Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Bamboo Tobacco Pipes from Papua New Guinea


I have been spending a lot of time at the Smithsonian's Museum Support Center (MSC), where the bulk of the collections are stored. These tobacco pipes were collected by British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon in the early 1900s. Dr. Bell asked me to visually "unroll" them to show the complete patterns. It would have been simplest to do rubbings of the pipes to get an accurate and quick layout, but because they are so old and delicate, I drew a grid on my paper and transferred points using a soft tape measure.

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