- Collection type
- Object
- Description
- Canoe prow ornament in the form of a bird perched on a relief-carved scroll. [ZM 23/5/2005]
- Long description
- Canoe prow ornament in the form of a bird perched on a relief-carved scroll. The bird has blue glass beads for eyes. Traces of red, white, black and ?green paint. The end of the beak and tail have broken off and are missing. There are tin cane strips passed through a perforation at the bottom of the ornament. [LKG 10/06/2010]
- Geographical reference
- New Georgia Ramada Island Nggerasi District
- Person
- Field collector Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville
- Field collector HMS Penguin
- PRM source Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville
- Date / Period
- Date made: Before 1894
- Date collected
- 1894
- Acquisition information
- Donated: 1895 Found unentered: 1989
- Materials and processes
- Material Wood Plant, Material Pigment, Material Glass, Material Bead, Material Cane Plant, Process Carved, Process Painted, Process Perforated
- Dimensions
- Height: max 410 mm, Depth: max 58 mm, Width: max 212 mm
- Object numbers
- Accession number: 1895.22.305
- Research and responses
For an account of Somerville's collection from the Solomon Islands, see 'The H. B. T. Somerville Collection of Artefacts from the Solomon Islands in the Pitt Rivers Museum’, by Deborah Waite, in The General’s Gift: A Celebration of the Pitt Rivers Museum Centenary, 1884–1984 (JASO Occasional Papers, no. 3), edited by B. A. L. Cranstone and Steven Seidenberg (Oxford: JASO, 1884), pp. 41–52. (Copy in RDF: Collectors: Somerville.) [JC 24 2 2007]
For an account of Somerville's collecting in the Solomon Islands, see 'Notes and Queries, Science, and “Curios”: Lieutenant Boyle Somerville’s Ethnographic Collecting in the Solomon Islands, 1893–1895’, by Deborah Waite, in JASO: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, Vol. XXXI, no. 3 (Michaelmas 2000), pp. 277-308. (Copy in RDF: Collectors: Somerville.) [JC 24 2 2007]
Search terms: Figure, Navigation, Ornament, Bird Figure, Canoe Part
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