A strange object was hiding, anonymously, among the orphan goods in the vast reserves of the Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, in Paris.
At first glance, it was a large purse made of freeze-dried fibers of animal or vegetable origin... In 2019, a curator at the British Museum, originally from Tasmania, showed the head of the Oceania collections of the Parisian institution dedicated to tribal arts a seaweed container typical of the ancient aborigines of this island.
An object that was then believed to be the only one of its kind to have survived.
But the scientist also unearthed from the archives of Henry Balfour (1863-1939), archaeologist and first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, an ink sketch of an identical specimen.
This document indicates that at the beginning of the 20th century, the Musée de la marine, then in the Louvre, kept another of these ingenious handbags traditionally made by women and which were used to carry water at least fifteen years ago. a thousand years.
This last…
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