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MATAHOATA 81 the early nineteenth century, and the show also includes tools related to the process. The people also wore a wide array of head, neck, and ear ornaments made from feathers, shell, bone, turtle shell, seeds, marine mammal teeth, and other materials. They carried woven fans and wooden staffs topped with pompoms of human hair. Pavahina, ornaments made from the white beards of old men, were the most precious of these and were attached to many different types of objects. All of these ornaments are represented in the exhibition, accompanied by drawings of people wearing them, especially those of Max Radiguet (fi g. 10), who was in the Marquesas in the 1840s as part of the military administration of the newly accessioned French territory. War is the subject of the last area of the early contact part of the exhibition, with a display of weapons including slings made from woven coconut fi ber, one of which was collected during Captain James Cook’s visit in 1774. Three massive clubs in paddle form (parahua) and ten of the well-known úu mentioned above are featured, including one of each type that belonged to Pakoko, an important early nineteenth-century warrior and chief whose story is highlighted. Though Marquesan culture had been changing and evolving from the time the ènana/ènata arrived in the islands, events were to thrust them into a period of traumatic upheaval and change. First contact with Europeans was a brief but bloody encounter with the Spaniard Alvaro de Mendaña in 1595. In less than a week, some 200 Marquesans were killed. The next meeting with outsiders was the arrival of Cook in 1774. Following this, sustained contact grew, bringing with it the introduction of new ideas, materials, and diseases that would transform their way of life while very nearly destroying them as a people over the course of the nineteenth century. FIG. 10 (above): Max Radiguet, Temoana, Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands, between 1842 and 1844. Ink, watercolor. H: 28.3 cm. Collection of the Service Historique de la Défense, Vincennes, inv. album 1, vol. 2, #20. © Service Historique de la Défense, Bibliothèque, Vincennes. FIG. 11: Canoe prow ornament, tiki vaka, àuàu, pihao. Marquesas Islands. Before 1880. Wood. H: 23 cm. Lent by Eugène PIttard in 1921 and donated by his son Jean-Jacques. Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, inv. ETHOC 008937. © MEG. Photo: J. Watts.


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