The Ethnological Museum of Berlin houses four Cook Islands artefacts, including a ceremonial adze, headgear and two drums. However, local experts believe that one of the artefacts, a tall and thin wooden and fibre drum, actually belongs to the Austral Islands. Cook Islands News editor Rashneel Kumar was in Berlin, Germany.

Four Cook Islands artefacts are among the Ethnological Museum of Berlin’s vast collection of about 500,000 ethnographic, archaeological and cultural-historical objects from Africa, Asia, America and Oceania.

The Ethnological Museum which was founded in 1873 and opened its doors in 1886 as the Royal Museum for Ethnology, is one of the Berlin State Museums, the de facto national collection of the Federal Republic of Germany. 

The four objects documented as Cook Islands artefacts are on display at the Pacific Galleries. They include a ceremonial adze and headgear linked to Mangaia and Rarotonga, as well as two drums. 

However, experts in Cook Islands culture say that one of the drums belongs to the Austral Islands, not the Cook Islands, as documented by the Ethnological Museum of Berlin. It is a tall and thin wooden and fibre drum, measuring 135 x 25 x 25 centimetres and weighing 10.5 kilograms. The other drum displayed at the museum is a pa’u mango, a drum synonymous with Cook Islands culture.

Dr Dorothea Deterts, the curator of the Oceania Collection at the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, told Cook Island News that the two drums in their documents mention “Hervey Island - being also a term for the southern Cook-Islands at that time”.

“Both are from the same collection, from Hugo Schilling. Hugo Schilling was curator at the zoological museum in Hamburg. Both drums were indicated in the original list of Hugo Schilling as coming from Fiji and later changed by the museum to coming from Hervey Islands.”

Dr Deterts was happy to discuss the drum documentation with local experts when explained that one of them might be incorrectly documented.

Jean Mason, curator-manager of the Cook Islands Library and Museum Society Inc, identified the drum as pahu ra from Australs, “probably Ra’ivavae, and the main island”. 

“There are seven islands in the group, in close proximity and four of them are high islands. Rai’vavae had a population of about 9000 in 1821; by 1834 there were only about 100 people left; the reason I say this is to make a comparison with Rarotonga, a standalone island, which had about 2000 people at contact,” Mason explained.

“My theory is Rarotongan art and craft is less ornate because the population was primarily engaged in food production. There was no neighbouring island in precontact times that Rarotongans could travel to for food resources (to free them up to make more art). These are my own thoughts.”

Mason added that Tahiti and its islands also make pahu that are tall and thin, similar to the one displayed under the Cook Islands collection.

“Our equivalent pa’u mango (upright drum with shark skin tympanum) tend to be short and squat and not as elaborately decorated. Although some patterns carved on the drums are shared with us  (especially with  Mangaia), I don’t know of anything in existence (past or present) like those drums in the pictures that can definitely be said to come from the Cook Islands,” she said.

“Only about a dozen of these Austral drums survive in museums and private collections around the world.”

Rod Dixon, author and former director of the University of the South Pacific Cook Islands campus, further explained that Sir Peter Buck/Te Rangi Hiroa in his 1944 book “Arts and Crafts of the Cook Islands” noted a certain similarity between Mangaian and Austral Islands carving “which has led in the past to European museums mistaking the elaborately carved paddles from Ra'ivavae as from Mangaia”.

“In this case it appears a pahu from the Australs has been mistaken as a pa’u from the Cooks.”

Renowned Cook Islands carver Mike Tavioni said the drum was either from Tahiti or Austral Islands “maybe Marquesas but more likely one of the other two”. Tavioni is certain it’s not from the Cook Islands. 

Meanwhile the ceremonial adze was collected between 1772 and 1775 by German naturalist and theologian Johann Reinhold Forster. It was acquired in 1831 for the Brandenburg-Prussian Kunstkammer, one of the most famous Kunstkammers (art and wonder chamber) of the early modern period.

The headgear was acquired from Austrian medical doctor and anthropologist Felix von Luschan in 1906.

Rashneel Kumar was a participant in the Visitors Programme of the Federal Republic of Germany. Kumar was one of 10 Pacific Island journalists invited to this programme to discuss the climate crisis affecting both Europe and the Pacific.