The identification of plants used to make tapa artefacts: development of a reference DNA database and trial of non-destructive DNA extraction methods.

Tapa (barkcloth) is a non-woven textile made from the inner bark of some plant species. Tapa manufacture was once widespread throughout the Pacific and tapa from the eighteenth and nineteenth century form part of Pacific collections in many museums. Here we examined the feasibility of DNA identification of the plants used to make tapa artefacts by developing and testing a DNA reference database of chloroplast L intron P6 loop sequences from many of the plant species used to make tapa, as well as other New Zealand textile plants.