Barkcloth 'ahu
Place: Tahiti & Society Islands
Category: Barkcloth
Tahiti and the Society Islands, l. 177, w. 150 cm, Hanover 1854, No. 48
Forster Register C.24: ‘various cloths from Otaheiti made of tree bark.’
The thick, soft cloth consists of two to four layers of different fibre materials. The upper fibre layer is quite severely damaged. In addition to a basic light-brown dye, the cloth has two length-wise borders dyed a reddish colour, 15 and 130 cm wide respectively. Annotation by Kaeppler: ‘Part of a mourning costume’. Gundolf Krüger