My grandmother is (not just) a small brown fragment

This is the story of a small rectangular barkcloth (tapa) provenanced to Pitcairn Island, which is held in the Macleay Collections, Chau Chak Wing Museum, at the University of Sydney, Australia (Figure 1).It has no extraordinary patterns or painted surface design.It measures 17.6 x 6.8 centimetres, the surface is embossed with the valleys and hills made by the parallel grooves of a wooden or whalebone beater (known as i'e in Tahitian and e'e in the Pitcairn-Norfolk Island languages), and it is dyed a rich red-brown. 1 The quality and density of the cloth, as well as the colour and intensity of the dye, is similar to the long bands that were cut and pasted over the shoulders of the tputa (a poncho or tunic-like garment) made on Pitcairn in the early 1800s, which will be discussed later in this paper

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• Specimens of Bark Cloth, 1769’

  Open Access•Nicholas Thomas•Journal of the History of…•2019

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