Chest Item Number: 1952.15 from the MAA: University of Cambridge
A large carved and painted wooden chest with an undecorated lid.; Goodtwo iron nails in the inside of the lid sides, and a ?copper alloy staple in inside the llid base which holds a paper label and may have been added by the collector.
Bill Holm notes in The Box of Daylight (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1983) page 71, that the Bella Bellas, or Nuxalk, were responsible for making many boxes and chests which were eventually collected from all over the coast. The style of painting and carving with thin black formlines, and an emphasis on red secondary painting gives the design a lightness which is consistent with a tentative provenance of manufacture of Bella Bella or Nuxalk (G.Crowther). The original European tribal names and, where possible, current tribal names have both been given in separate GLT fields.; It is noted on a tag belonging to the box that it was used as a chief' s throne . Holm also notes in The Box of Daylight (University of Washington Press: Seattle, 1983) page 70, that the chests were used for storing chiefly regalia, and at a chief' s death became containers for his remains. It was from such a box that the mythic Raven stole the sun and brought light to the world. The design on the box was produced in the highly abstract distributive style, whereby the identity of the creature was deliberately ambiguous. The ambiguity surrounding the identity of the creature would have enabled an owner to assert an identity appropriate to their own assemblage of crests, and therefore explains the ability for such decorated items to be traded without loss of crest items (G.Crowther). This box was identified as Tsimshian by B. McLennan and K. Duffeck in The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations UBC Press, 2000: 216-7. McLennan came to the Museum in 1992 to photograph (with infrared film) NWC objects with painted designs as part of his extensive Image Recovery Project for the book. (A. Herle 2001)
Exhibited: Old anthropological displays at CUMAA, case 21, dismantled 1986.
On display in new anthropological gallery in CUMAA, wall case, object 19, 1990 -.