Melanesia
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Glasgow Museums has a collection of 1,470 objects from Melanesia in the Pacific Ocean. These date from 1870 to 2004. This collection is the largest of Glasgow Museums’ Oceania collections, containing 624 objects attributed to Papua New Guinea alone. It encompasses carved wooden, stone and bone figures and totems, furniture, weapons, domestic items and ritual apparatus. It also contains hunting and fishing equipment, body ornaments, ceremonial artwork, musical instruments, masks, armour and costume. The 19th century collections from Fiji, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia and Vanuatu offer a particularly important record of early Scottish contact with the region, and are interesting from both a historical and an anthropological perspective. The collection also holds significant recent works representing contemporary indigenous art, including the only collection of works in a UK institution by the renowned Chimbu artist Mathias Kauage OBE of Papua New Guinea. Oceania is a geographic region consisting of many different countries and surrounding islands in the Pacific Ocean. It is generally defined by its subregions of Australasia, Micronesia, Polynesia and Melanesia. Melanesia is comprised of Fiji, New Caledonia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and part of Indonesia.
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