ARTEFACTS OF ENCOUNTER (sample)

Adams ku . (1995) in the Thames The Paciic in the Age of Empire (2010), which was HONOLULU, HAWAI‘I 96822-1888 ARTEFACTS OF ENCOUNTER (1991), inluentially contributed to a revival of material and artists from Europe and the Paciic. An area dispersed throughout the world, including over 100 objects from Cook’s irst voyage. ARTEFACTS of ENCOUNTER C O O K’ S VOYAG E S , C O LO N I A L C O L L E C T I N G A N D M U S E U M H I S TO R I E S Edited by Nicholas Thomas, Julie Adams, Billie Lythberg, Maia Nuku and Amiria Salmond Photography by Gwil Owen remarkable objects, ofering fresh approaches to the signiicance of artefacts of encounter. A r te fa c ts o f E n co unter b 1 2 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R ARTEFACTS of E NCO UN TER Cook’s voyages, colonial collecting and museum histories EDITED BY Nicholas Thomas, Julie Adams, Billie Lythberg, Maia Nuku & Amiria Salmond PHOTOGRAPHY BY Gwil Owen O TAG O U N I V E R S I T Y PR E SS b 3 4 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R b 5 Published by Otago University Press Level 1, 398 Cumberland Street Dunedin, New Zealand [email protected] www.otago.ac.nz/press First published 2016 Copyright © The authors and photographers as named Volume copyright © Otago University Press The publisher gratefully acknowledges inancial assistance from the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, United Kingdom. The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. ISBN 978-1-877578-69-4 A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand. This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including recording or storage in any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. No reproduction may be made, whether by photocopying or by any other means, unless a licence has been obtained from the publisher. Editor: Gillian Tewsley Design/layout: Fiona Mofat Index: Robin Briggs Front jacket: A god image known as Tangi`ia from Mangaia, Cook Islands. Front endpaper: The Maudslay Gallery, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge. Photograph by Mark Adams, 2007. Frontispiece: Old label associated with a paddle collected in New Zealand during a Cook voyage, formerly in the collections of Trinity College, Cambridge. Pages 4–5: After William Hodges, Vaitepiha Bay, Tahiti. Mark Adams, 2003. Back endpaper: Heiau with a marker to HMS Blonde. Photograph by Mark Adams, Hawai`i, 2002. Back jacket, clockwise from top left: Taumi, Society Islands; tekoteko igure, New Zealand; shell necklace, Tierra del Fuego; wooden chest armour, Prince William Sound. Printed in China through Asia Paciic Ofset. 6 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R CON TEN TS Preface and acknowledgements 11 PART I ENCOUNTERING ARTEFACTS 15 Introduction Nicholas Thomas & Julie Adams 17 1. ‘Weapons, Utensils and Manufactures of various kinds’: Cambridge’s collections Nicholas Thomas & Amiria Salmond 29 2. Relating to, and through, Polynesian collections Billie Lythberg, Maia Nuku & Amiria Salmond 43 3. Artiicial curiosities and travelling instruments Simon Schafer 56 W itne ss THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MARK ADAMS 68 PART II COOK’S FIRST VOYAGE 73 Introduction 76 A string of iridescent green shells – Artefacts from Tierra del Fuego 78 An early ‘ornamental carving’ 82 Divine archery – A bow, quiver and arrows from Tahiti 88 ‘A breastplate … for War or Mourning’ – Tahitian feather gorgets 92 ‘Their method of Tattowing I shall now describe’ – Tattoo instruments from Tahiti 96 ‘A smal quantity of cloth’ – Glazed barkcloth from the Austral Islands 98 Ancestral threads – Seven Māori cloaks 102 ‘Bludgeons from New Zeland’ – Māori hand weapons 110 ‘A New Zealand Warrior in his Proper Dress’ – Māori belts 114 ‘Their paddles were curiously stained’ – Two Māori paddles from the East Coast 118 ‘They throw’d two darts at us’ – Spears from Botany Bay 122 t he splendid land JOHN PULE 124 b 7 PART III COOK’S SECOND AND THIRD VOYAGES, AND THE VOYAGE OF GEORGE VANCOUVER 127 Introduction 130 A Māori shell trumpet at Cambridge Peter Gathercole, with postcript by Amiria Salmond 134 ‘One threw a dart at us’ – Four artefacts from Niue 146 ‘Long has he used the fue’ – A Tongan ly whisk (fue kafa) 148 ‘The beauties of their own exquisite forms’ – Tongan adornment 150 ‘An aristocrat among Tongan pillows’ – Tongan headrests 154 ‘All Made With Surpriseing Neatness’ – Tongan clubs 156 ‘Such was the prevailing passion for curiosities’ – Cook voyage collections from Melanesia 160 A Nuu-chah-nulth chief ’s rattle – A bird rattle from Nootka Sound 164 Wooden armour – An Alutiiq (Chugach) cuirass 166 ‘The quivers were extremely beautifull’ – A reindeer-skin Chukchi quiver 170 Between worlds – A Northwest Coast comb 174 Ceremonial whalebone weapons – A Nuu-chah-nulth club 176 ‘We found them superior to our own’ – Hawaiian ishhooks and early encounters 178 Travelling the world – A wooden igure from the Hawaiian Islands 182 Protective power – A feather helmet from the Hawaiian Islands 184 ‘A fascination for barkcloth’ – The irst eighteenth-century barkcloth book 186 a va ` uli , a vanoa p ekepekaniume SEMISI FETOKAI POTAUAINE 190 and PART IV MISSIONARIES AND TRAVELLERS 193 Introduction 194 Implements of New South Wales – Artefacts from the First Fleet? 196 ‘As much as three men could lift’ – A bale of barkcloth from Tahiti 198 ‘For they say … he comes down in a whirlwind’ – Four sacred fans from the Austral Islands 202 8 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R ‘Fine fancy and delicate taste’ – The Queen of Ra`iatea’s royal robe 207 Instantiating divinity – A spectacular ‘warrior’s cap’ from the Cook Islands 210 Galvanising the gods – A pearlshell and feather mask from Tahiti 214 The potency of Tangaroa – Two whalebone and whale ivory necklaces 218 ‘The God has arrived safely this afternoon’ – A Cook Islands god image 222 From father to son – Three Māori carvings 226 ‘They set to work to furnish them’ – A Quaker traveller’s Rarotongan fan 232 Intricate objects, intricate relationships – A Fijian paddle-shaped club 236 Maru, Kahukura and Hukere – Three named ‘god-sticks’ from New Zealand 238 From chief to chief – The biography of a Fijian breastplate 240 Early artefacts from Australia, New Caledonia and New Zealand 244 ‘A superb feather cloak’ – Kamehameha II’s royal visit to Britain 248 he tautoko LISA REIHANA 252 Epilogue: Exhibiting encounter Nicholas Thomas 259 p erspex patu GEORGE NUKU 262 PART V A CATALOGUE OF THE EARLY PACIFIC COLLECTIONS AT THE MUSEUM OF ARCHAEOLOGY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, CAMBRIDGE 265 Appendix: The Trinity College Inventory 319 Notes 326 Select bibliography 337 Contributors 339 Index 342 b 9 Drum from the Society Islands collected on Cook’s irst voyage. Wood, ish skin, coconut ibre. Height 65cm (D 1914.26). This drum appears in a drawing of weapons and other artefacts by Banks’ draughtsman, John Frederick Miller. British Library, Add. MS 23921, f. 57(a) 10 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R Preface and acknowledgements a A rtefacts of Encounter is a response to the extensive, indeed vast collections of objects of all kinds from the Paciic that make up museums’ ethnographic collections. In the past, such collections were associated particularly with the discipline of anthropology, and were thought to illuminate comparative studies of technology and style. The contributors to this book revalue them as historical collections to be interpreted in a crossdisciplinary way, informed by art history, anthropology, histories of travel, exploration, science, and not least by indigenous perspectives and knowledge. We are still interested in technique and in artistic style, but see artefacts as suggestive in multiple ways, speaking to ritual, aesthetics, social relations, gender and cross-cultural exchange, among other themes. The collections made by explorers, missionaries, travellers and others in the early contact period up until the middle of the nineteenth century have special historic importance. Antiquities and rarities had been acquired by elite and learned Europeans for centuries, and some artefacts from the Americas and elsewhere were brought back to Europe during the seventeenth century, but it was notably during Cook’s voyages that what was later called ‘ethnographic collecting’ gained momentum and became a dedicated pursuit. Collecting became a focus of interest to an unprecedented extent: objects were systematically represented, traded by dealers and savants, assembled in collections, published and publicly displayed. Exotic artforms were eagerly acquired and carefully depicted. They were discussed and critically assessed: sometimes considered grotesque; at other times celebrated for the ineness or intricacy of their decoration. Meanwhile, these artefacts and artforms retained ongoing importance in the lives of Paciic Islanders and for indigenous peoples around the Paciic Rim. Many forms were adapted or abandoned over the colonial period, particularly following the adoption of Christianity; other kinds of objects remained in use and continued to be valued. For many Paciic Islanders the historical works collected by Cook and others are not just signiicant or valuable objects – they bear great spiritual power, the presence of ancestors; some would say that they are ancestors. The study of Oceanic art, once a specialist ield of curators and university researchers dispersed among institutions in Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, has been opened up in a dramatic way. It is now a realm of fertile interaction involving Islander artists, curators, community members and scholars as well as many non-Islanders; museums around the world now mount major exhibitions dedicated to particular Paciic cultures and art histories that are visited by hundreds of thousands of people. This book is an expression of this more open and vibrant discussion. It is an outcome of two linked research initiatives and, less directly, a series of projects on the arts of the Paciic and the conceptual challenges that they raise. These projects relect a particularly active period in research on Paciic art, culture and history in Britain over the last 15 years. They have been animated by strong links through ieldwork and intellectual and artistic exchange with a range of scholars and communities within Pr eface an d ackn o wledgem ents b 11 the Paciic. Two projects at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge have been grounded in highly rewarding and continuing engagements with Paciic people from numerous Paciic nations, and diverse communities within them.1 Artefacts of Encounter, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, and Paciic Presences, funded by the European Research Council, were established to explore collections comparatively, and the research teams are fortunate to have had opportunities to visit – often with indigenous co-researchers and artists – many museums across Europe from Spain to Russia, including numerous smaller collections in regional institutions in Britain, France, Germany and elsewhere. Although it is informed by comparative research, this book is dedicated to a single, exceptionally rich and previously underreported collection: that of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. In the introduction, we explain the concerns, orientation and scope of our work more fully. We hope, above all, that the research we document here regarding works of the ancestors, many of them remarkable creations of diverse kinds, will be valuable today for their creators’ descendants, as well as for the wider community of those in the Paciic, and those elsewhere interested in the art and culture of the Paciic. Acknowledgements We are grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council and the European Research Council for generous awards that have supported the research team, travel to the Paciic and to museums, various conferences and workshops we have run, and the participation and engagement of colleagues from the Paciic. This programme could not have been conceived without the tradition of scholarship on cross-cultural histories in the Paciic, Oceanic art and museum collections that has informed and inspired what we attempt here. We wish particularly to acknowledge the formative studies of Peter Gathercole, Adrienne Kaeppler, Roger Neich and Bernard Smith. More immediately, we owe a great deal to colleagues who supported our work, especially curators from museums in Australia, Cook Islands, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Russia, Switzerland and elsewhere, including Lissant Bolton, Peter Brunt, Jeremy Coote, Bronwen Douglas, Elena Govor, Arapata Hakiwai, Jill Hasell, Steven Hooper, Karen Jacobs, Robert Jahnke, Sean Mallon, Michael O’Hanlon, Rosanna Raymond, Anne Salmond, Jean Tekura Mason and Wonu Veys. In particular, we thank colleagues at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for their support. Carl Hogsden worked as a research associate on the Artefacts of Encounter project and designed KIWA, the digital research environment that enabled connections to be made across institutions, countries and collections. Jocelyne Dudding and Joshua Muritt contributed to the photography; and we relied heavily on Rachel Hand’s deep knowledge of the collections. Alison Clark was immensely helpful as the book was in production, and compiled the bibliography. Lucie Carreau coordinated images, and the catalogue section could not have been completed without her patience and attention to detail. And we wish to thank Gwil Owen, for many years the Faculty and Museum photographer, who dedicated time over three years to ine studio photos, a vital dimension of our work to sympathetically represent remarkable artefacts of encounter. Finally, we would like to thank the team at Otago University Press for their eforts and dedication in getting this book ready for publication. In particular we acknowledge the work of Fiona Mofat (designer), Rachel Scott (publisher), Gillian Tewsley (editor) and Imogen Coxhead (proofreader). NT, JA, BL, MN, AS 12 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R Members of the Beats of Polynesia group visiting MAA, Cambridge, 2006. Photograph by Kerry Brown. P r eface a n d ac kno wled gemen ts b 13 14 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R pa r t 1 Encountering artefacts ba P r eface a n d ac kno wled gemen ts b 15 Figure from Alaska collected on Cook’s third voyage and displayed in the Leverian Museum before 1806. Walrus ivory, human hair, animal fur. Height 20.5cm (1921.567.2). 16 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R Introduction a N icholas T homas O ver the last 30 years, Captain James Cook’s expeditions and the colonial encounters that followed have been reconsidered by scholars, in part in response to the reimagining of history and culture in the Paciic associated with the idea of the ‘new Oceania’ – the representation of the region from the inside out – by Paciic Island writers, artists, scholars and politicians. Anthropologists, historians and art historians have brought fresh perspectives to bear on Oceania’s history: on the voyages and the complex and controversial encounters between Europeans and the peoples of the Paciic that began much earlier, in the sixteenth century, but gained momentum in the late eighteenth century, leading to a dramatic expansion of commerce and of missionary activity in the period to 1840. This new body of work has embraced much careful reconstruction and analysis of indigenous engagements with Europeans, which varied greatly from one part of the Paciic to another. It has beneited from changing perspectives on European art, science and politics in the period that have enabled richer contextualisations of debates about the morality of voyaging and about the nature of Islander societies, for example. And it has come to address and exploit a much wider range of voyage sources and artefacts. The classic historical endeavour was based on documentary sources, but as early as 1960, Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Paciic revealed the potential of visual material, including the sketches of draughtsmen as well as the work of voyage artists.1 Subsequent work on scientiic specimens and aNd Julie a dams indigenous artefacts has empowered an exciting range of cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural investigations that have increasingly involved indigenous scholars, curators and artists. The collections of Paciic artefacts and works of art made over the course of Cook’s three voyages are of foundational importance for the study of art and culture in Oceania and, in a broader sense, for the global and comparative understanding of what is now awkwardly called ‘world art’, since the non-European artforms that were irst avidly collected by Europeans – the irst to stimulate their interest and their relection on nonEuropean aesthetics – were from Oceania. The Cook voyage collections consist of material above all from the Paciic Islands, but also range around the so-called Paciic Rim, from Tierra del Fuego to Australia and Siberia. They feature great sculptures, feather god images, cloaks and costumes that have become icons of Oceanic art. Their genres are varied, including intricately carved weapons, containers and ornaments, musical instruments and tattooing implements. Even the most utilitarian of these artefacts are often outstanding and exquisitely made examples. Many are of unique historical as well as artistic signiicance, because their acquisition can be identiied with a speciic encounter, even narrowed down to a particular day, place and transaction. These collections are representative not only of technologies or belief systems in a compartmentalised sense, but of indigenous cultures at the formative stages of their modern histories. They embody Islanders’ Intro duc tio n b 17 Feather cloak from the Hawaiian Islands, formerly in the collection of Joseph Banks. Feathers, ibre. Height 80cm (1954.118). institutions, cosmologies and social relationships; and they are products of Islanders’ dealings with Europeans. Though transaction histories are varied and complex, for the most part the artefacts are the things that Islanders chose to gift or traic with mariners. The collections thus express and evidence their intentions – as they do those of Europeans – in a complicated and layered manner. Both on the voyages and back in Europe, collectors and scientists were thinking anthropologically in new ways. They struggled to get to grips with the singular problems of human variety that the voyage observations raised, as they created novel networks and institutions around studies of natural history – a ield that embraced humanity and issues of civility, morality and politics. The Cook voyage collections at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge are among the four or ive most important worldwide (others are at the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Göttingen and in the national ethnographic museum, recently renamed the Weltmuseum, in Vienna). Of over 2000 objects with Cook voyage provenances dispersed among dozens of museums in Europe, North America, the Paciic and elsewhere, MAA holds over 200, including the largest single set – some 100 artefacts – dating from Cook’s irst voyage (for which material is generally much scarcer than for the two succeeding expeditions). This collection was presented by Cook to his Admiralty patron, the Earl of Sandwich, and by him in turn to Trinity College, which exhibited the pieces as part of a Wunderkammer in the Wren Library, apparently 18 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R throughout the nineteenth century, before they were transferred to the museum in 1912 and accessioned in 1914. The museum also holds over 50 objects from Captain George Vancouver’s 1791–95 voyage to the Paciic and America’s west and northwest coasts; and smaller collections associated with the Botany Bay settlement in Australia and with early missionary travels by John Williams, George Bennet, Daniel Wheeler and Richard Taylor, as well as Carl von Hügel, the father of the museum’s founding curator. Over the last 40 years the Cambridge collections have been researched by a number of scholars. Adrienne Kaeppler, whose documentation of Cook voyage artefacts was of seminal importance, incorporated them partially in her 1978 catalogue, ‘Artiicial Curiosities’;2 and Peter Gathercole, curator of the museum through the 1970s, published a number of relevant essays. More recently, the collections have been reanimated by growing engagements between the museum and contemporary Paciic artists and communities. Many Islanders have visited and studied objects and some have produced work in response – shown in our 2006–08 exhibition Pasiika Styles and subsequently. Building on previous studies and on our collaborations in the Paciic, ‘Artefacts of Encounter’, a major project funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council over 2010–13, was led by former MAA curator Amiria Salmond and the museum’s director, Nicholas Thomas. It was followed up by ‘Paciic Presences: Oceanic art and European museums’, which Salvador Brown playing a pūkaea with members of Ngāti Ranana and Beats of Polynesia at the opening of the Pasiika Styles exhibition at MAA in 2006. Photograph by Kerry Brown. Talking around objects: Julie Adams, Teiki Huukena, Philippe Peltier, Maia Nuku and MarieNoëlle Ottino-Garanger examine a Marquesan igure in the Musée du quai Branly, November 2013. Photograph by Mark Adams. was supported by the European Research Council. Both projects ranged considerably more widely than the museum’s own collections. They took as a starting point the proposition that, while artforms and objects have conventionally been seen to encode or relect meanings, they are not simply symbolic. Rather, they can be seen also as material makers of relationships: they can express transactions and transformations. They can be especially revelatory in cross-cultural settings, notably as gifts intended to turn a mere encounter into a positive relationship, for instance. When the Artefacts of Encounter project was initiated, new arguments were emerging about artefactuality and materiality, which we hoped to advance. In hindsight, however, we would claim that the practical work of the project – which was about encounters but which also required us to encounter artefacts and collections – came up with a novel methodology. W.J.T. Mitchell inluentially raised the question, ‘What do pictures want?’3 He sought to acknowledge and address the claims – the demands – that images all too often seem to make of us, to entertain what, on the face of it, might be considered a theoretical heresy: that paintings, photographs and other images may play active and forceful parts in our lives. His argument was conceived independently of Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, but needless to say it resonated with that more Intro duc tio n b 19 anthropologically framed, provocative account of the work of art in social and political life.4 Unlike Gell, who was working at the level of the conceptual essay, we studied singular and very special historical objects in museum stores and laboratories; but we came up with answers to a question related to Mitchell’s: ‘What do artefacts want?’ – that is, what do ethnographic, or museum artefacts want? Questions of this kind appear to ly in the face of common sense: we know, or think we know, that seemingly inanimate things can’t ‘want’, or make demands on us. Yet artefacts and artworks are made up of materialised human intentions. Whatever else they are, they can be intricately and ingeniously assembled ‘wants’. In the broadest terms, our answer would be that artefacts want activation. We found them wanting to be talked about. During the Artefacts of Encounter project, the research team became increasingly aware of the richness and value of talking around objects. Collectionsbased research can be solitary and isolating work, with days spent in storerooms or basements – like that of historians, who spend long hours in libraries and archives. In contrast, the team found it valuable to make joint visits to museums. Usually there were at least two researchers present, but often more; and our study groups included curators and collections managers at the institutions we visited – not always experts in Paciic culture and history but people who typically knew a great deal about the histories of the collections they cared for. They had the capacity, for example, to associate various distinctive kinds of old labels with particular travellers, donations and moments in their institution’s history. What became our approach engendered a genuinely collaborative way of examining artefacts, some of which were relatively well known to specialists or were of familiar genres, while others were surprises – exceptional, extraordinary or enigmatic in one way or another. We looked at things together, observing each other’s reactions and responses, and voicing thoughts, questions, doubts and confusions. In particular, we invested time in comparing objects with examples encountered elsewhere, in other institutions, by looking at images of related pieces on our laptops in conjunction with the artefact in front of us to determine similarities or contrasts in materials and techniques. In this way, the project relects the capacity that students and scholars now take for granted to carry around considerable amounts of comparative archival and 20 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R visual data in digital form. Memory and intuition are still crucial to association and interpretation, but a portable drive with thousands or tens of thousands of images as well as archival texts (often our evening reading on trips of this kind) were important in informing and substantiating the comparisons and associations we were seeking to make. Our discursive approach extended to how these object encounters were recorded on the project’s bespoke database, KIWA: the entries, written up by one member of the research team, relected the broader discussions and questions that had taken place during the encounter. Unlike many standard museum databases or catalogue systems, each encounter was individually authored in recognition of the inherent subjectivity of this type of work. If artefacts want to be discussed, they might equally be said to want to be looked at. The practice of ‘learning from objects’ was at the heart of the Artefacts of Encounter methodology. If it might sound commonsensical, the prioritising of a close engagement with and attention to objects themselves, their materials, techniques of construction, size and features, can challenge preconceived assumptions about their function, context and histories. Consider what are routinely described in collections as ‘ly whisks’. Through a focused engagement with the materiality of these objects, which often include human hair, pearlshell and intricately carved wooden igures, it quickly becomes discernable that something more is going on. The use of potent materials, such as human hair, in what have been labelled as seemingly mundane artefacts demands not just a rethinking of their original context, but a reconsideration of the dynamics of the encounters during which they were collected. For example, was the missionary George Bennet’s labelling of an object decorated with valuable red feathers as a ‘child’s rattle’ a cultural misunderstanding, a deliberate attempt to neutralise the potency of an artefact he was struggling to comprehend, or a result of Islanders withholding sensitive information from him? Bewildered, confused, fascinated and repelled in equal measure by the cultures they encountered, missionaries tended to try to to sanitise and domesticate what they did not immediately understand. Their contradictory responses are often starkly apparent in their interactions with objects. Problematic classiications and outright misrepresentations are frequently retained or reproduced in museum records and catalogues today. The Artefacts of Encounter methodology of focusing on the dense, vivid RIGHT: An old label associated with the MAA Cook voyage collections when they were displayed in the Trinity College Library. BELOW: God image from the Cook Islands, described by George Bennet as a ‘child’s rattle’. Bamboo, seeds, feathers, ibre. Length 32.3cm (Z 10567). and tangible materiality of things set out to challenge and rethink longstanding misinterpretations of this kind, and, in so doing, allow the objects themselves to act as a lens to focus the complex conceptual landscape from which they have come. Of course, a close engagement with artefacts is hardly a new methodology. In the 1920s the Māori anthropologist Te Rangi Hīroa Sir Peter Buck made the following claim about Māori cloaks: ‘the garments themselves tell us what did occur, but to understand them we must learn their language as expressed through the minute details of technique’.5 To try and achieve this, our engagement with objects involved us taking detailed measurements of an object’s length, width and height; we measured the wefts per inch on woven cloaks and belts; we measured the width of bands of human hair on a necklace; we noted whether strands of coconut ibre had been plaited with two- or three-ply cords; and we recorded how many pieces of pearlshell appeared on a headdress. Close analysis of a distinctive carving style found on the loom (the join between shaft and blade) of two Māori paddles allowed them to be identiied to a particular set collected by Cook’s crew on 12 October 1769. Similarly, apparent small red stains on a woven Māori belt were identiied as traces of kōkōwai – a paste made from red ochre that was used on artefacts and also on the bodies of people of high status – thus indicating that the belt was presented by a person of considerable mana, a ‘chief ’, to a member of Cook’s crew on the irst voyage. Numerous detailed photographs were taken to try and record the intricacies of what was revealed during these Fan from the Austral Islands collected by George Bennet during the London Missionary Society’s deputation to the South Seas in the 1820s. Wood, coconut ibre, vegetable ibre, pearlshell. Length 69cm (Z 5026 D). Intro duc tio n b 21 LEFT: Counting the number of weft threads per centimetre on a Māori belt at MAA. Photograph by Julie Adams. CENTRE: Māori weaving historian Dr Patricia Te Arapo Wallace examining the belts collected in New Zealand on Cook’s irst voyage. John Pule’s painting, The Splendid Land, (pp. 124-25) presides over the workspace. MAA, April 2012. Photograph by Julie Adams. BOTTOM: Detail of a drum from the Austral Islands (E 1904.459). Photograph by Lucie Carreau. artefact encounters. Sometimes upwards of 50 images of one object were uploaded onto the KIWA database; they could then be shared and viewed by ailiated researchers in the Paciic and elsewhere. Such sets of photos we could take and share only because we now use digital cameras; we were fortunate that research funding enabled us to buy high-speciication cameras with the capacity to focus in on detail and produce exceptional images in stores and also in the often diicult lighting of gallery displays. Our photos were, moreover, very much like written notes from archival sources: not just records for further reference, they also drew attention to particular aspects of artefacts; they ‘quoted’ from the material, underscoring what appeared most important. The business of taking photographs in the course of an object encounter in a museum store or display is a very diferent experience to having an object professionally photographed in a studio, and produces a very diferent result. The team found that their ‘encounter photos’ had an immediacy and vibrancy to them that provided an interesting contrast to the kind of images usually found in catalogue-type publications; and it was decided to try and replicate this within the context of this book. Many of our own research images are included within the text in the hope that something of the nature of our methodology is visually present in this, the project’s principal outcome. We hosted a number of visitors from the Paciic, and involved almost continual informal liaison with Islander makers, artists, researchers and others. Building on 22 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R Kanak archaeologist François Wadra researching the collections from New Caledonia at MAA in October 2013. Photograph by Mark Adams. an associated project that examined the Melanesian collections of the British Museum,6 we were particularly concerned to be open to the diversity of indigenous interests and responses. Rather than seek simply ‘information’, we aimed to acknowledge the difering responses of makers, curators, grassroots community members and others. Several texts here are coauthored by these visitors; others report dialogue with them. Over the course of the three-year project, Artefacts of Encounter research teams visited over 30 museums and encountered over 1000 objects collected during voyages to Polynesia between 1765 and 1840. Subsequently, the Paciic Presences group investigated collections from selected regions in Melanesia and Micronesia as well as Polynesia, and studied the histories of collecting and museum-making across a number of European countries. This book, while it is informed by this wider range of ongoing work, documents and explores early Paciic collections from just one institution, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology – one of the eight museums of the University of Cambridge. The initial focus of our work was on artefacts collected from the islands of the Paciic during the voyages of exploration. However, it seemed appropriate to broaden the book’s scope in two directions. First, since we were concerned to present the material in Cambridge deriving from the especially renowned (and controversial) voyages of Cook and Vancouver, it was important to represent these fully – including the collections made in Australia, Tierra del Fuego, on the American northwest coast and in Siberia – to fully illustrate the range of material acquired at this time and the variety of encounters that generated it. Second, we thought it appropriate to track the transformation of collecting through the irst half of the nineteenth century. In addition to ongoing naval voyages of exploration and surveying, traders made increasingly frequent visits, and missionaries established stations and made them bases for further evangelical enterprises. Missionaries were at the time famous – and later notorious – for their destruction and appropriation of ‘idols’; but they came also to be engaged in more wideranging collecting and, as historians of ethnography have pointed out in many contexts, documenting myths, rites and customs. Our cut-of point in this book is deined broadly by the colonial history of the Paciic, and more speciically by the history of the museum itself. The period through to the mid-nineteenth century was one of contact, commerce and evangelisation; of shifting encounters between Islanders and diverse Europeans. From mid-century on, formal colonisation became increasingly intrusive and consequential, especially from the 1870s and 1880s, when European states claimed and began to exercise sovereignty over a host of islands and archipelagos. One of the catalysts for the museum’s foundation was the return of Sir Arthur Gordon and others from the Paciic. After Gordon’s period as the irst governor of the new colony of Fiji, he and his private secretary Alfred Intro duc tio n b 23 24 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R Members of the Paciic Presences research team at work in the stores of the Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, October 2013. Photograph by Mark Adams. Intro duc tio n b 25 Baron Anatole von Hügel, founding curator of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Portrait by P. Voluzan, 1899–1900, oil on canvas. (2013.14). Maudslay donated substantial, primarily Fijian collections to the University of Cambridge; and they no doubt encouraged the appointment of Anatole von Hügel, a young Anglo-Austrian traveller, scientist and ethnological collector who had spent time with them in Fiji, as foundation curator of the museum in 1883. Gordon and Maudslay’s collections, and those of their successors – notably including early professional anthropologists such as Alfred Haddon and his students and associates – belong to a diferent historical epoch and a more formal and systematic colonial anthropology than the material represented in this book. The artefacts featured here entered the museum after von Hügel collected in Fiji and established the institution, but were all acquired before his time: they represent the earlier stages of exploration, encounter, evangelism and collecting in the Paciic, between 1769 and the 1860s. We are fortunate that the richness of documentation enables us to connect many artefacts and groups of artefacts with these earlier collectors and encounters – with particular moments in space and time and, in some cases, with particular indigenous people or scenes of exchange. It is these ‘artefacts of encounter’, given to or obtained by Europeans in the Paciic over roughly a century from the late 1760s to the early 1860s, that this book is concerned to document and understand. 26 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R Artefacts of Encounter is a sequel to a distinguished series of catalogues published by curators and scholars in North America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand that have documented Cook voyage and other early collections – some in speciic museums, others more comparatively. This book, like its predecessors, aims to document a collection more fully than has been previously attempted. Beyond this, it airms the importance of historical objects collections for a range of disciplines, including anthropology, the history of science and art history. It also acknowledges the sense in which some of these artworks and artefacts – though not all – have power and meaning for Islanders and Islander communities in the present. But the format of this book departs from the concise descriptive listing typically employed to date. The irst chapter outlines the various collections’ histories – their route to the museum. The second chapter explores current theory around artefacts; and the third chapter addresses the other side of the encounter, and a vital aspect of its material culture – the instruments carried on board the European ships, particularly those engaged in voyages of discovery. We thus place works of art, ritual assemblages and scientiic devices together: all can be seen as technologies, yet not technologies of a merely mechanical or instrumental kind. All, it turns Whalebone club from New Zealand, formerly in the collections of Jesus College, Cambridge. Length 50cm (D 1887.6). out, are constituted through and are constitutive of social relations, deined in some cases by naval and scientiic protocols, in others by status, gender and mana. The artists’ pages interspersed through the book underscore the sense in which these artefacts are not antiquities or relics, but forms that remain potent and active. Some of these pages – Mark Adams’ photographs, in particular – are themselves about place: the places in which things were created, valued and transacted; places they passed through; places they have ended up in. The second part of the book features key objects and sets of objects. It is organised chronologically, dealing with artefacts collected on Cook’s irst, second and third voyages, on Vancouver’s voyage, and by missionaries and their contemporaries. These commentaries do not have a standard format, but emphasise what we know and don’t know – the particular histories and questions that these diverse objects give rise to. This selection is wide-ranging, but necessarily limited: for reasons of space it was not possible to discuss every object in the collection in the same depth. In the book’s inal section we include a fuller listing of the relevant collections, with further notes on some objects. Our hope is that this volume will represent a rich resource for those interested in the art of the Paciic, and the stories behind museum collections. The book relects our sustained research, but also the work of our predecessors – such as Peter Gathercole, whose seminal essay about a Māori shell trumpet collected on Cook’s second voyage is reproduced here.7 His essay, irst published in 1976, in many ways anticipates the methodologies deployed by the Artefacts of Encounter team. Gathercole’s detailed analysis of the object and close reading of the encounter in which it was collected served as an inspiration for our own work; and, indeed, a short update of our indings about the trumpet is included at the end of his essay. Artefacts of Encounter is neither exhaustive nor deinitive. Some of the discoveries outlined here were made only late in our research process. Ongoing work may well reveal oversights; it will certainly bring new inds and connections. Intro duc tio n b 27 The Anthropology Gallery, MAA, Cambridge. Photograph by Jocelyne Dudding. 28 a A RT E FAC T S O F E N C O U N T E R