1895.22.120

Collection type

Object

Description

Barkcloth. It is pale cream in colour, with a fine and smooth texture to the fibres, and undecorated. [AF [OPS move] 9/8/2017]

Geographical reference

Solomon Islands

Oceania > Melanesia > Solomon Islands

New Georgia Ramada Island Nggerasi

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

Width: max 840 mm, Length: max 2060 mm

Object numbers

Accession number: 1895.22.120 Other numbers: Brigham (1911) 243?

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 (or 1896.51.3 .1, .2, .3) 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 243: 'Very light brown undyed kapa from the NGarasi District, Rubiana, Solomon Ids. H. B. M. S. Penguin, 1894. 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 240 mm x 200 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 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 [sic] by Henry Boyle Townsend [sic] Somerville while on the survey expedition on HMS Penguin under Cmdr. A. F. Balfour.... Two cloths are from "Ngarasi District, northeast coast of Rubiana," which is now called Ramada lagoon in northeast New Georgia. Of these two, number 1895.22.120 is light brown and undyed, and marked in the inventory as "? matimat, Ngarasi".' For the other six barkcloths donated by Somerville and discussed by Richards and Roga, see 1894.26.49, 1895.22.116-.119, 1895.22.121. [JC 8 12 2005]

Search terms: Barkcloth