Digging up the past: Hallie Buckley & Peter Petchey

A series of exhumations from grave sites in the South Island at Lawrence and Milton are revealing more about the lives of our early settlers. The Otago Historic Cemeteries Bioarchaeology Project is in its second stage at Lawrence, focusing on the remains of Chinese settlers who came for the Gold Rush in the 1860's. It's giving up clues about health, diet, overall quality of life and burial traditions. A similar project at St John's Burial Ground in Milton in 2016 focussed on European settlers. Project leaders University of Otago Department of Anatomy professor Hallie Buckley and Department of Anthropology and Archaeology professor Peter Petchey tell Kathryn Ryan what they've discovered so far.