Posted on November 27, 2015 in Solomon Islands, Uncategorized
Over the past few months, project intern Emily Wilkes has been busy working with Pacific Presences team member Lucie, exploring the museum’s collections for Pacific objects made from gourd material, here is her first blog post on the project:
This work is being carried out with the Pacific Presences Project, in conjunction with Dr Andrew Clarke of the McDonald Institute, University of Cambridge. The aim of this collaborative project is to carry out DNA analysis on samples collected from gourd artefacts stored in the MAA. This will help fill critical research gaps relating to the origins, international spread and domestication of the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria). At present, we know that the bottle gourd originated in Africa and had spread to South America by at least 9,900 years BP, but questions such as how it travelled to the Pacific, remain unanswered. This project will help researchers in their quest to reconstruct the global movement of this plant. It will contribute to our understanding of how groups within the Pacific selected for certain traits, determined by how they were used culturally. This domestication process will have influenced the evolution of specific gourd shapes and sizes and can be seen in the museum collection today. The results obtained from DNA analysis of Pacific objects will form the focus of a comparative framework for linking similar data collected from African and Asian gourd items.
As part of this project, I have been working on creating a shortlist of museum items which are suitable for sampling purposes. The MAA has a magnificent collection of over 200 Pacific objects made from gourd material, many of which were accumulated by early voyagers in the late 19th-early 20th century. They include items collected from across Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. I have been looking through these assemblages, recording each object’s dimensions, form, use and suitability for sampling. Whilst the sampling process involves taking only a small scraping from the inside of the gourd, access to this interior material is sometimes completely blocked, for example, by wooden stoppers which we are unable to remove. The process aims to be as non-destructive as possible and the material will not be manipulated for testing purposes; only those objects already displaying openings wide enough to collect a sample will be used. Therefore, it is critical that information regarding an item’s suitability for sampling is thoroughly recorded. In addition to this, I have been photographing the collection, helping to improve the information available to those searching for items on the museum database. Being able to digitally view what a specific object looks like minimises the need to physically remove the artefact from the museum’s stores, therefore helping to conserve it for future generations.
Lime gourd from the Santa Cruz Islands. Collected by Reverend William Chamberlain o’Ferrall, Melanesian Mission, between 1897 and 1902, donated to the Museum in 1920. IDNO: 1920.734. Photo by Emily Wilkes, October 2015. © MAA.
Over the next few weeks, I will be writing about some of the fantastic items I have been recording. I will be introducing you to items ranging from intricately decorated water containers collected in Hawaii, to a bottle gourd on which some rather mysterious animal feet are mounted! The photo below is a taster of the first of these case studies. This will explore the use of the bottle gourd for storing lime within Pacific communities and will be posted very soon!
Emily Wilkes
Posted on November 6, 2015 in Uncategorized
This year, project intern Alice Bernadac spent three months conducting preliminary research on the photographic collections made during the Templeton Crocker Expedition and now housed in Paris and Cambridge alongside Senior Research Associate Lucie Carreau. Here Lucie and Alice write about the collection and the research process:
Led and partly funded by wealthy sailing enthusiast Charles Templeton Crocker, the 1933-1934 Templeton Crocker Expedition visited the Solomon Islands between the 2nd of March and the 15th of September, 1933. Accompanied by a small team of scientists, the expedition’s main goal was to conduct research in the field of natural history and healthcare. Concomitantly, however, expedition members formed large collections of ethnographic objects, and produced thousands of photographs of the places they visited, the people they encountered and the events they witness.
The bulk of the material collected was divided between the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu and the Field Museum In Chicago. Smaller collections of objects and/or photographs were sent to the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. While the expedition’s scientific research has received some attention in the past, the ethnographic and photographic collections remain largely unexplored. The collections in Europe in particular have never been researched, probably due to the lack of access to information relating to the expedition.
Photograph:
Boy from Anuta, Temotu Province, Solomon Islands
Photographed by Toshio Asaeda, c.1933
© University of Cambridge, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
Alice: ‘My contribution to the project consisted in researching and comparing the sets of photographs and archival material held at the two institutions to try to establish the uniqueness of each set, identify overlaps across the collection, and get a wider view of the expedition’s photographic activities. At MAA, the collection was formed of 562 photographic prints, 1 negative and 170 lantern slides. In Paris, the collection numbered 231 photographs and 6 negatives. The collection overlapped and I was able to identify 206 duplications. Only 25 photographic prints and the 6 negatives from the Paris collection are not present in MAA’s collection. Both collections offer rich photographic records of almost all of the islands of the Solomon archipelago that were visited by the expedition. Some islands, however, are better represented than others, in particular Rennell and Bellona.
Confronting these two collections has brought to light interesting aspects of the expedition photographic collections. For example, documents held in MAA’s archives suggest that the rich visual documentation of relating to canoes was gathered by Charles Templeton Crocker and other expedition members to contribute to A.C. Haddon’s research, which culminated in the publication of Haddon and Hornell’s Canoes of Oceania between 1936 and 1938. The vast majority of photographs are associated with the expedition’s artist, photographer and film-maker, Toshio Asaeda, an employee of the California Academy of Sciences. While a large proportion presents anthropometric characteristics and testify of the scientific purpose of the expedition, many others show a more artistic approach, capturing individuals or groups of individuals posing for the camera, smiling, or engaging in daily activities, rather than ‘types’ of people. His most personal photographic approach emphasizes Asaeda’s great skills as a portraitist’.
Alice Bernadac’s research has also brought to light nine audio-discs recorded in Rennell and donated by Charles Templeton Crocker to the Musée de l’Homme un 1934, as well as a second set, originally in the collections of the Musée de la Parole in Paris. Both sets are now housed at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris.
Additional information on the expedition will be gathered in the following months as team member Lucie Carreau was recently awarded a Jonathan Ruffer Curatorial Grant by The Art Fund to travel to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to further her research on Templeton Crocker.
Lucie Carreau and Alice Bernadac