1923.87.162

Collection type

Object

Description

Cloak or kakahu. Made of flax. With two narrow taniko borders and one broad one.

Long description

The kaitaka patea (class of kakahu) has an undyed kaupapa (body of the kakahu) woven in whatu aho rua (double paired twining). The aho (wefts) are spaced at 10 mm. Shaping of the kaupapa occurs at the shoulder area and towards the lower taniko border. The neck border incorporates decorative rolled red wool yarn. The taniko borders incorporate undyed, black and brown dyed muka (Processed New Zealand flax, Phormium tenax) with small areas of red and green wool. The geometric design of the taniko borders include triangular motifs either side while the bottom border also displays diamond and zig zag patterns. [TW 11/07/2013]

Geographical reference

New Zealand

Oceania > Australia and New Zealand > New Zealand

Cultural groups

Māori

Person

Field collector Charles Smith

PRM source The Executors of the Charles Smith Estate

PRM source Alfred T. Collier

Date / Period

Date made: Before 1869?, uncertain

Date collected

1860 - 1869?

Acquisition information

Purchased: 1923

Materials and processes

Material Flax (NZ) Plant, Material Wool Yarn Animal, Material Pigment, Process Twined Woven

Dimensions

Width: max 1455 mm, Length: max 1100 mm

Object numbers

Accession number: 1923.87.162

Research and responses

This object was studied by Michelle Horwood, Victoria University of Wellington, on 5 November 2013. She thought the taniko border looked old, pre 1850. There is only a little red wool in the border. [MJD 05/11/2013]

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 57 (page 13 of Simmons's original list). [JC 28 7 2016]

Search terms: Clothing, Textile, Cloak