This is a traditional Nias Ceremonial Shield. It is made of wood, at about 1.5 meters high by 50 centimeters wide.
From the photographer (Lemi4): This ceremonial shield has been hanging in my uncle's house in Pengadegan, Jakarta since before I was born. At New Year's Eve 2001 I happened to bring a digital camera while my extended family was there to have our yearly New Year's Eve family gathering. Some time after taking the picture there, I edited this picture using a Windows port of the GIMP to place the shield on a somewhat-pseudo-simulated-red-velvet background, primarily to place it on the Nias Wikipedia article, which I created some time within the few days after the Boxing Day Tsunami.
At the time I licensed it under cc-by-sa-2.0. Today I've decided to dual-license this image with the GFDL so as it can (presumably?) be more compatible with Wikipedia.
This licensing tag was added to this file as part of the GFDL licensing update.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/CC BY-SA 3.0Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0truetrue