A long-time Taieri resident says the removal of walls around grave plots at the West Taieri Cemetery in the 1970s might be behind recent damage.
Outram man Len Doherty said high winds could have toppled headstones at the site.
In March, 12 headstones at the graveyard near Outram were reported to have been pushed, pulled or kicked over, with most of those being broken.
Police and the Dunedin City Council investigated the incident.
Mr Doherty (91) has lived and farmed in the area all his life, and owns land next to the graveyard.
When he heard the headstones were knocked over, he immediately thought winds were the culprit.
"I don't like vandals but I'm not quite sure it had anything to do with that,'' Mr Doherty said.
A possible answer "goes back a few years'', he said.
In the 1970s, the local county council decided to make the cemetery into a lawn cemetery.
At that time, each plot had a wall around it.
"They knocked the walls down,'' Mr Doherty said.
This had left the headstones open to the winds that whipped across the plain.
The taller headstones then started to fall over.
"A lot of them fell over.''
Council staff at the time asked him if they could bury the fallen headstones on his property, which he agreed to.
A pit was dug, and the headstones dumped in and covered up, a state of affairs which would not be acceptable today.
Some of the plots still had walls around them, in cases where families would not give permission to remove the walls, but the cemetery was old and other plots were the graves of people who no longer had kin in the area.
"No-one was looking after them.''
Mr Doherty said the recent spate of toppled headstones was noticed after "a huge windstorm the previous week''.
"I'm quite sure it's the wind that knocked them over.''
In April the Otago Daily Times reported the Dunedin City Council would spend up to $3200 to help repair or replace fallen headstones.
