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DECORATIVE ART 273 



of Ling Roth's book [7] as tatu designs are in our 

 opinion very probably not tatu designs. They were 

 collected by Dr. Wienecke in Dutch Borneo, and appear 

 to be nothing but drawings by a native artist of such 

 objects in daily use as hats, seat-mats, baby-slings, and 

 so on. We communicated with Dr. J. D. E. Schmeltz of 

 the Leyden Museum, where these "tatu" marks are 

 deposited, and learnt from him that they are indeed actual 

 drawings on paper; there are ninety-two of them, apparently 

 all are different isolated designs, and they are evidently 

 the work of one artist.^ There is not a tribe in Borneo 

 which can show such a variety of tatu design, and indeed 

 we doubt if ninety-two distinct isolated tatu designs could 

 be found throughout all the length and breadth of the 

 island. Moreover, as can be seen by reference to the cited 

 work, the designs are of a most complicated nature, not 

 figures with the outlines merely filled in, as in all tatu 

 designs known to us, but with the details drawn in fine 

 lines and cross-hatching, which in tatu would be utterly 

 lost unless executed on a very large scale. 



V. Sea Dayak Tatu, 



The Sea Dayaks at the present day are, as far as the 

 men are concerned, the most extensively tatued tribe in 

 Borneo, with the exception of the Bakatans, Ukits, 

 Kahayans, and Biajau ; nevertheless, from a long-continued 

 and close study of their tatu, we are forced to the conclusion 

 that the practice and the designs have been entirely borrowed 

 from other tribes, but chiefly from the Kayans. For some 

 time we believed that there were two characteristically 

 Sea Dayak designs, namely, that which is tatued on the 

 throat (Figs. 75 and jG) and that on the wrist (PL 143, 

 Fig. 7), but when later we studied Bakatan tatu we met 

 with the former in the gerowit pattern on the throat of 

 men, and the latter in the lukut design on the wrist of the 

 women. A Sea Dayak youth will simply plaster himself, 

 so to speak, with numerous isolated designs ; we have 

 counted as many as five of the asu design on one thigh 



^ Dr. Schmeltz has kindly furnished us with an advance sheet of his forth- 

 coming catalogue of the Borneo collection in the Leyden Museum ; he 

 catalogues these drawings as tatu marks, but in a footnote records our opinion 

 of them made by letter. Dr. Nieuwenhuis apparently adheres to the belief 

 that they really are tatu marks. 



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