1930.85.6.2

Collection type

Object

Description

Portion of house carving with with central scroll and manaia designs on one surface. A perforated shell disk is incorporated into the design.

Long description

The carved surface has traces of a dark coloured pigment and red pigment. One end is carpentered to a lap joint. [SM 9/10/2008]

Geographical reference

New Zealand

Oceania > Australia and New Zealand > New Zealand

Cultural groups

Māori

Person

Field collector Mākereti Papakura (Margaret Pattison Staples-Browne)

PRM source William Francis Dennan

Date / Period

Date made: Before 1930

Date collected

By 1930

Acquisition information

Purchased: 1930

Materials and processes

Material Wood Plant, Material Pigment, Material Shell, Process Carved, Process Decorated, Process Carpentered, Process Painted, Process Perforated, Process Chip Carved

Dimensions

Depth: max 50 mm, Width: max 140 mm, Length: max 453 mm

Object numbers

Accession number: 1930.85.6.2

Research and responses

For general information, see The Old-Time Maori (by Makereti sometime Chieftainess of the Arawa Tribe, known in New Zealand as Maggie Papakura; collected and edited with a biography by T. K. Penniman), London: Victor Gollancz, 1938. [JC 15 5 1996]

See also ‘Makereti’, by Hélène La Rue, in Collectors: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, ed. Alison Petch (Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, no date [1996]), pp. 31-35. [JC 11 6 1997]

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 probable entry for this object, see page 58 (page 14 of Simmons's original list). [JC 28 7 2016]

Associated publications

For a discussion of the circumstances in which some of the objects that once belonged to Makereti were acquired by the Museum, see ‘Makereti and the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1921–1930, and Beyond’, by Ngahuia te Awekotuku and Jeremy Coote, in Pacific Presences 2: Oceanic Art and European Museums (Pacific Presences series, 4b), edited by Lucie Carreau, Alison Clark, Alana Jelinek, Erna Lilje, and Nicholas Thomas (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2018), pp. 277–95, 460–63. This object is referred to on page 288: 'In 1930, [Makereti's son Te Aonui] sold the PRM ten carvings (1930.85.1-.7) from the house Ruamano - at Parekarangi, five miles from Whakarewarewa - that had belonged to Maihi Te Kakau Paraoa and Marara Marotaua, along with three canoe carvings (1920.85.8-.9), and three further tukohu (1930.85.10.-12), used for boiling food in the hot springs at Whakarewarewa.' (Printout of article in RDF: Biographies: Makereti.) [JC 4 1 2019]

Search terms: Figure, Dwelling, Bird Figure, House, House-ornament