The Past, Present and Future Values of the Polynesian Stone Adzes and Pounders Collected on the Pandora

Abstract

After the Pandora's partly unsuccessful pursuit of the Bounty mutineers through the Pacific islands in 1791, the ship ran aground on a submerged reef and sank 140km east of Cape York, Queensland. Archaeological excavations revealed that the Pandora crew, in addition to their primary objective, made ethnographic material collections during their voyage, including 25 stone adzes and 5 stone pounders. These collected objects are of particular interest because they have escaped the past processes that might have impacted them had they made the journey back to Europe. In archaeological studies, for instance, these adzes were not included in 20 th century typological analyses concerned with understanding the initial human migrations into Oceania, or in more recent geoarchaeological research that seeks to understand Polynesian voyaging, social networks and exchanges. Our paper contextualises the adzes and pounders found on the Pandora to understand the engagement between the European crewmembers and the local people they encountered during their journey through the Pacific Islands. The Pandora crew had participated in the early colonial collecting practices that were foundational to European museum collections and the beginnings of anthropological and archaeological enquiry in the Pacific. On the other hand, the Polynesian participants likely benefited from the engagement in ways that suited their own agendas. We argue that the Pandora objects and similar museum collections as a broader assemblage are important not only for archaeological research, but also because they potentially continue to hold contemporary significance for Polynesian people today and are a legacy that can benefit future generations. Richards and Günther: The Past, Present and Future Values of the Polynesian Stone Adzes and Pounders Collected on the Pandora Art. 4, page 2 of 15 objects on the Pandora wreck might seem unexpected, however given the historical context, it might have been more surprising not to have found evidence of curio collecting aboard the ship as this was undoubtedly becoming a common colonial practice. Method This paper challenges the perceived divide between disciplines identified as limited archaeological approaches for understanding social processes versus anthropological approaches for examining longer-term transformations (Thomas 1991, 1996). We argue that examining the continuity and change in values attached to the Pandora collection is important not only for archaeological research, but also, because these objects are part of broader assemblages that continue to hold contemporary significance for Polynesian people today and are a legacy that can benefit future generations. That is, these objects or 'things' are not simply ' art' as opposed to ' artefacts' but can be studied comparatively to understand indigenous social values and agency in different temporal contexts (Harrison 2013). Our assemblage-based approach (see Flexner 2016; Harrison 2013) combines anthropological and archaeological methods to investigate the tangi...

Uncovering Pacific Pasts: Histories of Archaeology in Oceania

“…Mann, Chapter 3, this volume introduces the continuing value to researchers today of such early collections, using the latest chemical sourcing techniques to tell us about exchange relationships in the Pacific in the earliest stages of European contact. Michelle Richards, one of the PhD scholars associated with the Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific (CBAP) Project, has been garnering much useful information on such topics from portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF) analysis of such museum collections (Richards and Günther 2019). Her work has also demonstrated that claimed precontact artefacts can sometimes turn out to have been manufactured in the post-contact period in what can fairly be described as 'factories' in the Pacific and elsewhere to feed the nineteenth-and early twentieth-century museum obsession with developing 'representative' collections of Pacific artefacts for comparative analysis (Richards 2021).…”