Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/404

 370 Some Ethnological Suggestions

Solomon Islands. In this group (though not exclusively, as the fashion is followed elsewhere, e.g. in Samoa) it is locally a common practice to bleach the hair by using lime, with the result that the normally dark hair acquires a light-brown, reddish or yellowish colour. In the northern islands of the group the hair is sometimes coated with red ochreous earth. Throughout the group much attention is given to hair-dressing, which forms an important occupation of daily life. Most of the carved wooden human figures from the Solomon Islands, to which I have referred, have the hair indicated of a light colour, sometimes by leaving the light wood unstained, sometimes by colouring the top of the head red. In the more realistic examples the hair is represented by a number of minute vegetable burrs, crowded closely together over the Jiead, so as to give the desired effect of a rough surface, and stained a red colour. In others, again, a light brown or yellowish tow is used.

My suggestion, then, is that the cylindrical accessories which were placed upon the heads of the Rapanui statues were intended to represent the hair mass, that the natives specially selected a rough, vesicular tufaceous rock as material, in order to give the effect of hair which was not straight or but slightly waving, like the hair of Polynesians, but rather curly or frizzly, like the prevailing Melanesian hair-type. Further, that a red tufa was selected in order to conform with the practice, common enough in Melanesia, of bleaching the hair to a reddish colour with hme, or of coating it with red ochre. It still remains to account for the cylindrical shape given to these tufaceous masses. Why, if they represent hair, were they not hemispherical like the hair mass as usually represented in the wooden carvings, as is seen, for instance, in the Solomon Island figures 1 This shape was, I think, mainly imposed by necessity. The red tufa " crowns " were made on one spot in the island, and had to be transported often many miles to the places where were erected the statues which they