Gourd liquid, and solid, containers

Intriguing

Stopped by the Canterbury museum today and in the Māori section of the Museum there were several of these 'gourd' containers.

They looked intriguing, from a metre away behind glass I wasn't so sure what they were made of and as one of them looked mightily like a rather large pear which are notnative to New Zealand I was intrigued. So I went away to find a museum guide and shetold me that they were gourds, and told me that gourds were like pumpkins when I tried to figure out if that's what she meant by …