Irregularly shaped pink barkcloth from Hawaii embossed with tightly-spaced parallel lines and dotted circle and triangle shapes. Shapes were beaten into the cloth during production. Fragment of a kapa moe, or mutli-layered sleeping cover. Kapa (the Hawaiian word for tapa) is a cloth made from the inner bark of trees and is widely used in the Pacific for clothing and bedding, as well as secular, sacred, and ceremonial uses.
tapa (bark cloth)
tapa (bark cloth)
Cloth Fragment
Original To Stephen Phillips House (Salem, Mass.),
16861
Unknown
Pacific Island Group
12 x 13 1/4 (HxW) (inches)
Gift of the Stephen Phillips Memorial Charitable Trust for Historic Preservation
2006.44.3651
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