Footnote 4ĭespite the well-documented institutional history of the Ashmolean clubs, extending back to at least 1685, and probably to the early/mid-seventeenth century, neither the provenance nor the indigenous context of these artefacts is known. Footnote 2 Where information exists, most of the clubs are documented as entering their respective collections prior to 1700 the earliest examples are illustrated c 1586, Footnote 3 and two were recovered from the San Pedro shipwreck of 1596, found off the coast of Bermuda. The clubs’ size and the complexity of their two-dimensional design panels distinguish this rare style, of which there are some forty extant examples, held largely in European museums. These large clubs (114–140cm in length) are carved from tropical hardwoods and embellished with curvilinear and geometric two-dimensional designs on the broad faces of their terminal ends. and Brosimum cf guianense) and their probable dates of manufacture ( c AD 1300–1640), but also their possible provenance (strontium results are consistent with a possible range from Trinidad south to French Guiana).

This paper provides new data for these poorly known objects from early collections, revealing not only the type of wood from which they were carved ( Platymiscium sp.

Previous attempts at attribution, based on stylistic comparisons with nineteenth- to twentieth-century Brazilian and Guyanese clubs, have proved inconclusive given the unique features of this club style, raising the intriguing possibility that these may be exceptionally rare examples of ‘Island Carib’ (Kalinago) material culture, particularly as images of such clubs appear in seventeenth-century ethnographic accounts from the Lesser Antilles. During the seventeenth century, the term ‘India occidentali/occidentales’ referred not only to the ‘West Indies’ (its literal translation), but to the Americas as a whole hence, the Ashmolean clubs and, indeed, the c forty examples of similarly large, decorated clubs known in international museum collections had no firm provenance and lacked even the most basic information. This paper focuses on the material study (radiocarbon dating, wood identification and strontium isotope analyses) of four large ‘India occidentali’ clubs, part of the founding collections of the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, and originally part of John Tradescant’s ‘Ark’, in Lambeth (1656).

Arcano 17 andre breton pdf