PBA Galleries

Small cardboard box with shell fragments discovered by well known collector Leo Fortess. Includes identification remarks on lid in Mr. Fortess’s hand, which reads: “Various worked shell & ornament blanks collected from Browne-Fortess Living Cave shelter lava tube at Paniau, Puako, South Kohala Hawaii, 1969”. * Small cardboard box contains adze fragments and tools also discovered by Mr. Fortess with note in Mr. Fortess’s hand, which reads: “Basalt adze fragments & flake knives & drills”.

Ex Leo Fortess collection: Leo Fortess, known for his prolific collection of Pacific artifacts, arrived in Hawaii in 1941 on the 76-foot schooner Chance, which he and his wife, Lillian, and two other couples with little previous sailing experience piloted from New York to Hawaii via the Panama Canal. Fortess began collecting Polynesian artifacts as the Chance passed through the Marquesas Islands and Tahiti in 1940 through 1941, an interest that he maintained the rest of his life. Fortess served as one of the few non-academic presidents of the Anthropological Society of Hawaii and was a life member of the Bishop Museum and Honolulu Academy of the Arts. The "self-taught" Fortess proposed the use of the then-new carbon-14 dating technology to Dr. Kenneth Emory of the Bishop Museum. Emory and Fortess submitted materials from the Kuliouou cave shelter for the first carbon-14 date in the Pacific.