Basketry techniques

Alison Petch,
Researcher 'The Other Within' project

Basketmakers

Illustration from 'A Guide to Basketmaking' in Basketmakers, 1992: 4

Another form of technology which interested Pitt Rivers Museum staff was basketry. The museum has within its collections many different forms of baskets including baskets made from many different weaves, baskets from most countries in the world, and baskets made from a wide variety of materials.

In her Occasional Paper on 'Classification' Beatrice Blackwood shows the way the Museum considered Basketry as regards its museum documentation. It is surprisingly simple:

BASKETRY
Baskets, including plaques and platters
Design samples
Tools and raw materials

There has only been one specific publication by the Museum about Basketry: Basketmakers: Meaning and Form in Native American Baskets edited by Linda Mowat, Howard Morphy and Penny Dransart and published in 1992 as Monograph 5. This publication was linked to a temporary exhibition with the same title.

In Linda's introduction to the publication she states:

The visitor looking for baskets in the Pitt Rivers Museum will be directed to a series of large Victorian mahogany showcases. These are crammed with scores of baskets displayed according to technique of manufacture. American baskets jostle for position with examples from Ancient Egypt, Australia, Nagaland and Sarawak.' [Mowat et al, 1992: 1]

It is worth quoting Linda's introduction at some length as she considers technology and evolution as it relates to basketry:

The General [Pitt Rivers] loved to collect ordinary, everyday objects and many baskets are exactly that. Yet, had he been a serious student of basketry, he might have paused to think about just how they fitted into his evolutionary scheme of things. Is a coiled basket simpler than a twined one? Is plaiting a basket with no tensioning mechanism any less skilled than weaving a textile on a loom? How is that a single group of people, presumably at the same stage of development, can produce a whole set of baskets ranging from the simple, quickly made and disposable to the complex, highly skilled and deeply symbolic. [Mowat et al, 1992: 1]

Linda is a skilled basket-maker herself (indeed she is another example of a member of the Museum's staff who is able both to look at (and after) an artefact as a museum object and make a facsimile of it). She makes the point that baskets were not only studied, and displayed as baskets but also in their different functions:

one advantage of General Pitt Rivers' arrangement is that it allows us to look at baskets in quantity. And if this is not enough, their nature is such that we can turn away from the Basketry cases and still find baskets ... all over the Museum. Here they are with cradles ... There they are with Agriculture ... Nearby we find them with food processing ... There are burden baskets for garden produce ... there are storage bins, water jars, fire fans and rattles; there are children's toys, trinket boxes, fish traps and weapons. Baskets are woven from the strands of life itself. [Mowat et al, 1992: 1]

Linda makes the point that the scope of North American baskets, the focus of the publication, 'is tremendous in terms of technology, all the basic constructional techniques being represented and a wide variety of exquisite forms being produced. The range of basketry materials used ... is extensive'. [Mowat et al, 1992: 1-2] What she says about the North American baskets is true for the global collections as well.

She also makes the point that the study of technology cannot be divorced from the maker:

... behind every basket is a basketmaker: the woman or man who gathered the raw materials, prepared them with care and constructed the form that, whatever its original purpose, has now become in addition a work of art, a piece of sculpture. But many of the old basketmakers are anonymous. Like most of the artists who made the beautiful objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum, their names were never recorded or thought important. They passed on the skills and traditions of their people from generation to generation, but the signatures on their work - a particular start to a coil basket, a particular finish on a rim - remain illegible to the uninitiated. [Mowat et al, 1992: 3]

The first chapter of 'Basketmakers' is a guide to basketmaking written by Linda. This discussions the various basketry techniques represented in the Museum's collections. She makes the point that all baskets can be described as being woven and that 'weaving' in this sense is synonymous with 'making'. [Mowat et al, 1992: 5] It is referred to as weaving because two sets of elements are interlaced at right angles, the warp and the weft. She identifies the following separate techniques and describes them:

Wicker weaving
Chequer weaving
Twill weaving
Overlay

She also discusses twined weaving processes, plaiting processes and sewing processes.

A website about the PRM basket collections

Felicity Wood, a longtime Friend of the Museum, an avid basketmaker and basket collector, has set up a website to bring information about the Museum's baskets to the attention of the general public. You can find this site here. This site as well as containing informatoin about specific baskets also gives (or will give) information about different techniques and materials, basketry uses, conservation etc.

Basket collections at the PRM

There are a total of 6,315 basketry items in the Museum's collections in November 2008. Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers gave at least 347 basketry related items to the University of Oxford in 1884, although almost half of these are a set of 150 plaited rings from Cape York. None of them have documentation from when they were in Pitt Rivers' ownership which suggest any interest, on his part, in basketry techniques. Henry Balfour donated fewer basketry objects, but he appears to have taken more interest in the technique. Balfour was also interested in how baskets were made, collecting basketry tools as well as the finished products. Blackwood was interested in basketry and made a large collection of baskets during her fieldwork, she described the techniques used precisely. 67 per cent of the basketry collections were acquired between 1884 and 1945. In 1945 baskets were the 16th most common artefact, but by 2003 the figure had dropped to 19th (that is, they were becoming less significant, though they were still a sizeable collection). There are a total of 60 English baskets, only 0.1 per cent of the English collections.

Baskets	1880s	1890s	1900s	1910s	1920s	1930s	1940s	1950s	1960s	1970s	1980s	1990s	2000s
England	0	4	4	16	0	1	9	3	1	0	7	8	7
UK	0	5	4	16	1	1	16	5	1	0	7	8	7
Europe	8	14	36	18	4	2	20	14	4	4	7	39	8
Global	771	367	510	391	815	649	740	432	405	178	149	637	202

Basket Displays in the Museum

There are a large number of displays which include baskets but the main basketry cases in the Court of the Museum were recreated by Balfour in 1914 (the first time they were created they presumably were established after 1884 following the model Pitt Rivers himself had used in London).:

The series illustrating the varieties of technique in Basketry has been completely rearranged, and diagrammatic explanatory models have been added. New exhibition cases have been erected for a part of this important series. [Museum Annual Report 1914]

According to the same annual report Winifred Blackman [1] had worked on card catalogues for basketry, among other subjects (it is not clear what happened to these card catalogues though they may have been integrated into the main musuem card catalogue systems).

It seems that these displays were established quite early on in the Museum's history and have just been augmented when new and exciting examples have been accessioned.

Here is a list of basketry displays in the Court of the Museum as at 2008:

Case 19.B - Baskets - Nagaland, India
Case 19.C - Baskets - Nagaland, India
Case 113.A - Basketry Techniques
Case 114.A - Basketry Techniques
Case 117.A - Rope, String and Netting
Case 118.A - Plaited Baskets and Basketry Tools
Case 121.A - Coiled Baskets and Basketry Tools

Balfour's work on basketry techniques in the Museum

There is not a great deal of documentation about the work of museum staff on basketry before Basketmakers but here is an account of Balfour's teaching methods which give a clear idea of his interest in the subject. Wilson Dallam Wallis, who started the Oxford Diploma in 1908 as a Rhodes Scholar, and later became Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, remembered his classes with Balfour nearly fifty years later:

Our work with Henry Balfour was done entirely in the Pitt-Rivers Museum, of which he was Curator, before exhibition cases which frequently were supplemented with trays or handfuls of additional specimens. He was especially interested in the development and distribution of technological products and processes, and sought to demonstrate both independent origins and diffusion. Many of the Museum cases contained maps indicating the distribution of boomerangs, types of basketry, and so on, and to these Balfour made additions from time to time. He thought there was a place in the world for a museum illustrating typology; I never heard him speak disparagingly of ethnographic arrangements. The handful of notes which he brought to the peripatetic lecture were suggestive of Darwin’s use of every scrap and kind of paper; they were any size and shape, sometimes interspersed with press clippings and portions of letters…The examination included written work six hours a day for three days, and an oral given jointly by Balfour, Marett and Thomson. We were called into a room individually, and when dismissed were not allowed to communicate with waiting victims. Balfour’s examination consisted largely of having us identify various specimens which we had not seen in the course of our work with him. (1957: 786-7)

Another of Balfour's students (who later worked in the Museum herself) Beatrice Blackwood's lecture notes from the period survive, including notes she took during Balfour’s classes (Beatrice Blackwood papers, PRM manuscripts, box 1 and 1A). The lecture courses cover ‘The Aesthetic Arts’ and ‘The Industrial Arts’ and ‘Prehistoric Archaeology’. The lectures follow Balfour’s written work, where applicable, very closely. Under the ‘Aesthetic Arts’, he discussed ‘1. art, decorative and realistic 2. music, mainly the instrumental side 3. personal ornament’ (BB box 1). His lectures on the ‘Industrial Arts’ including fire-making technologies, ‘the art, or industry, of war’, fishing, the history of agriculture, navigation, and manufacturing industries, including pottery, textiles, basketry and metal work. The lectures combined a comprehensive overview of the main practices, techniques and finds from around the world, with some general theorizing about the probable historical and cultural relationships between different traditions: which was the most primitive, what course did the historical development take as practices spread from culture to culture, had things emerged independently or might there be a link between similar cultural traditions from different places. He used maps to show the global distribution of certain practices and technologies, and there are suggestions as to his use of objects during the lectures.

Balfour also collected baskets during his foreign excursions during the Long Vacations. For example in 1905 in what is now known as Zimbabwe:

... went to a native curio store supplied by King Lewanika, bought a fine Barotse basket there, a carved food vessel, Kangombio etc.’ (14 September 1905) [Balfour's field journals, PRM ms collections Balfour papers]

Blackwood also used basketwork in her talks to the students at the Museum and collected many specimens during her fieldwork in the Pacific and North America.

Notes

[1] Winifred Susan Blackman (1872-1950) was awarded the Diploma in Anthropology at the Museum in 1915. Her first contact with the Museum was in 1912 when she started work on the museum catalogues. She carried out fieldwork in Egypt from 1920 and was also Librarian at the Department of the Social Anthropology from 1919.

ENGLAND: THE OTHER WITHIN

Analysing the English Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum