Eleven people had contacted her as a result of the article, either giving her permission to take samples from their mud brick buildings, or offering her whole or part bricks, she said yesterday.
"It's been fantastic. Everyone has provided me with as much of the history of their buildings as they can . . . and the offers have come from a wide area."
For her examination project, Ms Shaw (22), an honours student in geography, is analysing pollen taken from old mud bricks made in Central Otago.
She hopes tiny pollen grains trapped in the bricks when they were made will reveal whether the region's vegetation has changed since pre-European days.
She needed at least five bricks from different places to make her study worthwhile, and said getting 11 was better than she had hoped.
They were from homes and farm buildings from throughout Central Otago, including Earnscleugh, Bannockburn, Kyeburn Diggings and St Bathans.
The bricks were believed to be between 120 and 130 years old.
Ms Shaw, who made her "house calls" to take samples last month, is part-way through the laborious task of extracting the pollen from the bricks, a process which involves heating soil samples as small as 1g each in a water bath, drying them using centrifugal force and decanting them.
The difficult part would came later when she had to try to identify pollen grains using pictures in books, Ms Shaw said.
