- Collection type
- Object
- Description
- Club of whale bone, flat, chopper-shaped, with blade forming a hook on the back and a human figure carved above the handle. The butt is carved into a face. [El.B 21/08/2007]
- Geographical reference
- Cultural groups
- Māori
- Person
- Field collector Edward Harland Duckworth
- PRM source Edward Harland Duckworth
- PRM source R. Haines
- Date / Period
- Date made: Before 1972
- Date collected
- By 1972
- Acquisition information
- Bequeathed: 1972
- Materials and processes
- Material Whale Bone Animal, Process Perforated, Process Carved
- Dimensions
- Length: max 300 mm, Width: max 100 mm
- Object numbers
- Accession number: 1972.24.173
- Research and responses
In 1978, David Simmons recorded the holdings of Māori material in a number of museums in Europe and North America including, in May 1978, the Pitt Rivers Museum. (For copies of his notes and related correspondence, see RDF: Researchers: Simmons.) In 1996, Simmons put together the ‘draft catalogues’ he had prepared, depositing copies in, at least, the National Library of New Zealand / Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa and the British Museum. The ‘draft catalogue’ of the Māori material in the PRM, which includes photocopies of some of the relevant catalogue index cards and annotations supplied by PRM assistant curator Lynne Williamson in 1982, was included in ‘Draft Catalogues of Maori Material in English Museums II. Prepared by David Simmons from records made in 1978… Compiled in Auckland in 1996’. It is now widely accepted that Simmons’s assertions about the provenance and history of individual Māori objects are not to be trusted without further evidence and/or documentation. Nevertheless, as the entries in this document have been referred in the literature, in July 2016 I obtained from the British Museum scans of the pages devoted to the PRM’s collections (numbered by hand as pages 43 to 62), printing out a copy for the RDF. For the entry for this object, see page 60 (page 16 of Simmons's original list). [JC 29 7 2016]
1972.24.173
Club of whale bone, flat, chopper-shaped, with blade forming a hook on the back and a human figure carved above the handle. The butt is carved into a face. [El.B 21/08/2007]
On display
1972.24.173
Digital asset copyright: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford
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