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 19^th-early 20^th 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