Tiki Central / General Tiki / The British Museum has put every Pacific artifact in their collection online
Post #705387 by tikilongbeach on Wed, Jan 22, 2014 9:12 AM
|
T
tikilongbeach
Posted
posted
on
Wed, Jan 22, 2014 9:12 AM
CheekyTiki originally posted this on Facebook. You can search here: http://www.britishmuseum.org The British Museum's Melanesian, Polynesian and Micronesian collections include every conceivable item from a geographic range stretching from Indonesia's provinces in Papua in the west to Rapanui (Easter Island) in the east. There are weapons, masks, canoes, fishing gear, sacred and household objects and carvings from many islands, as well as hundreds of special and historical items such as the full length Maori feather cloak placed on the funeral casket of New Zealand Prime Minister, Richard Seddon, in 1906. Until now many Pacific Islanders would never have got the chance to see these treasures, even ones made by their own people. "Vanuatu made amazing textiles, women from Vanuatu," said Lissant Bolton, Keeper Africa Oceania and the Americas, British Museum, told Pacific Beat. 'We have done a lot of work to document those skills and that knowledge and the significance, what these textiles were used for,' she said. People wanting to look at the collection can take an online tour of highlights from Oceania. Each item has an electronic record online and museum staff are working hard to add photographs to those records. 'I see our Melanesian collection as a repository of historical and cultural and artistic information which should be available for Pacific Islanders to reconstitute their culture," said Ben Burt one of the Oceania curators "In the British Museum we have artefacts which have not been seen in their home countries for many years, many generations, things which in some cases people have entirely forgotten, in other cases things which they remember but don't have any longer, Mr Burt said. 'Many of those things they would like to see again or start making again, he said. But the real wealth of the collection is in the vast electronic database of the entire collection. People can search for a specific object or for a location, such as a particular place or island in their home country. Many will be surprised by what they find - a search for the island of Erromango in Vanuatu, for instance turns up 86 objects, including old photographs. For some items background information is sparse, and the Museum is keen to hear from Pacific Islanders who may have new knowledge to contribute. Figure-head for a canoe, of wood, black with pearl-shell inlay, from Solomon Islands |
