Canoe prow ornament made from a dark wood carved with conventionalised roughly carved face. There are two holes on one projection and three on the other where the ornament attaches to the boat. Some nails have been inserted into the surface of the ornament along the side. [ASh [OPS move] 03/10/2016]

Collection type: Object
Description: Canoe prow ornament made from a dark wood carved with conventionalised roughly carved face. There are two holes on one projection and three on the other where the ornament attaches to the boat. Some nails have been inserted into the surface of the ornament along the side. [ASh [OPS move] 03/10/2016]
Geographical reference: New Zealand
Oceania > Australia and New Zealand > New Zealand
Cultural groups: Māori
Person: Field collector Unknown Collector; PRM source Stevens Auction Rooms
Date / Period: Date made: Before 1904
Date collected: Before 1904
Acquisition information: Purchased: 1904
Materials and processes: Material Wood Plant, Process Carved, Process Perforated, Process Nailed
Dimensions: Depth: max 230 mm, Length: max 737 mm, Width: max 360 mm
Object numbers: Accession number: 1904.48.2 Other numbers: 12134
Research and responses: John Crace Stevens died in 1859, his Auction Rooms by this time were being run by his son, Henry Stevens, see biographies [AP 06/08/2009]
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 entry for this object, see page 62 (page 18 of Simmons's original list). [JC 29 7 2016]

Search terms: Navigation, Canoe Part