Necklace

A rare woman's necklace from the Dogon village of Koundou, known as arandugo, with glass beads and bronze pendants cast using the lost wax method, has come to the National Museum in Szczecin thanks to the cooperation with the Students' Ethnographic Expedition 'Africa 76-77' organised by the Department of Ethnography of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. The whole undertaking was supervised by ethnographer Jacek Łapott from the National Museum in Szczecin. The means of transport of the expedition was a STAR 266A truck. It travelled over 13 000 km through five African countries such as Algeria, Niger, Mali, Nigeria and Cameroon. The expedition aimed primarily to collect materials for the master's theses written by the students as the organisers of the expedition. Ethnological research was conducted among the Dogon inhabiting the Bandiagara Escarpment in the Republic of Mali, the Kirdi ethnic group from the region of the Andamawa massif in Northern Cameroon, and near the town of Victoria (Southern Cameroon), namely, an area of the itinerary of a Polish traveller, Stefan Szolc-Rogoziński. Apart from research focused on the issues of material culture - construction, pottery and smithery, at the same time, a collection of ethnographic artefacts was gathered. Altogether about 1300 exhibits were collected and handed over to Polish museums. Most of the collection acquired by the expedition is in the National Museum in Szczecin, then in the District Museum in Kalisz, while some objects were also donated to the Poznań Musical Instrument Museum.

Katarzyna Findlik-Gawron