Made of birch bark discs, flattened root, black thread, sweetgrass and porcupine quills, natural and dyed green, magenta, purple, yellow, and reddish-orange. Aniline dyes were used to colour the porcupine quills.

Four birch bark discs decorated with quillwork compose the centre of the mat, which is framed by bunches of coiled sweetgrass wrapped with black thread. Three sections of this wrapped sweetgrass are separated by two sections of flattened root and bent into a zig zag pattern.

Floral and berry motifs.

British Museum accession record. Father Edward Purbrick acquired this item, along with other similarly-quilled birch bark pieces, while on a tour of inspection of Canadian Jesuit missions in the Central and Eastern Great Lakes region.

Collected by Father Edward Purbrick in 1879 and subsequently donated to the Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school in Lancashire. The Stonyhurst Collection was purchased by the British Museum in 2003.

A description of Father Edward Purbrick's collection and a discussion on the decorative styles of many of the birch bark items is found in Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), 182-3.

Unknown Anishinaabeg artist, mat. Currently in the British Museum, Am2003,19.55. Item photographed and described as part of a GRASAC research trip December 2007; GRASAC item id 26319.

This record was created as part of a Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) research trip to the Pitt Rivers Museum and British Museum, December 8-22 2007, funded by a grant from the International Opportunities fund of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Researchers present: Heidi Bohaker (HB), John Borrows (JB), Lindsay Borrows (LB), Darlene Johnston (DJ), Jonathan King (JK), Stacey Loyer (SL), Janis Monture (JM), Bruce Morito (BM), Ruth Phillips (RP), Cory Willmott (CW).