The Art of Contextualising Maritime Archaeological Collections: using 17th and 18th century paintings to inform Dutch East India Company (VOC) Clothing Accessories

Author/s Dana Abbott

Year of publication 2025

Report Number: 354

This report is a cross-institutional collections-based research project comparing an archaeological assemblage of buckle accessories from the Western Australian Museum (WAM) with broadly contemporaneous Dutch paintings from the Rijksmuseum’s digital collections. The study employs an interdisciplinary and multi-modal approach to historically and socially contextualising the assemblage using a combination of material, documentary and visual sources, and is informed theoretically and methodologically by dress studies literature. The results of the comparative analysis demonstrate the productivity and value of using multiple sources to inform archaeological materials, particularly historical paintings, which provide crucial contextual information absent in fragmentary archaeological records. This study integrates archaeological and art historical findings, augmented by historical research, to provide an interpretation of the archaeological assemblage. In doing so, this project demonstrates how discrete collections can be connected to each other in novel ways to generate new knowledge of existing materials, which may be used to guide future research projects and reshape WAM’s VOC exhibitions for future audiences.

This publication is a revised version of a dissertation submitted in 2024 in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of Western Australia, published by the WA Museum as part of the Department of Maritime Heritage Reports series.