Britain, the diet of our studied individuals was focused on C3 crops and terrestrial meat sources. Despite higher δ15N values in contemporary UK populations (which can be simplistically interpreted as indicative of higher meat intake), consideration of different local baselines makes it likely that this New Zealand population had relatively similar levels of meat intake. Interestingly, marine resources did not form an important part of the Milton diet, despite the site’s proximity to the ocean, hinting at the possible stigmatization of local resources and the development of a European New Zealand (pākehā) food identity.