̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - artefact

World first as 3,000-year-old Chinese oracle bones go 3D

sjr81 — Mon, 21 Mar 2016 15:06:43 +0000

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, which is celebrating its 600^th anniversary this year, holds 614 Chinese inscribed oracle bones in its collection. They are the oldest extant documents written in the Chinese language, dating from 1339-1112 BCE. Inscribed on ox shoulder blades and the flat under-part of turtle shells, they record questions to which answers were sought by divination at the court of the royal house of Shang, which ruled north central China at that time.

̽��ֱ��inscriptions on the bones provide much insight into many aspects of early Chinese society, such as warfare, agriculture, hunting, medical problems, meteorology and astronomy.

Among the latter is a record of a lunar eclipse dated to 1192 BCE, one of the earliest such accounts in any civilisation.

Charles Aylmer, Head of the Chinese Department at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library, said: “Some of the bones have already been included in the Cambridge Digital Library but now new technology provides readers around the world an even closer look at these precious artefacts.

“In what is believed to be a world first, one of the bones (which features in the 600^th anniversary exhibition Lines of Thought) has been digitised in 3D thanks to the work of archaeologist Professor Dominic Powlesland, one of the leading pioneers in this area.”

Cambridge UL Chinese Oracle Bone (CUL.52) by Professor Dominic Powlesland on Sketchfab

̽��ֱ��high-resolution image of the bone, which measures about 9x14 cm, knits together 1.3 million aspects to allow a seamless view of its entire surface.

̽��ֱ��image brings into sharp focus not only the finely incised questions on the obverse of the bone, but also the divination pits engraved on the reverse and the scorch marks caused by the application of heat to create the cracks (which were interpreted as the answers from the spirit world). These can be seen more clearly than by looking at the actual object itself, and without the risk of damage by handling the original bone.

In collaboration with the Media Studio of Addenbrooke's Hospital (part of the Cambridge Biomedical Campus), the scanned data were used to make what is believed to be the first 3D print of an oracle bone.

̽��ֱ��print was made with a printer whose main function in the hospital is to assist in planning maxillofacial and orthopaedic surgery. ̽��ֱ��print comprises 350 superimposed layers of a fine powdered plaster compound hardened with cyanoacrylate (superglue).

3D prints such as this enable students and researchers to obtain a ‘hands-on’ impression otherwise impossible for conservation reasons. It is hoped to create images of more bones from the Library's collection as funding permits.

Aylmer added: " ̽��ֱ��oracle bones are three-dimensional objects, and high-resolution 3D imagery reveals features which not only all previous methods of reproduction (such as drawings, rubbings and photographs) have been unable to do, but which are not even apparent from careful examination of the actual items themselves.

“In particular, the reverse sides of the bones, which are crucial to understanding the process of divination but have hitherto been neglected because of the difficulty of representing them adequately, can now be studied in detail thanks to this new technique.

“To hold a 3D print of an oracle bone is a very special experience, as it provides the same sensory impression as that obtained by the people who created them over three thousand years ago, but without the risk of harm to the priceless originals."

A 3000-year-old ox bone - inscribed with the earliest-known example of Chinese writing - has become the world's first 'oracle bone' to be scanned and printed in 3D.

To hold a 3D print of an oracle bone is a very special experience, as it provides the same sensory impression as that obtained by the people who created them over three thousand years ago

Charles Aylmer

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Knowing me, knowing you

amb206 — Tue, 20 Oct 2015 07:00:00 +0000

Eighteen people take part in Alana Jelinek’s film Knowing. You hear their voices but you never see their faces. ̽��ֱ��camera records only their hands as they touch, turn, and sometimes pick up, a succession of objects placed on a white table. ̽��ֱ��smooth surface, sterile and cool, contrasts with the raw sense of nature locked into the things set out upon it. ̽��ֱ��juxtaposition is one of man-made and hand-made. Machines make polished perfection; hands make an uneven beauty that is richer still.

A bracelet plaited from grass, a wooden shield hewn with a stone tool, a fish trap woven from rattan, a string of beads made from tree resin. These humble things are the stars of Jelinek’s film; the stories wrapped up in them are theirs alone. ̽��ֱ��hands that touch make connections with shapes and materials; they create a patina of human wear and tear. As we watch, the fingers on the screen become our fingers – and, through our nerve endings, our antennae, we ask questions.

Who made these things, who has used them, where are these things now? And the hands we see – who do they belong to? ̽��ֱ��voices we hear: where are they from, do they belong to villagers, scholars, curators, or all three? ̽��ֱ��absence of faces hints at the disjuncture between people, places and things. What are things without people – what happens when things become museum objects, items to be labelled and catalogued?

Jelinek’s film will make its debut on 25 October as part of a celebration of the art and cultures of West Papua staged by Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. ̽��ֱ��event ‘Knowing West Papua’ includes performances by Papuan musicians, a last chance to experience the exhibition 'Sounding Out the Morning Star: Music and West Papua', and talks about West Papua given by artists, musicians and Cambridge researchers.

Knowing is not a documentary. ̽��ֱ��film doesn’t set out to provide answers but, rather, to tease out some of the fragile stories told by material culture. Jelinek is neither anthropologist nor archaeologist; she’s an artist and self-taught film maker. She trained as a painter but her work came to be more about ideas than about creating images. For the past seven years, increasingly curious about the narratives that exist in objects, she has worked with museum collections.

̽��ֱ��48 minutes of Knowing have been edited down from 22 hours of filming in which a selection of objects was retrieved from the collection of the Volkenkunde in the Netherlands and those of a number of private individuals. ̽��ֱ��finished artwork is slow-paced and reflective.

“I wanted to bring together people who are variously connected with West Papua, people with different relationships to regimes, past and present, and to see how their knowledge of the objects varied because of these different cultural starting points. I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to talk about their own material culture and the material culture of others,” says Jelinek.

“Everyone chose objects from their own region to talk about. In the case of Dutch people, whose material culture is not collected by the ethnology museum, participants brought objects from a similar period to talk about.”

We’re accustomed to films that tell, instruct, inform. Knowing is both reticent and playful, even gently humorous. In between objects, the screen goes black while the voices continue; it’s frustrating to discover how carelessly you’ve looked at an object that’s now disappeared. In placing objects in front of people, Jelinek invites their thoughts, any quizzing is gentle. ̽��ֱ��voices we hear are hesitant and respectful, shy even, in identifying what is set before them.

“It’s decoration for the arms,” says a male voice as hands reach out to bracelets crafted from grass. “I am not allowed to put it on.” A female voice explains that her father gave her similar bracelets to wear when there was a fancy dress day at school in the Netherlands. “You go like us,” her father had said. At school people would ask what the children were. “What are you?” “I’m Little Red Riding Hood.” “What are you?” “I’m a Papuan.” In this little tale lies a wealth of meaning about identity.

Male hands wiggle into a fish trap and a man’s voice explains how fish swim in and can’t get out. “We were a poor family – everything we could eat was welcome.” In the communist times of the 1960s life was hard; a catapult, the voice explains, will kill birds and squirrels. In this roundabout way, Jelinek hints at the troubled history of West Papua, a territory with an indigenous population that has suffered terribly during waves of colonialism, most recently as part of Indonesia.

Knowing carefully credits by name all those who participated in making the film. Many have names unfamiliar and ‘exotic’ to Europeans. Among them is Benny Wenda, leader of the West Papua independence movement, who has lived in exile in the UK since escaping from prison in Indonesia in 2002. Wenda’s hands hold a multipurpose tool from the highlands: it will help to build a house, cultivate land, split wood – it can also be a weapon.

Weapons are made to treasure and to pass on as well as to use. A carved and decorated dagger is made from a human bone. ̽��ֱ��imagery incised into its surfaces tells stories about the Amsat, an indigenous culture infamously associated with head hunting and cannibalism. ̽��ֱ��dagger may even have been used to get brains out of the skulls of those killed through head hunting.

Today these objects are in a museum; each one carries a label which, in the hands of people touching them, seems like an affront. Some objects are made to display, some to hide; some are valuable, some are not. Many objects important to people are not represented in museum collections – they are too precious or too private. Museums tell only a fraction of human stories.

̽��ֱ��session organised by Jelinek was the first time that Wenda had seen and handled the objects from West Papua held in the Volkenkunde. How do you feel, Jelinek asks, seeing these things? It upsets me, Wenda replies, but at the same time it is good that these precious things are kept safe. “This is our value, this is our spirit … but how are my people? This makes me cry – hard, hard cry. How are my people?” he says.

For details of ‘Knowing West Papua’ on 25 October 2015, and how to book (free) tickets, go to https://www.festival.cam.ac.uk/events/knowing-west-papua

Inset images: A penis sheath in the Volkenkunde collection stores in s'Gravenzande, Netherlands (Katharina Haslwanter); Gershon Kaigere and Peter Waal in the Volkenkunde collection stores in s'Gravenzande, Netherlands (Katharina Haslwanter).

What can museum collections tell us about people and their stories? On Sunday 25 October 2015, the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology will host an event that asks profound questions about objects and identities with the focus on West Papua.

This is our value, this is our spirit … but how are my people? This makes me cry – hard, hard cry. How are my people?

Benny Wenda

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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Captain Cook’s Maori paddles: an artefact of encounter

lw355 — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:22:28 +0000

Living in a multicultural, globalised world, it’s hard to imagine the moment when different cultures first met, or a time when people’s knowledge of each other’s worlds was nonexistent.

Yet, on 12 October 1769, seven Maori canoes paddled out from the east coast of New Zealand south of Poverty Bay to investigate a large ship. ̽��ֱ��vessel was the HMS Endeavour, captained by Captain James Cook, and this was the first time the Maori people had encountered a European.

They were at first reluctant to approach the ship but then, according to the diary of ship’s surgeon William Monkhouse, “very soon enter’d into a traffick with our people for [Tahitian] cloth… giving in exchange their paddles (having little else to dispose of) and hardly left themselves sufficient number to paddle a shore.”

A set of these finely carved and decorated paddles is now housed in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, where an innovative research project ‘Artefacts of Encounter’ has been working with Polynesian communities to understand what the earliest Europeans to visit the Pacific Islands made of the people they met, and what those people made of them.

Rather than turning to the written evidence of Europeans, the researchers have placed at the heart of their investigation the objects the Polynesians gave in exchange for goods. For the Polynesians, the paddles and pots, feathered cloaks and woven helmets, nose whistles and shell horns are often the only surviving evidence of a contact with other cultures that happened centuries ago.

“Artefacts help us to study what parties on either side of the encounters were trying to achieve through these seminal transactions,” explained researcher Dr Julie Adams. “They help us to consider new evidence of the nature of these encounters and of the changes in social practices, ideas and beliefs they engendered, both in the Pacific and in Europe. Artefacts are key to understanding how socio-cultural change unfolds.”

But with more than 650 voyages from Europe and the Americas entering Polynesia between 1765 and 1840, the artefacts the explorers brought back are both plentiful and largely scattered throughout museums of the world. Artefacts were divided up between crew members as ships returned home; today, no single museum houses the bounty of any single expedition.

Focusing initially on 40 ‘priority’ voyages – among them those of Cook (1768-80), Malaspina (1789-94), d’Entrecasteaux (1791-1793) and d’Urville (1822-40) – the team has re-analysed over 1,000 objects from 30 museums and Carl Hogsden has built a digital research environment that brings them back together for the first time.

Named KIWA after the great Polynesian navigator, the digital resource manages a wealth of widely dispersed data through a series of active collaborations with holding institutions, scholars and Polynesian communities, “enabling the discovery of new connections between hard-to-access material,” as Hogsden explained. KIWA is designed to enable the sharing of data and research insights among the geographically dispersed project team (based in the UK, New Zealand and Brazil) as well as between research and curatorial staff worldwide.

For the Maori wooden paddles, for instance, the researchers have traced back almost 250 years from the artefact to the first encounter – through close study of the wooden paddles themselves, which are intricately decorated in red ochre, as well as through sea charts, ship’s log records, diary entries, inventories and, significantly, discussions with a Maori kin-group whose ancestors may have been among those who exchanged paddles for goods with Cook’s crew.

“ ̽��ֱ��paddles would have been part of a set used to paddle a waka taua, a large canoe embodying the spiritual potency (mana) of a kin-group personified by their chief,” explained Adams. “They were probably given as a gift to Tupaia, the Tahitian priest-navigator-interpreter who accompanied Cook and his men to New Zealand, possibly in an effort to bind him and his own mana to the local genealogical networks.”
Tupaia was to die of typhus at Batavia and his possessions were brought back to Britain, where they were sent by Lord Sandwich, then Lord of the Admiralty and Cook’s patron, to Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1771. After being exhibited for many decades in Trinity College Library, they were deposited in the Museum in 1914.

Adams, who with Dr Amiria Salmond and others has helped amass the object-centric evidence that underpins the digital resource, explained the resource’s significance: “For the very first time, it is now possible for researchers to reassemble all of the artefacts collected on a certain expedition – such as the Bellingshausen voyage from Russia to the Marquesas Islands in 1803. These are now dispersed across various institutions and have never been studied in their entirety.

“Or researchers could ask the database to show all the carved wooden clubs collected from Tonga, or all objects made from barkcloth, dog skin or feathers, or all the objects collected by an individual, such as the missionary George Bennet who toured Polynesia in the 1820s.”

One aim of the project, which is led by Professor Nicholas Thomas and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is to expose variations in patterns of exchange among different island groups (including Tonga, the Society Islands and New Zealand) as well as between different voyages over time. Such a comparative approach will enable new conclusions to be drawn not only about the voyages themselves and their immediate aftermath, but about the divergent trajectories of first imperial, then (post-)colonial relationships.

̽��ֱ��project has taken a lead from present-day Polynesians, who assert strong ancestral interests in these encounters and their artefacts. A key aspect of the project has been collaboration with a Māori tribal group, Te Aitanga a Hauiti (represented by the arts management group Toi Hauiti) – whose forefathers encountered early European explorers from the arrival of Cook in 1769. For six months, Hogsden worked with Toi a Hauiti to help create a digital research network that allows the Cambridge-based system to share content with a digital archive under development by the Maori community and local web developers, CodeShack.

“This work forms the basis for a reciprocal relationship between networked research hubs where ownership and control of information lies with the source,” explained Hogsden. “Although the networked content is collaboratively produced, the interpretation of digital objects differs. This is important because the Maori community views objects in a highly relational way – everything is connected to everything else – and so whereas our database is object-centric, theirs is relationship-centric. ̽��ֱ��two databases can nonetheless talk to each other and share content.”

For the paddles, members of the project team visited New Zealand to discuss the objects with the Ngai Tamanuhiri tribe, whose ancestors were probably part of the party who paddled out to the Endeavour in 1769. ̽��ֱ��importance of the paddles as early examples of kowhaiwhai painting has been recognised by those engaged in the revitalisation of Maori arts, and research is in progress to establish their genealogical connections to present-day Maori communities.

̽��ֱ��Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology holds a world-class collection of Oceanic, Asian, African and Native American artefacts and has been shortlisted for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2013.
For more information, please visit the Artefacts of Encounter project website

Maori paddles presented to Captain Cook’s crew on their first voyage of discovery capture the spirit of a first encounter between two cultures.

they enter'd into a traffick with our people... giving in exchange their paddles

William Monkhouse, Ship's Surgeon, HMS Endeavour

Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

Maori paddles collected on Captain Cook's first voyage

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