A Dyak Carrying Basket
The Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution holds a large ethnographic collection from Maritime Southeast Asia. This Dyak basket was collected not long before 1906 by W. L. Abbott on the Landak River (a tributary of the Kapuas River) in present-day South Kalimantan, Indonesia on the island of Borneo. It is catalog number E244256.
Note the wood panel rim and the basketry-woven body. Abbott claimed that women produce the basketry sections with men doing the final woodwork.
A huge number of associated Dyak baskets collected by Abbott were exhibited by the Smithsonian at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco, California in 1915, but this example appears to have been left behind (based on the published checklist for the exhibition published in The Exhibits of the Smithsonian Institution at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, California, 1915 (San Francisco, CA: Smithsonian Institution, 1915). (See page 95. This volume is available in the Internet Archive here.) The curator-author of the Panama-Pacific catalogue wrote of the exhibition’s “Arts of the Dyaks of Borneo” installation:
The basketry of the Dyaks is unrivalled for strength, fineness, variety and skill in construction. Rattan and bamboo, tough and resistant, are materials capable of being readily and evenly divided and splints of any length can be easily made. Many of the specimens combine joinery work with basket weaving and the knots, loops, windings, and other fastening off show marvelous ingenuity. (Smithsonian 1915, 93).
This description (my guess is that Otis T. Mason is its author) certainly is illustrated by the basket pictured here.
For earlier posts in this series on Asian packbaskets at the Smithsonian, see here (Japan) and here (Philippines).
Shreds and Patches 