Three objects do more work than a paragraph.
Thul is the bridal basket — finely woven, carried from a woman’s family home to her husband’s on the day of the marriage. It held clothes and small belongings and the idea that a weaving could be trusted with the most important things a person owned.
Tuiûm is the water carrier — a single length of large-diameter bamboo, internodes knocked through, stoppered at one end, filled from the spring and walked home. A household’s daily water moved through it before pipes existed and the object is still lighter than the plastic that replaced it.
Tingtang and tumphit are the instruments — the single-string drone and the multi-pipe flute, one built from a bamboo tube and a coaxed piece of the same skin, the other from a set of carefully-lengthed culms. The acoustic research the studio is doing now starts here, with the instruments that already knew what mautak sounded like.
None of these was a specialist object. Each was made by the person who needed it, from the material that was in front of them.