ADDITIONS AND ORNAMENT. I29 
h,j, k,l; V, 2. It will at once be manifest that all of this ornament is 
at base a skeuomorph of plaited material or basketry of various narrow 
or broad elements. In the clubs of this collection the only material 
which is found in employment to cover any considerable spaces is 
sennit, and this is not applied in basketry, but always in coil; the only 
exception is the pandanus club in Kramer (338) which exhibits a bas- 
ketry of some material applied upon the greater extent of the shaft. 
Yet basketry application upon clubs, in fact upon all sorts of weapons, 
even upon arrows, is distinctive of the Buka culture in the Solomon 
Islands, a very suggestive circumstance. 
In studying the units of decoration we shall begin with the most 
common forms and the most common combinations of those forms, and 
we are at once struck by the preponderance of the rectilinear. The 
references by number in the following discussion are to figures which 
appear seriatim in Plates IX to XVII at the end of this volume. 
The principle of the ornamentation of these weapons rests upon the 
skeuomorph, pictures of lashings of sennit and of plaitings of basketry. 
The biomorph is almost wholly absent. The spiral vine on the Fijian 
billet 3147 a, figure 58, may be taken as in part a phyllomorph; the leaf 
has scarcely undergone so much as a conventionalization, except that 
we recognize that principle as beginning in figure 132, where we find 
an unbotanical added ornament, and in figure 133, where a decorative 
margin has been supplied; the vine itself falls properly into the class 
of phyllomorphs, for while it retains its natural twining about the 
trunk, it is portrayed by the zigzag sennit-derivative. We recognize 
no biomorphs; the nearest approach thereto is the octopus design in 
figures 91 to 95, and at the most these figures are but highly conven- 
tional forms. 
We shall consider in the first place those elements of design which 
are at the beginning rectilinear and which in the main diverge very 
little from the straight line. 
Spatially the most considerable of the rectilinear units is the banded 
zigzag. I incline to establish as the primitive expression the zigzag 
with limiting bands on each edge. It is clearly a pictorial represen- 
tation of the ever-present sennit of coir. As with any cord, length 
indefinite and width effectively negligible, its first macroscopic impres- 
sion is that of parallel lines; thus we obtain the parallel bands in this 
element. In early decoration arising in other culture areas, a twine 
is represented by parallel lines with curved or even rectilinear diagonal 
lines across the length. But in Nuclear Polynesia no twine is found. 
In the universal sennit cordage of that culture the eye picks out diag- 
onal lines in one direction and equally diagonal lines in the other, yet 
not quite equally in the visual sense, for on either face of a three-part 
sennit one part is prominent as a zigzag, while the other parts are 
somewhat hidden by the leading cord, as may readily appear to any 
