Sensing Culture at the Pitt Rivers Museum, October 2017

In October Jamie Cameron (Research Assistant, Oxford Internet Institute) came to the Pitt Rivers Museum to 3D scan an object in the museum’s collection; a model of a totem pole (also known as a crest pole) made by the Northwest Coast Haida (1891.49.13 .1 - .2). The scan will be 3D printed and used for Sensing Culture, a Heritage Lottery funded project, led by the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). One of the aims at the project is to develop and produce ways in which the visitor experience for blind and partially sighted people can be improved. Other museums within the University of Oxford GLAM (Gardens, Libraries, Archives and Museums) are also involved.

 Jamie Cameron '3D scanning' the model Crest Pole © Pitt Rivers Museum

Our colleague Laura Peers (Curator of the Americans and Professor of Museum Anthropology) recommended the wooden model of a Haida totem pole for 3D printing. The pole was made in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, Canada, most likely by artist Charles Edenshaw. Our documentation tells us that the model pole was collected by resident missionary Charles Harrison (who published accounts of the Haida) at the end of the 19th Century. The pole itself is carved with ‘crest figures’ that relate to lineages, aspects of status and property rights. To the Haida of the Northwest Coast, the act of looking up at these representations shown on the sides of giant crest poles would have triggered a visual reminder of the stories of how ancestral beings bestowed certain rights on a family. The figures on this particular model pole include an eagle, bears and their cubs in human or ancestral form, frogs and humans.

Unfortunately we don’t yet have insight into why this particular model totem pole was made. Could it have been a prototype for a much larger pole that was never carved? Was it a commercial product for Europeans, or could it have been made to order by European collectors to illustrate the types of narratives on totems that the Haida produced?

 © Pitt Rivers Museum (1891.49.13 .1 - .2) 

In 2009 the museum received a Haida delegation as part of the project “Haida Material Culture in British Museums: Generating New Forms of Knowledge”. The delegates, when looking at the model crest pole, observed that some of the original museum labelling is incorrect, and that the bear at the bottom of the pole was holding in its mouth a prawn or shrimp, and not a crayfish as had been labelled. They also added that this pole might be depicting the bear mother story, a popular Haida narrative. These observations were added to our online database, a living document which reflects the multi-vocality and dynamism of the museum’s collection. Visits like these highlight the importance of retaining relationships between museums and the living communities from which material culture was taken from, often under very difficult and problematic circumstances. The Pitt Rivers Museum always aims to be at the forefront in repairing relationships damaged in the past by European colonial collecting practices. We continue to generate positive outputs such as material repatriation, loans to source communities, access for originating communities to engage with and reconnect with the collection both physically and digitally, and collaborative work, such as the Great Box Project in 2014

Jamie used 3D imaging technologies, including photogrammetry, to create a ‘scan’ of the totem pole. This will be 3D printed, and such prints will allow visitors who are blind or partially sighted to ‘read’ the object through touch. Haida art uses a structured formline design, where different coloured paints highlight certain features, and on carvings such as the model pole, formline appears in incisions in shallow and deep relief. Visitors will be able to feel the incised lines on the 3D print to help understand the layout and proportions of the totem pole. Many museums are using 3D printing to engage their visitors, and it is just one of the ways that the Pitt Rivers Museum works to enable access to its collections.

Nicholas Crowe 

Assistant Curator

One of my Favourite Objects

Detail of house pole 1901.39.1 © Pitt Rivers Museum

One of my favourite objects in the Museum is a carved wooden bowl from British Columbia (1887.1.632). It is carved to represent a beaver with a human face carved in the top side of the bowl. The carving is very stylistically striking using a prominent feature of indigenous art of the Northwest Coast of North America called formline. Formline is the term used to describe the distinctive style comprising ‘continuous, flowing curvilinear lines that turn, swell and diminish in a prescribed manner. They are used for figure outlines, internal design elements and in abstract compositions’ (Marjorie M. Haplin. “Northwest Coast Native Art”). In 2009 I was lucky enough to be part of the project team recording information from a research visit of a delegation of Haida people. This object was viewed as part of that visit. During their time here I was able to learn a great deal about the collection of Haida objects that feature prominently in the Museum’s displays, not least the imposing house pole (1901.39.1) which is positioned centrally in the Museum Court.  

The bowl was donated by Reverend W. Warner Parry to the University Museum and was part of a large number of ethnographic objects transferred to the Pitt Rivers Museum in 1886. From the accession entry we do not know if the bowl was also collected by Parry or if it came to him through a third party. Parry was part of the British Royal Navy and so it is possible that he travelled to the Northwest coast of America and acquired the bowl in person. A label glued to the side of the object tells us that the bowl was ‘from an Indian burial ground. Maple Bank Esquimault, Vancouver Island’. The bowl is interesting as despite its provenance having been recorded it is unlikely to have originated at Esquimault. In fact, the Haida tribal members who visited in 2009 confirmed the bowl as Haida in origin. However, the style of the bowl is markedly different from all the other Haida grease bowls in the collection. The bowl is one of three bowls with carved with the beaver motif in the Museum collections, the other two coming from the original Pitt Rivers founding collection that came to the Museum in 1884.

Beaver bowl 1884.68.48 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Beaver bowl 1884.68.58 © Pitt Rivers Museum 

The symbol of the beaver in Northwest coast tradition represents the values of productivity, creativity, creation, cooperation, persistence and harmony. The beaver is also serious and hardworking. We have a number of objects with the beaver totem from Haida Gwaii, an archipelago on the North coast of British Columbia formally known as the Queen Charlotte islands. Many are associated with rank, status and prestige. Indeed, the beaver bowl is on display in the Museum in a display case of the same title (case 58.A), such beautifully carved and handmade objects belonged to significant Haida families.

It is the exquisite carving and anthropomorphic nature of the beaver which appeals to me so much in the design of the bowl. The Haida I met in 2009 were warm and animated people, it is through them that the objects I had spent time passively observing came alive and spoke of the people who made them and used them in their former life before they became a part of a Museum collection.

Faye Belsey 

Assistant Curator

Haida Great Box Project

Jaalen and Gwaai with the new box on the left and
the original box on the right © Pitt Rivers Museum

This week skilled Haida artists Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw talked to staff about their work carving a replica of a box in the Museum collection.

The original box, made in the late 1800s, is from Haida Gwaii, a group of islands on the northwest coast of Canada. This first came to the attention of Gwaai and Jaalen during a Haida First Nation visit to examine collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum in 2009.

At the time the Haida delegates identified the box as a masterpiece in carving and pointed out objects like this are needed in Haida Gwaii to inspire artists and carvers.

Haida box PRM 1884.57.25 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Consequently, I am really pleased that Gwaai and Jaalen have finally been able to return to the Museum and feel privileged to witness this new box being made.

Even the Western red cedar wood being used to make the box has travelled specially all the way from Haida Gwaii.

Known as a bentwood box, I was really impressed to hear how this is carved from a single section of wood. Gwaai and Jaalen explained how they had to firstly make an undercut in the wood. The area along the undercut was then steamed for about 15 minutes. This made the wood pliable enough to bend to form a corner.

Jaalen working on the new box
© Pitt Rivers Museum

I was also interested to find out that the painted carved designs on the sides of the box show the face of the Chief of the Undersea World (Konankada) with Mouse Woman (Kuugin Jaad) standing underneath.

Pointing out the face of the Chief of the Undersea World with
Mouse Woman below on the replica box © Pitt Rivers Museum

If you are a carver and live nearby I encourage you to come to book a space this Thursday (18 September) at 2 pm when Gwaii and Jaalen are having a 'woodcarvers gathering'.

You can also keep up-to-date with the  'Great Box Project' by following blogs posted by Laura Peers, the Museum Curator of the Americas collections. Laura will also be giving a free Saturday spotlight talk about the project in the Museum on 15 November at 2.30 pm. I encourage you to come along if you can.

Zena McGreevy
Senior Assistant Curator

Visit from the Oriental Rug and Textile Society

On the 16th May Joint Curator and Head of Collections, Julia Nicholson and I welcomed a group of 15 people from the the Oriental Rug and Textile Society. The group have a keen interest in rugs and textiles from Asia and the Middle East. Julia and I showed them a small selection from the vast array of textiles in the Pitt Rivers Museum collection from all over the world. I greeted the group and gave them a tour of the textiles on display. The wall cases along the North side of the Museum's Court displays and explores weaving and textile production from around the world. The display includes complete looms, weaving equipment such as combs, shuttles and spools and textiles and garments.

Unfortunately most of the Asian textiles on display in these cases have limited information associated with them so I highlighted textiles from the Americas, Africa and Oceania, which I knew more about. These included the wonderful Chilkat dance apron (1884.56.82) from North West coast USA/Canada. The apron is made from deer hide and woven with mountain goat hair yarn. The fringes of the apron are made from puffin beaks and deer hoofs. These would make a jingle noise when the apron was danced. Puffin beaks are more difficult to source then deer hooves but they make the same sound, so both are used in this example, with puffin at the front and deer at the back.

Chilkat dance apron: 1884.56.82 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Not all of the textiles in the collection have been loom woven and so I also highlighted an interesting finger-woven bag from the Great Lakes region of Eastern USA. It is finger-woven with bison hair and decorated with early European trade beads.

Bison hair bag decorated with human figures: 1884.69.15 © Pitt Rivers Museum

Both these objects are part of the founding collection and are considerably old, dating prior to 1884. Both have been investigated by visiting researchers as part of collaborative projects with source communities and the Museum. The blanket was viewed by a delegation of Haida from Haida Gwaii, British Columbia in 2009 and the bag as part of the Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) in 2007. Both visits greatly helped to enhance the Museum's knowledge of these objects.

We wanted to illustrate to the group the range of textiles we have in the collections so I showed them briefly a more recent acquisition of Miao textiles from South West China on display in the New Acquisitions case. The textiles were collected in the Guizhou province of South West China in the late 1980s and early 1990s at a time when the area was still mostly inaccessible to tourists.

Textiles from Nagaland, India make up a large proportion of the total number of textiles in the collection so I took the group to the Upper Gallery of the Museum to show them the Naga display there. The display includes jewellery and ornamentation as well as larger body cloths and textile pieces. The objects were largely collected by two people, John Henry Hutton and James Philip Mills, both political officers in the Indian Civil Service and assigned to work in Assam in the early 1900s. Mills and Hutton took a keen interest in the material culture of the Naga tribes and amassed significant collections during their time spent in Nagaland. Body cloths often indicated which tribe the wearer came from and their status in society. The Museum also has a small collection of more contemporary Naga body cloths collected by the anthropologist Dr. Vibha Joshi on behalf of the Museum in 2007. 

The group view textiles from the Museum stores in the visiting 
researchers room © Pitt Rivers Museum 

After a whistle stop tour of the galleries the group were welcomed into the research room by Julia Nicholson to view a selection of textiles we had chosen from the Museum stores. This included textiles from South America such as Guatemalan textiles from the Elsie McDougall collection, molas from Panama, and some pre-columbian Peruvian textiles. We also had a bigger cohort of Asian textiles including patola cloths from India and a wonderful patchwork gypsy child's dress from Syria. The dress, on closer inspection has been very thoughtfully constructed, with great care taken in arranging the patchwork pieces of cloth to make an aesthetically balanced garment, made with love and attention to detail. 

Girl's patchwork dress: 1967.28.55 © Pitt Rivers Museum

The visit was very well received and Julia and I will be repeating the morning for members of Hali Magazine and the Oxford Asian Textile group in coming months. 

Faye Belsey

Assistant Curator