Thanks to the hard work of University of Canterbury (UC) intern, Hannah Kraiger, LPC is getting back in touch with our roots.
Over the last few months, Hannah has been working with Environmental Business Partner, Crystal Lenky, and the team at Underground Overground – a Christchurch-based Archeology consultancy, to catalogue and share our artefacts.
LPC works under a Heritage New Zealand archaeological authority to ensure we protect the 60 pre-1900 historical sites within the Port when carrying out construction projects.
There are low, medium and high-risk zones across LPC and depending on the project area, will have different requirements during construction.
With a large amount of development at the Port over the last decade, there have been many artefacts found, mostly typical 19th-century material including domestic and commercial artefacts.
These artefacts have been stored in Ashburton – which is where Hannah comes in.
Studying towards her Masters in History, Hannah took on an internship with LPC to help us understand what we have.
Last year, Hannah worked to catalogue our artefacts and use her findings to build a webpage on our public website, to share this information with our community. You can check out the website here.
Wanting to share this with the LPC team, Hannah and Crystal worked with Mark Anderson from Civil Maintenance who built the display boxes and tables, which are now installed around our main office in Lyttelton.
“This has been my favourite part, putting all the displays together,” says Hannah.
“Rather than sitting in a box, they are now out for everyone to see and hopefully, people can learn a bit of history too.”
What started out as a project slightly out of her comfort zone, has turned into a passion as Hannah is now completing her dissertation on the material.
“I’ll be using the artefacts to look at the social and cultural history of the Port – specifically in the colonial era.”
The project has also cemented a passion for Hannah who hopes to go into exhibition work and curatorship.