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Rectangular shaped tapa fragment, painted black and embossed with diamond shapes. Some of the white ground is visible through the watermarked diamonds and there appear to be thick stripes of black at 3" intervals. This fragment was cut from a larger sample. Possibly from Hawaii. 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)
Original To Stephen Phillips House (Salem, Mass.),
Unknown
Pacific Island Group
7 1/4 x 14 3/4 (HxW) (inches)
Gift of the Stephen Phillips Memorial Charitable Trust for Historic Preservation
2006.44.3670
full digital copy available on Google Play: https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=IKgxAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&output=reader&authuser=0&hl=en
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