April 16, 2017 |
Revised at January 12, 2018
Image credit: Macadamer
https://www.flickr.com/photos/macadamer/31807039230/in/dateposted-public/
Austronesian Tapa Cloth
The main difference of Homo sapiens from other animals is the lack of dense hairs on their skin. So they are also called by another name, “the naked ape”. Then how can they resist the extreme weather? In order to have something with which to cover their naked bodies, they took the skins of other animals in the ancient times, and in modern time, cotton cloth is widely used. But before cotton was found, what did our ancestors use to serve this purpose? Tapa cloth is one of the answers. Compared to cotton, tapa doesn’t require weaving, so it is a material much easier and requiring less technique for making cloth.
Tapa is the bark stripped mainly from Paper Mulberry (Broussonetia papyrifera). Then through a complicated and time-consuming process, the bark was put in water to soften and then beaten, until only sheets of fibres remain, then the fibre sheets are placed together and glued together layer by layer to make tapa cloth. The tool used for this process is the Tapa Beater which consist of wood and stone. But only the stone tapa beater have survived up to now and have been discovered by the archaeologists. The earliest stone tapa beater was found in Eastern Asia and dated from as long as 6,600 years ago. Comparing to the fact that cotton was grown and used by Chinese at around 2,200 years ago, we can ascertain tapa cloth have had been used for a long period of time before cotton was used. History shows that the ancient people were using tapa cloth for no less than 5000 years already.
According to geological study, the last Ice Age ended 11,400 years ago. After that time, Formosa (now Taiwan) Island was separated from the Asia Continent. The Austronesian people then divided into two groups, one in Formosa and the other one in Yangtze River Basin. Both groups had the tapa cloth culture. So inferring from the above, the history of the tapa cloth usage of the Austronesian people might be even earlier than 11,400 years ago.
Areas around the world where the tapa cloth are used contemporarily include most of the Pacific Islands, Yunnan, Hainan, Vietnam, and Uganda. Austronesian people such as Fijian, Hawaiian, Samoan and Tongan even have the advanced techniques for making tapa cloth up to today. Tapa cloth have become a beautifully striking part of Austronesian culture, Fiji Airways even use tapa designs on their planes, both the interior and the exterior.
The main source of tapa cloth, the Paper Mulberry tree, have a natural distribution in South and East Asia, from Assam in the West and up to Taiwan in the East. Further eastward, the other Pacific Islands also grow paper mulberry trees, but these trees were introduced into these regions when the people migrated. These journeys took place over long-distances over the seas by boats or rafts.
Paper mulberry is a dioecious plant, this means that the male and female flowers are on different plants. In the Pacific Islands, most paper mulberry trees are single sexed, and grown on separate islands. This tree is multiplied only through cutting or layering, not through pollination. So the DNA of these trees have been kept unchanged for a long-time, maybe thousands of years.
According to a recent paper “A holistic picture of Austronesian migrations revealed by phylogeography of the Pacific paper mulberry” , it was discovered that the DNA of Paper Mulberry trees in Taiwan and Pacific Islands are identical. So the theory of “Out of Taiwan”, that the ancestors of the Austronesians come from Taiwan, has an even stronger support. When the ancestors of the Austronesian people left Formosa and headed toward the Pacific Islands 7000 years ago, the saplings of Paper Mulberry Tree were probably one of the indispensable items in the goods they brought. Since they had the tree, they had the source of their cloth.
The legendary history of Hawaii and Maori mentioned that when their ancestors arrived the new locations with their canoes, they had brought some useful plants with them. Those plants were called “Canoe Plants”. The paper mulberry tree is on the list already. Obviously this tree was introduced by man no less than one thousand years ago, and proliferous growing over the Pacific Islands, and contributing the colourful tapa cloth culture of all the Austronesian people.
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