Tapa Cloth Wooden Beaters

This month's feature is a set of wooden beaters used to make tapa cloth. They are numbered in the Dard Hunter Collection from #101 - 110, and are part of Dard Hunter's early collection. In the past, we've featured tapa cloth; to make tapa, soaked bark from mulberry trees must be beaten into a matted pulp. Beaters are made from wood and feature grooved surfaces on most or all sides of the head. The grooved surfaces help spread out pulp as it is beat, while the smooth surfaces even out and add a finish to the pulp. The grooved surfaces may have different patterns, but the most common is plain vertical grooves running the length of the beater. Beaters also have a range of cross-sectional head shapes, such as triangular, circular, or rectangular. 

The beaters in the above images are all from the late 1700's or early 1800's, and are from a variety of locations in the Pacific Islands. The dark circular beater is from New Guinea, the dark triangular one from Fiji, the pale rectangular one with thinner grooves is from Hawaii, and the large, tapered, rectangular beater is from the Samoan Islands. The grooves on the beaters often come in patterns that produced matching watermarks on the final tapa; even the plain parallel grooves created watermarks, and Dard Hunter's book Primitive Papermaking (1927) contains specimens of tapa that contain watermarks from patterned beaters. Each beater is designed to be held in one hand, and in many locations the primary users were women. The creation of tapa has faded into obscurity, and sadly there are little, if any, cultures still creating tapa in the old manner. 

We hope that you enjoyed this peek at our collection! We'll be back next year with another artifact. Have a great December!