1895.22.117

Collection type

Object

Description

Barkcloth. It is brown in colour. There are areas where the fibres are thin and there are some holes. It has been folded once along the length. [AB [OPS Move] 17/7/2017]

Geographical reference

Solomon Islands

Oceania > Melanesia > Solomon Islands

New Georgia [north coast]

Person

Field collector Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville

Field collector HMS Penguin

PRM source Henry Boyle Townshend Somerville

Date / Period

Date made: Before 1893?, uncertain

Date collected

? 1893 ? 1894

Acquisition information

Donated: 09/1895

Materials and processes

Material Bark Cloth Textile Plant, Process Beaten

Dimensions

Length: max 1900 mm, Width: max 960 mm

Object numbers

Accession number: 1895.22.117 Other numbers: Brigham (1911) 249

Research and responses

The Museum's collection of barkcloth (including this piece) from the Solomon Islands (including Santa Cruz) was surveyed on 29 April 1996 by Ms Virginia Bond of the Sainsbury Research Unit at the University of East Anglia as part of her work for her MA dissertation. [JC 30 4 1996]

See 'A Study of Bark Cloth from the Solomon Islands with Particular Reference to the Use of Indigo in the North-Western Region' by Virginia Bond (M.A. dissertation; Norwich: Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, 1996). Copy in Balfour Library. See page 53. [JC 3 10 1996]

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 27 2 2003]

This is presumably the source of one of the specimens of barkcloth given by Henry Balfour to William T. Brigham, Director of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum; see Ka Hana Kapa (Memoirs of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum of Polynesian Ethnology and Natual History, III; with separately boxed set of color plates), by William T. Brigham (Honolulu: Museum Press, 1911). On page 231 Brigham notes that his private collection contains many specimens 'gathered in visits to many museums, and sent by correspondents who desired to make the knowledge of bark-cloth manufacture more complete'. A list of 'Specimens of Kapa in the Author's Collection' follows (pages 240-49). This includes some 14 specimens given to Brigham by Balfour, including (on page 241) Brigham's number 249: 'Another of the Rubiana kapa, "quality A coarse", from the same source [i.e. Penguin collection, Solomon Ids. Given by H. Balfour, Esq.].' On examination of the object it was found that a piece had been cut off one end, presumably to provide Brigham's sample. The removed piece would have measured approximately 220 mm x 190 mm. The later history and current whereabouts of this and the other samples is not known. [JC 5 9 2003; JC 23 9 2003]

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 27 2 2003]

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]

Associated publications

Discussed briefly (with 1895.22.118 and .119) on page 61 of Not Quite Extinct: Melanesian Bark Cloth ('Tapa') from Western Solomon Islands, by Rhys Richards and Kenneth Roga, Wellington, New Zealand: Paremata Press (2005): 'In the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford there are seven undecorated [sic] barkcloths collected in 1894 by Henry Boyle Townsend [sic] Somerville while on the survey expedition on HMS Penguin under Cmdr. A. F. Balfour.... Three cloths, numbers 1895.22.117 to 119, are listed as undyed, undecorated red brown cloth "from the N. Coast, New Georgia".' For the other six barkcloths donated by Somerville and discussed by Richards and Roga, see 1894.26.49, 1895.22.116, 1895.22.118-.121. [JC 8 12 2005]

Search terms: Barkcloth