- Collection type
- Object
- Description
- Arrow with yellow reed shaft and iron head. [MJD 06/01/2012]
- Long description
- Arrow with yellow reed shaft and iron head. The arrow head has curved edges in opposite directions, sharply barbed, and has a long, thin, cylindrical stem, to fit into the ends of the shaft. The arrow head is coated with a shiny substance, possibly poison. The base of the arrow and top of the shaft have a thick coat or incrustation of poison. [MJD 06/01/2012]
- Geographical reference
- Futa Jalon [Rio Pongo] [Freeport] [Freetown]
- Cultural groups
- Mandinka
- Person
- Field collector Thomas Cooper
- Field collector Thomas Guest
- PRM source Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford
- Date / Period
- Date made: Before 02/1797
- Date collected
- By February 1797
- Acquisition information
- Transferred: 10/02/1886
- Materials and processes
- Material Reed Plant, Material Iron Metal, Material Poison
- Dimensions
- Length: max 650 mm
- Object numbers
- Accession number: 1886.1.569.22 Other numbers: 93
- Research and responses
This is part of a collection obtained from the Sierra Leone Company [SLC] factor Thomas Cooper, based at the SLC factory at Freeport on the River Pongo (in what is now Guinea), by the SLC surgeon Thomas Guest, based at Freetown, Sierra Leone, and sent by Guest to Dr John Sims in London before 15 June 1797. (See scans and transcriptions of Guest's letters to Sims in RDF: Biographies: Sims.) See also ‘“The Complete Accoutrements of an Inhabitant of the Mandingo Country”: An Eighteenth-Century Collection from West Africa at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, by Jeremy Coote, in Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 24 (2011), pp. 150–68. (Copy in RDF: Biographies: Sims.) [JC 6 4 2012]
- Associated publications
- Reference: Finding the Forgotten: Locating Transatlantic Slavery in The Pitt Rivers Museum Collection, Main author: Jane Webster, 2025, Page: 118
- Listed as number 93 on page 181 of A Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum Descriptive of the Zoological Specimens, Antiquities, Coins, and Miscellaneous Curiosities (Oxford, 1836): 'African Arms, &c. .. 93. Quiver of poisoned arrows from Sierra Leone. (Dr. Simms, 1826.' [JC 24 6 2011] For a detailed account of the collection of which this is a part, see ‘“The Complete Accoutrements of an Inhabitant of the Mandingo Country”: An Eighteenth-Century Collection from West Africa at the Pitt Rivers Museum’, by Jeremy Coote, in Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 24 (2011), pp. 150–68. (Copy of the article in RDF: Biographies: Sims.) [JC 6 4 2012]
Search terms: Archery Weapon, Arrow