Fiji’s famous
Fother artefacts from Fiji.
These items are located in a 40,000 square-foot section called “The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing” which holds a collection of art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas.
According to Wikipedia records, the Africa, Oceania and the Americas collection ranges from 40,000-yearold indigenous Australian rock paintings, to a group of 15-foottall (4.6 m) memorial poles carved by the Asmat people of New Guinea and a priceless collection of ceremonial and personal objects from the Nigerian Court of Benin donated by German art dealer Klaus Perls.
Some Fiji wooden artefacts at The Met, including war clubs, are
The types and styles of Fijian war club come in an exceptionally wide range. Upon close inspection, one would notice the high degree of skill and patience taken while fashioning these clubs especially, that were to be used by chiefs.
Although certain types appear to have been more in favour than others, there was room for personal choice in the pattern, miner details, decorative and finish.
The most elaborately designed clubs, called culacula, were for priests and chiefs. They delivered blows with the thin edge of their blades and had the ability to cut or snap through bones rather than simply shattering it.
“The Tongans may have developed them as a shield-club when they first encountered Fijian war arrows in the mid to late 1700s,” noted a Fiji Museum online article. “Chiefs and priests, who would stand at the front of the war party, were particularly at risk of flying “missiles”. Anatole von Hugel was famous for amassing a large collection of “Fijian artefacts of unsurpassed quality”. He took them back with him Britain on his return home.
After being appointed as the inaugural director of the new Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, he donated his collection from Fiji to the institution, many of them war clubs.
Sir Arthur Gordon later added to the Fijian collection at the Cambridge Museum.
While nowadays clubs can be spotted only during dances and traditional ceremonies such as funerals of high chiefs, in the early days, as you’d imagine, the wooden artefact was a common sight.
Its familiarity and prevalence never made it unimportant. In fact, in the eyes of both indigenous Fijians and curious white men, the clubs had a special place in people’s minds and imagination.
Before the arrival of cameras, the white man-made meticulous freehand sketches of them while recording information in the pages of history books.
Among the earliest published sketches of Fijian clubs were those that accompanied the Narrative of Dumont d’Urville’s first voyage to the Pacific (1926-29), and in Fiji and the Fijians by Thomas Williams (London, 1858).
D’Urville was in Fiji waters for only a short while between May and June 1826, and his artist recorded only a few weapons. Nevertheless, his sketches are be
totokia, dave ni waiwai, masi kesa, culacula, sali, vunikau vulibuli vonotabua, iulatavatava and sedre ni waiwai.