Basket, woman's mayaku burden basket
date: label: Accession Date
content: 20 Mar 2018
label: Collection Date
content: 30 Jun 1982
name: label: Collector
content: Ms. Emilienne Ireland
label: Donor Name
content: Ms. Emilienne Ireland
notes: label: Notes
content: Basket made from split bamboo, some dyed. Rim is round, bottom is square with interior wooden frame anchored with white, black and red cotton thread. Large woven diamond pattern with 4 cotton tassels, red and white, one at each corner. Cotton binding just below rim. Buriti strings cross across the opening.
label: Notes
content: Notes by the collector, Emilienne Ireland: All-purpose basket, carried exclusively by women and girls, for carrying loose items on top of the head, or for storing items at home. Twill-weave basket woven in three designs: (1) "top of the anaconda's head" design (walamá onéputáku), referring to Green anaconda (Eunectes murinus); (2) kulúpiyené (referring to the lozenge shape of a fish the neighboring Mehinaku people call kulupei and the Wauja call "ausityepe" (possibly Piaractus brachypomus or Metynnis argenteus), commonly called pacú in Brazilian Portuguese. This fish has high, deep, and laterally compressed body in profile, hence its association with a diamond or lozenge pattern. Note that the Wauja name for this design, which is perhaps more commonly used than any other, presumbably came from the Mehinaku tribe. According to a field label, a young Wauja man in his twenties at the time did not know what this design referred to. (3) The third design is woven as "winding river" (wénewénesúku) if you include both black and undyed strips, but if you look at the black strips alone, it appears to be "leaf-cutter ant trail" (kutákumá áhinabúla). [On. 6.30.82, Takaru, then an adolescent, said it was kulúpiyené design, which was just the name of the design, and didn't mean anything.]
label: Record Last Modified
content: 18 Oct 2019
label: Specimen Count
content: 1
place: label: Place
content: Piyulaga village, Mato Grosso, Brazil, South America
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Wauja (Waurá)
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 2074242
label: USNM Number
content: E435250-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: Basket
physicalDescription: label: Length
content: 62.25 cm
label: Width
content: 60 cm
label: Height
content: 22.75 cm