Tautain notes, the Marquesan custom points to the “hats” of Easter Island being signs of mourning and of death.
If the crowns of the statues of Easter Island are head-coverings definitely associated with the function of the images as representations of the dead, we should expect to find head-coverings or hats connected with the cult of the dead elsewhere. It is part of the general scheme of Oceanic history which I have put forward elsewhere[1] that the ghost-societies of Melanesia embody the cult of the migrants who were responsible for the stone-work of this region. We can look to these organisations for guidance concerning the beliefs of the people who introduced the art of stone-working into Oceania. If now we examine the cults of these ghost-societies we find few elements more prominent than the hats which are worn in the rites.[2] In the Sukwe of the Banks Islands these hats are so prominent that they are denoted by the same word, tamate, as the ghosts of the dead from which the societies take their name. Every society has a special object associated with it which in most cases takes the form of a hat. Moreover, the plastic representations of the human form connected with these organisations have the head covered with a hat of which characteristic examples are shown in Plate III., Fig. 1 of Vol. I. of The History of Melanesian Society.
In the Matambala societies of Florida the place of the tamate of the Banks Islands seems to have been taken by figures of the tindalo or ghosts, though we do not know that these were worn on the head. In the Dukduk, again, of New Britain, which is also a ghost society and is shown by many correspondences of belief and ritual to represent the Tamate societies of the Banks Islands, masks are worn which correspond with the tamate of the southern islands. The members of the Rukruk of northern Bougainville, a
- ↑ The History of Melanesian Society. Cambridge. 1914.
- ↑ Ibid. vol. i. p. 90. Most of these hats are conical in form, but some are more or less cylindrical.
