Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/394

 360 So??ie Ethnological Suggestions

suggested by the retrocession of the cartilaginous extremity of the nose, due to shrinkage of the tissues either post mortem or as a result of hunger-emaciation. If this be so, this feature would be pathological rather than normal and to be accounted for on other than ethnological lines. These emaciated figures call to mind certain rude carvings in wood or pumice-stone from the Chatham Islands, in which the ribs and backbone are very strongly indicated.^ The same peculiarity appears in some of the tree carvings in the same islands, representing skeleton-like figures cut in the bark of the kopi or karaka tree, as described by Dr. A. Denby,^ who supports the theory of an early Mela- nesian occupation of the Chatham Islands.

The prominent brow-ridges seem to suggest a Melanesian or a Papuan type, while the elongated ear-lobes are decidedly Melanesian, the practice of distending the lobes with large disks or rings being, in the Pacific, specially associated with the Melanesian area and but rarely seen in Polynesia. In the Marquisas group, it is true, this practice obtains as a prominent feature, but here too it is linked with other unmistakably Melanesian culture-elements. In the pic- ture of a typical Easter Islander published in De Reis van Mr. Jacob Roggeveen (Mulert edition, 191 1), the man appears wearing a " goatee " beard without other facial hair, and it is possible that a native fashion may be indicated in the beards of the wooden figures. But the beard in this photograph is far less crisply defined than are the " imperials " of the carvings, and it may be that this feature may have been suggested by some of the early European voyagers, who were looked upon as gods and may have been perpetuated as such in sculpture. That por- traiture was to some extent practised in connection with these wooden figures is borne out by a small example

^Cf. Partington's Album of the Facijic, iii. pi. 223, fig. I. Also a specimen in the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford.

^T.N.Z. Inst. 1901. xxxiv. p. 130, and pi. v.

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