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tapa cloth

Printed siapo with handprinted symbols like a black circle or different black shapes. How did the object come to the Übersee-Museum? The collection was purchased by the museum from Otto Tetens in 1907. Tetens was director of the Samoa Observatory of the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen in the colony of German Samoa from 1902 to 1905. Nothing is yet known about the exact circumstances of Tetens' acquisition on site.

Data Provider
Übersee-Museum Bremen

Cataloguing data

Object type
bark cloth
Dimensions
General: 76 cm
Material/Technique
Bark bast of paper mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera)[?]; pigment bark fibre beaten to tapa, pattern rubbed on with a matrix
Current location
Übersee-Museum Bremen
Inventory number
D05728
Other number(s)
http://coll.uebersee-museum.de/v/D05728

Provenance and sources

  • Production
    when
    1800-1905
    where
    Samoa
  • Assignment to a curated holding:
    Ethnographic collections
Secondary literature
Te Rangi Hiroa: smo Material Culture, 1930. Krämer, Augustin: Die Samoa-Inseln: Entwurf einer Monographie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Deutsch-Samoas, Bd. 2, 1903.

Information about the record

Legal status metadata
CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED
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