Fig. 49.—Rubbing of part of the decoration of a Tongan club in the Norwich Museum; one-half natural size.
One frequently finds designs in the ornamentation of objects from Oceania which are evidently based upon sinnet lashings. To take a few out of many examples now before me, in Fig. [48] we have a reduced rubbing of a carved cylindrical club, said to come from the Friendly Islands (Tonga); the same kind of club also occurs in Fiji. The decoration of this club irresistibly suggests bands of plaited sinnet irregularly bound round the club.
In these two groups of islands sinnet is often worked into a design that is also copied on the upper part of a carved wooden club. (Fig. [49].) The same kind of lashing is seen in Plate [I.], Fig. 1. Occasionally, instead of being angular, this pattern is carved in curved lines, and so gives rise to an imbricate pattern, which might be mistaken for a scale pattern.
Fig. 50.—Rubbing of part of the decoration of a Tongan club in the Norwich Museum; one-half natural size.
Other sinnet patterns perhaps occur in the lower part of the decoration of a Tongan club. (Fig. [50].) The design on the upper left-hand corner is evidently copied from matting, and it frequently occurs on these clubs. This figure also illustrates the Tongan peculiarity of inserting little figures into designs, in this case a man and probably a frigate-bird.
I do not wish to suggest that all zigzags included within parallel lines, as in Fig. [48], or such simple designs as those of Fig. [50], are everywhere sinnet derivatives, or otherwise skeuomorphic; some, at least, in the Pacific certainly are. We have seen that birds’ head designs may degenerate into zigzags (Figs. [30], [36]), and we shall see that frogs’ legs (Fig. [122], B), snakes (Fig. [103], G, H, K), alligators (Fig. [97], E, F), and even the human form (Fig. [125], A) may pass into zigzags. There are many other possible origins of the zigzag, but in many cases it is probably only a purely decorative motive of no further significance. The simple zigzag can be traced in ancient Egyptian art as far back as 4000 B.C., and, according to Professor Flinders Petrie, it continued popular with a few modifications for about 2000 years, when spots were associated with it, but these were adopted from foreign art. About the eighteenth dynasty the use of the zigzag was discarded in favour of the wavy line and various scroll designs. In all cases it is necessary to study each pattern locally.
3. Skeuomorphs of Textiles.
In Europe a very early form of fabric was wattle-work, formed by the interlacing of flexible boughs and wands. The most ancient huts were doubtless made of wattle-work daubed over with clay. Only very exceptionally are traces of these structures found, as, for example at Ebersberg, where Dr. Keller[27] found, among the débris of a lake-village which had been destroyed by fire, fragments of the clay daubing, “smooth on one side, and marked on the other, with deep depressions of the basket-work.” The pattern thus impressed on the clay is one of repeated straight lines crossed by a contrasted series of curved ones. (Plate [II.], Fig. 1.) Thus the fire which consumed the house baked its clayey coating, and in this way preserved for us a record of what it destroyed.