Oceanic art and architecture

Materials and techniques

Until the 16th and 17th centuries, when European cultures appeared upon the scene, Oceanian cultures maintained various forms of Neolithic technology. The only exception was in the northwest of New Guinea, where the people living around Geelvink Bay (Teluk Cenderawasih) imported very small quantities of metal from the Indonesians of the Moluccas (Maluku). The technique of forging was jealously guarded, virtually as a cult secret; some tools were traded but only in quantities far too small to have made much impact on normal working conditions.

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Throughout the rest of Melanesia and in Polynesia and Micronesia, the basic tool remained the stone blade, which was hafted as an adz or an ax and sometimes interchangeably as both. Tridacna shell was sometimes used for blades in parts of Oceania where stone was in short supply, including Micronesia and the Solomon Islands. When obsidian was available, it was chipped into blades for use as both weapons and tools. Other working materials included bamboo and bivalve shells, which take extremely sharp edges. Some fine cutting and engraving was done with unhafted boar tusks or with hafted shark and rodent teeth. Animal bones served as gouges, awls, and needles. All these tools were employed in working wood, which with rare exceptions was the main medium used throughout Oceania.

Clay was also employed, mainly for sculptures, for some small musical instruments (whistles), and for pottery in Melanesia and New Guinea. The making of clay vessels was almost exclusively women’s work, except in a few small areas in New Guinea and the northern Solomons. The usual method involved spiral coiling of rolls of clay. The decorating of the pot was the work of men.

Some working of shell and turtle shell was done with simple drilling and abrading equipment. The carving of stone, although obviously presenting far more arduous and time-consuming problems than wood, was undertaken remarkably often and occurred throughout the Pacific Islands; hammering, pecking, and polishing were the main methods. Even so resistant a material as jade was mastered by grinding with abrasives.

Paint and painting were thought to animate sculpture—often literally, in religiosymbolic terms, as paint was considered to have magical, vivifying powers. Paints were generally ochres, with some vegetable-derived pigments. Water was the usual medium, occasionally supplemented with sap. Brushes were the fibrous ends of chewed or frayed sticks, small feather bundles, pieces of wood, and sometimes the most elementary applicator of all, the finger. Apart from sculpture, the surfaces used for painting were rock faces, bark, and tapa (cloth made from pounded bark). Rock painting was most common in Australia, where panels of bark were also used. In Melanesia, paintings were made mainly on sago-palm spathes and sheets of tapa cloth. In Polynesia the women manufactured great quantities of tapa, which they then decorated with abstract designs using vegetable dyes. The techniques they employed included painting, stenciling with leaf templates, rubbing over relief-design tables, stamping, and printing with carved bamboo rollers.

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The only areas where weaving was practiced were the Caroline Islands, the Polynesian outliers east of the Solomon Islands, some of the Santa Cruz Islands, parts of Vanuatu, the Saint Matthias Group (northwest of New Ireland), and a few places on the northern coast of Indonesian New Guinea. Spinning was unknown; instead of yarn or thread, strips of banana fibre were used on a simple backstrap loom. Weaving was a woman’s craft in the Caroline and Saint Matthias islands but was practiced by men elsewhere. A form of “finger weaving,” as in net making, was used by Maori women in creating textiles from flax fibres.

The architecture of the Pacific Islands was varied and sometimes large in scale. Buildings reflected the structure and preoccupations of the societies that constructed them, with considerable symbolic detail. Technically, most buildings in Oceania were no more than simple assemblages of poles held together with cane lashings; only in the Caroline Islands were complex methods of joining and pegging known.

Oceanic artists’ quest for media was consummately opportunistic; they regarded almost anything from the lavish natural world that surrounded them as potentially usable. The marine world yielded shells of all kinds, especially conus, cowrie, and nassa shells. Birds gave down, beaks, and plumes (those of the birds of paradise were especially prized); animals provided teeth, tusks, and skins; insects supplied their brilliant wing cases. The vegetable realm was drawn upon for flowers, leaves, and fibres. The assembly of such materials into single objects was rare in Polynesia and Micronesia, but the practice was typical of Australian and Melanesian styles and contributed brilliantly to their more spectacular effects. The most basic medium of all was the human body, which received both removable and permanent decorations, including scarification, enhanced by treatment to raise keloid welts, in New Guinea and tattooing with needles and pigments elsewhere.