The Middle Waikato (or Hamilton) Basin is a promising area for studies of the postglacial history of Northern New Zealand. The major geomorphological features of the basin were developed in the last 40,000 years, mainly by aggradation of the ancestral Waikato River (Mccraw 1967, Hume et al 1975) and in the process a number of peat bogs and small lakes were formed which now provide suitable locations for palaeoclimatic and palaeoecological investigations. Four pollen diagrams from peats in the area have been published (Harris 1963, McGlone et al 1978) which show similar features to diagrams from elsewhere in the North Island (McGlone and Topping 1979) but there have been no comparable studies of sediments from the lakes.