Kiribati armour is the only fully articulated body armour Oceania produced, and almost all of it is coconut. A mid-19th-century suit runs 203 × 68 × 35 cm and swallows more than 400 metres of plaited sennit — roughly eight hundred coconuts of husk fibre — bound with human hair, palm leaf, ray skin and shark teeth.

The system takes its structure from that material list rather than from any ornament. Aged oiled coir is the ground, fresh sennit is the primary, and tooth-ivory appears only as an edge — never a field. Type is Victorian museum label, because that is the honest register: Gilbertese has been written in Latin letters only since the 1860s mission presses.