PMH326870_D4007

Title: A presumed message stick held in the Peabody Museum Harvard

Description: Display Title: Ornamented wooden pin PMH Catalogue Description: Ornament, carved wood, cylindrical, incised/burned design, resin one end

Date Created: 1902

Notes on date created: terminus ante quem

Item type: message stick in a collection

State/Territory: WA

Notes on linguistic areas: The origin of the message stick is Gascoyne, Western Australia

Dimension 1: 235mm Dimension 2: 13mm Dimension 3: 13mm

Materials: wood

Source types: museum collection

Institution/Holder file: Peabody Museum Harvard object identifier: 32-68-70/D4007

Collector: Sold By: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (4/11/1932-5/9/1932) Collector: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (1902)

Coordinates: 24°52'57.100800"S,113°39'9.201600"E  (-24.882528, 113.652556)

Media copyright: Peabody Museum Harvard For rights and reproductions requests, see https://www.peabody.harvard.edu/about/rightspermissions

Notes on coordinates: Coordinates for Carnarvon, Western Australia. Wikipedia: The Gascoyne region is one of the nine administrative regions of Western Australia. It is located in the northwest of Western Australia, and consists of the local government areas of Carnarvon, Exmouth, Shark Bay and Upper Gascoyne.

URL institution: https://pmem.unix.fas.harvard.edu:8443/peabody/

Notes: PK: This looks more like a hairpin than a message stick. Diana Zlatanovski, Collections Steward sent an Excel sheet of message sticks and commented: "As you’ll notice some of them aren’t titled message stick, but all of the artifacts on the list have at some point been in their museum life been cataloged as a message stick." 27.02.2024 PK: Accession materials supplied by PMH indicate this object as a "message stick" on p42 of PMR-24-142 Kelly 32-68DIST.pdf 27.02.2024 PK: The possibility is that this was a hairpin repurposed as a message stick

Media Files:

Data Entry: Julia Bespamyatnykh, Piers Kelly, Nitzan Rotman