Hair: untold stories

Hair: untold stories

by | Museums & Exhibitions

the many meanings of hair

Hair: untold stories

Hair has been our most personal, natural form of adornment for millennia. We either hide it or show it, and it is so personal that it is regarded as an extension of the person itself. But hair is much more than that. The excellent exhibition Hair: untold stories in the Horniman Museum and Gardens is entirely devoted to the many meanings of hair.

Hair explores our relationship to human hair by looking at it from various perspectives. Researchers, artists, film makers, hair dressers, poets and photographers all weigh in to paint a vivid and sometimes unexpected picture of this material. The exhibition starts out with a section on hair as material: maybe not the first use to come to mind, but to me a refreshing way of looking at hair as something other than a part of our body or our appearance. Hair is a marvelous fibre: lightweight yet incredibly strong, flexible and absorbing. Hair was used to attach shark’s teeth to palm rib swords on the Kiribati islands in Oceania, but of course also in products related to hairstyling like wigs and fillers.

A large map illustrating the hair trade is very illuminating. I was aware that in many cultures, hair is shaven off for religious reasons, but never thought much about what that hair was used for: apparently, there is a thriving market for it, and not all of it goes to wig making. ‘Waste’ hair, collected when brushing, is sorted and sold as well. I learned that many early Afro wigs were made of yak hair coming from Central Asia and China, that nowadays synthetic wigs can also be made of fibres derived from banana skins, and much more.

What looks like a hair shop, is an art installation by Korantema Anyimadu, exploring the experiences of black and non-binary people with hair in the UK. Listening to their favourite songs, reading memories and looking around in the hair shop I learned a great deal about memories associated with the smell, feel, timing and handling of hair and the challenges of feeling ‘at home’ in a country where your basic hair care cannot be achieved so easily.

Exhibition Hair

Hair combs: more than tools

Installation by Korantema Anyimadu

Swedish jewellery made of hair

The section on Entanglements presents and discusses the balance between the personal aspects of hair and the social norms expected of the wearer: the eternal balance between individuality and the common. Bridal hair is associated with fertility and beauty, Victorian women were expected to wear their hair up when married, and keeping the first hairlocks of a child as memento is a worldwide phenomenon. Hair and death are shown in European mourning jewellery created with hair of the passed persons, and a topic I could personally relate to is how to deal with the loss of hair due to illness or chemotherapy.

A series of combs ends the exhibition: these are not just presented as hair maintenance tools, but as meaningful, powerful objects that can convey many messages. I really enjoyed this exhibition, as it managed to address many unexpected angles on hair in a comprehensible, enjoyable and thought provoking way.

Accompanying the main exhibition are several smaller photographic exhibitions: Cult Hair (on the lower gallery) and Intimate Archives (on the gallery above the World Gallery). The latter combines hair care rituals with spells and traditions, showing how acts of social care connect scattered and displaced people. A powerful expression of the meaning of body aesthetic, both as performative act and as carrier of identity!

Hair: untold stories in Horniman Museum and Gardens: find out more on the museum website

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.

Beautiful Bodies

Beautiful Bodies

by | Reviews

gender and corporeal aesthetic in the past

Beautiful Bodies

Body aesthetic is increasingly understood as much more than just ornamentation. How we treat our bodies, dress our hair, inscribe our skin, apply make-up and fragrance as well as how we clothe and adorn ourselves is highly informative about how we see ourselves and how we would like others to see us. But how to approach this sense of self for past societies? Beautiful Bodies explores how archaeological studies may shed light on both beauty and gender, two highly discussed topics.

Beautiful Bodies is a series of articles resulting from a conference session on the same topic. As such, this is an academic read, that will bring you up to speed with current theory and thought about the relation of gender and body aesthetic, explored through archaeological material. Archaeology uses things and how they were found to attempt to explore the past, and this is also very applicable to grasping past notions of concepts like beauty and gender. Because, as the editor Uros Matic explains in the introduction, ‘beauty’ is achieved by doing something: putting your hair up in a certain way, applying make-up, wearing a certain outfit. For doing, you will need materials and tools, and those are what archaeologists ultimately find. The introductory chapter, like the last chapter, serves to provide context for the case studies in this book, and as such covers a few basics. It goes over how the social construct of ‘beauty’ is inevitably indicative of a class society, how it may be achieved in gendered spaces or through gendered acts, and how it can lead to racism and excluding: whoever does not conform to socially accepted beauty standards is often an outsider, and that sadly still holds true today.

The nine chapters that follow are in chronological order, starting out with an examination of aesthetic leadership by Queen Puabi in ancient Mesopotamia. Its author Helga Vogel considers not only the materials and colours of her jewellery and dress, but also their weight, as presented by Kim Benzel in her PhD-thesis. That weight (imagine up to 4 kg of jewellery) might have had ‘a significant impact on the physical embodiment of queenhood and her self-perception of being queen’. (p. 38) There is much to ponder about Puabi’s physical appearance and the significance attributed to her dress and adornment, which reminded me of the essay by Josephine Verduci in the Routledge Handbook of the Senses of the Ancient Near East: she points out how ‘multiple modes of experience can be working in unison’ (p. 137), and I imagine the sensory overload of Queen Puabi’s presence to do just that.

Pharaonic Egypt is presented in two chapters. Uros Matic considers how grooming activities for men were carried out in public places, for all to see, while women seem to have preferred their body-care to be carried out in private. While that points to a gender system behind beauty treatments (p. 62) and the use of gendered spaces, it got me thinking about what else this gender-defined time was used for: grooming, obviously, but how did that activity set the scene for others? What did women talk about in private, what was the point of men grooming in public? Could a point be made that female grooming acts might not just be beautification, but constituted a transformation, a rite de passage of sorts in themselves? His observation that Egyptology tends to create an image of ancient Egypt, populated by beautiful people (p. 58) is particularly noteworthy, as this adds another layer to our view of gender and beauty in the past: our own filters. The next chapter by Kira Zumkley focuses on a mystery grooming tool found in burials of both men and women, in elaborate and simpler contexts. She proposes this to be a tool for wig maintenance, and that is fascinating to me in relation to recent research on hair in ancient Egypt: excavations in Amarna have revealed the dressing of the hair of the dead by means of extensions and with head cones. Could bringing such a tool along with you have a particular agency in the context of an afterlife?

Hairstyles also are discussed in the chapter on the Aegean, where Filip Frankovic demonstrates that during the Bronze Age, social affiliation was based on age, before it shifted to gender: changes in hairstyle reveal a changing self-perception. Another layer of identification is explored for ancient Athens by Isabelle Algrain, which I found to be intriguing. Besides heteronormativity, she argues, politonormativity was a determining factor: status associated with male or female values mattered first and foremost in the context of citizenship (p. 173). Here, society defines who we are, before gender does.

Wanting to belong to a different social group is reflected in the use of mirrors, found in burials in the Roman province of Moesia Superior. Vladimir Mihajlovic argues that mirrors have been found with both male and female individuals, who were not necessarily Roman citizens. In self-fashioning themselves as such though, they attempted to perform their desired status into being: an ancient equivalent of ‘fake it ‘till you make it’. Exactly the opposite seems to have been the case in Viking-age Scandinavia. Bo Jensen makes the interesting point that ‘beauty’ was not something to achieve or generate: beauty was something everyone apparently possessed as long as there were no flaws, such as scars or marks. The last chapter deals with beauty ideals in Qajar Iran, where Maryam Dezkhamkooy takes us through the varying beauty ideals from genderless beauty to notably gender-differentiated preferences: an enriching read.

Beautiful Bodies is an exploration in both objects and ideas in the context of past gender norms. Not all chapters include all elements, but this entire book provides plenty of food for thought on how we might approach the past by carefully going over some of the most personal objects that have survived: those with which we create who we are and that in turn shape our world. It will get you thinking about how fashioning the self is related to the gendered structures of any given society, sometimes even shaping those, to manifesting our wishes and aspirations, and even to creating a particular afterlife – definitely a recommended read!

Beautiful Bodies. Gender and Corporeal Aesthetics in the Past. by Uros Matic (ed). Oxbow Books, 2022

305 pages, with B/W illustrations, in English. Available with the publisher and online.

The book was received as review copy by the publisher.

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.

Le Khôl

Le Khôl

by | Reviews

Kohl containers in france

Le Khôl

Another lovely book on kohl containers! The Musée International de la Perfumerie in Grasse, in southern France, hosts an exhibition on kohl containers in the winter of 2021-2022: Le Khôl. Le secret d’un regard envoûtant venu d’Orient. The exhibition is accompanied by a concise publication in magazine format, in which various authors provide background information on this elaborate private collection.

The museum was donated a private collection of 268 kohl containers, collected over four decades by Mme. Leblanc in various parts of the world. She describes in the chapter on the history of her collection how she first became enamored with kohl containers in 1967, whilst living in Africa, and how after those first pieces her collection expanded gradually until it encompassed hundreds of pieces from several continents.

A chapter on the history of kohl containers by the head of the department North Africa-Middle East of the Quai Branly-Musée Jacques Chirac, Hana Chidiac, explores how eye make-up was used from Antiquity through the Middle Ages into our own timeframe, as well as how the meaning of kohl was perceived throughout time. Hélène Kessous, anthropologist specialized in India, contributed a chapter on the uses of kohl in India, including the differences between kohl, surma and kajal as well as their respective containers. I enjoyed that this chapter also included a recipe for kajal, as well as short discussions on the magical aspects of kohl and its presence in movies.

The second part of the book is a catalogue of kohl containers from various parts of the world, which I enjoyed reading in tandem with Paint It, Black, the existing and elaborate publication on kohl containers. Le Khôl complements Paint It, Black geographically with kohl containers from further afield such as China, Central and Southwest Asia, adding to your overview of these wonderful items.

Throughout the book, the kohl containers are shown in large, full colour photographs, which make this book a publication you’ll enjoy browsing through. Not all containers in the collection have been included: a selection has been presented, but the pieces shown are varied both geographically and in their shapes and materials, so there is plenty to see and enjoy. The terminology is sometimes a bit Orientalist, using words like secrets, beguiling, seductive, and mysterious – the book does not need these, as the individual chapters and catalogue are interesting enough by themselves.  Le Khôl is a short, sweet presentation of a private collection of kohl containers in a luxurious magazine format, that you will want to add to your bookshelf!

Le Khôl. Le secret d’un regard envoûtant venu d’Orient, by Ludmilla Renardet & Julie Gérard (eds), Editions Faton, 2021

63 pp, full-colour, in French. Available with the publisher, the Musée International de la Parfumerie and online.

The book was purchased through the Institut du Monde Arabe.

Browse other books on personal adornment here!

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.

Gold of the Great Steppe

Gold of the Great Steppe

by | Ancient jewellery, Reviews

The Saka Scythians in Kazakhstan

Gold of the Great Steppe

A glimpse into the world of the Saka Scythians through the results of very recent excavations is the topic of the exhibition Gold of the Great Steppe in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The accompanying publication shows the splendor of Scythian gold ornaments in great detail, combined with the challenges and possibilities of ongoing archaeological research in East Kazakhstan.

Scythian gold is world-famous: several previous exhibitions have had visitors marvel at the craft and skill of Scythian artists. This particular exhibition and publication zoom in on the Saka, one of the peoples that we know under the umbrella name of ‘Scythians’, in eastern Kazakhstan. What is remarkable about the publication is that it has been compiled while research is ongoing: some of the finds presented have been excavated as recently as 2020. The archaeological context is presented alongside the gold from which the book gets its title. Gold of the Great Steppe is not just a catchy title to draw your attention: this book is literally crammed with images of stunning gold pieces, many of which are published for the first time here. Earrings, necklaces, headdresses, horse equipment, dress ornaments, weaponry…all executed with the flowing lines, crisp granulation and masterful decoration that the Saka are famous for. But what makes this book stand out, is the presentation within the archaeological context in which they have been retrieved – it’s like following the archaeologists closely, seeing what they are seeing.

That view starts with the large burial mounds, or kurgans, that dot the steppe landscape. As in many civilizations, where people bury their dead is both highly significant as well as a territorial marker that announces the ties of a particular people to their land. After the introductory chapter on the project itself, the second chapter of the book starts out with a brief presentation of Saka culture in the Altai Mountain range (the Kazakh part of the Altai), in which a brief history is outlined along with written sources and the part archaeological research plays in reconstructing this history. On a side note, the written sources, such as Herodotus and Achaemenid texts, are presented and throughout the book cited without discussion of their cultural bias. The presentation of petroglyphs on the other hand is absolutely enriching for our understanding of the visual language of the Saka, as several of the forms in rock art return in the gold ornaments found in the kurgans. I also enjoyed that a few settlements are included, too: much of our knowledge about the Saka stems from their funerary monuments, and so learning more about their settlements further widens our view, however brief these paragraphs are. The chapter then continues with an in-depth discussion of these funerary monuments. Individual kurgans and the finds encountered are presented, along with excavation photographs, drawings and schematics. The gold artefacts shown in this chapter are not only stunning to behold, but gain in meaning because their context is given as well. At the end of the chapter, a culture emerges that combines mythologies and world views from across the continent, attached great value to horses and combined these two values in a strong visual expression.

The next chapter zooms in on a large kurgan and its contents: kurgan 4 in Eleke Sazy. Meticulous research of this burial leads to the assumption that it might be here that the early Saka culture reached its formative stage, forming the starting point for further developments of Saka culture. Due to the careful and methodical excavation, a reconstruction has been made of its occupant: a young archer, dressed in clothing embellished with gold and wearing several pieces of gold weaponry. Here again, the photography and detailed description of the finds provide the reader with a unique viewpoint, looking over the shoulder of Kazakh archaeologists as they work.

The second half of the book zooms out, from the individual finds and their historic context, to thematic subjects: funerary customs, horse-human relations and gold working. The chapter on funerary customs is absolutely fascinating from both an archaeological and ethnographic perspective. Although I personally feel that drawing a direct parallel between living cultures and archaeological finds that are substantially older is hazardous (and as if reading my mind, the author of this chapter starts out by addressing that exact point!), I have learned a great deal about traditional funerary customs, that do provide food for thought on how we might understand the physical remnants encountered in archaeological research. The chapter on horse-human relations examines how horses were buried in the kurgans: not only where and with what equipment, but also which type of horse. Horses, like humans, have been buried with elaborate trappings and with great care. Interestingly, their ears in some cases have been clipped to mimick the undulating forms of mythological animals in Scythian gold ornaments – another benefit of the excellent conservation circumstances of the Kazakh steppe is that organic material is well preserved. How the gold ornaments, that inspired this exhibition, were made, is the central theme of the last chapter. Here, we see traditional methods of observation combined with chemical analyses, identifying where the gold came from and how it was worked into the fabulous adornments illustrated throughout the book.

As this book presents ongoing research, it does come with a few challenges. The finds themselves for example are so recent that a contextual analysis, placing the Saka within the wider Scythian cultural realm, has not yet been made – the Saka are presented within Kazakhstan only. There is a slight imbalance between the descriptive nature of the text and the interpretations given, likely because the authors are specialists in their fields and connect proverbial dots based on their extensive knowledge. For the reader however, it is sometimes not as clear cut on what grounds conclusions pertaining to mythological or ritualistic assumptions have been drawn.

A very strong point of the book is in its illustrations. For starters, the photographs of the gold ornaments are many and beautiful, allowing the reader to admire them in detail. Sweeping views of the landscape help build an understanding of the natural environment of the Saka, while excavation photographs present finds in their original context, and in doing so convey the amount of work needed in conservation and restoration of individual finds. Maps and schematics aid our understanding of what we are looking at, while reconstruction drawings bring the picture of the past full circle.

All in all, this is not just an art historian book about gold jewellery. This book showcases the possibility encapsulated in ornaments to function as historic sources, if they are studied in and together with their original context.  A single ornament, looted and deprived of its context, loses its voice as carrier of information about the past, and the authors of this book have gone through great lengths to illustrate what information can be derived from ornaments. The archaeologists in Kazakhstan battle looting, time constraints and global warming in their everyday work, while also painstakingly studying material culture to increase our insights into the culture of the Saka steppe nomads. Gold of the Great Steppe book offers a wonderful view into Saka culture, the rich heritage of Kazakhstan, and the hard work of its archaeologists.

Gold of the Great Steppe, by Rebecca Roberts (ed). Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021.

170 pp, full-colour, in English. Available with the publisher and online.

Available with the publisher and online.

The book was gifted as review copy by the publisher.

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.

Splendour and Shine II

Splendour and Shine II

by | Reviews

regional dress and adornment

Splendour and Shine

Jewellery and dress are not static. They change over time, sometimes only marginally, sometimes profoundly. Some are ‘frozen’ in a particular form, and some continue to inspire new forms. These changes during a lifetime and exchanges between cultures are the central theme of the exhibition Splendour and Shine in the Flow of Time, that is on view in the Kreismuseum Zons, Germany, during the winter of 2021-2022. I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the exhibition, and brought the accompanying publication home with me: another highly informative read!

As in her earlier publication Splendour and Shine in the River of Time, which accompanied the exhibition in Liechtenstein, Irene Steiner combines traditional jewellery and dress from the German-speaking world with that of the rest of the world.  In 9 chapters, the book discusses change and developments starting out with traditional dress that has virtually remained unchanged for over a century and ending with the existence of traditional dress in a global world. The many dresses and items of adornment shown serve as case studies to present a train of thought, and that makes this book densely packed with food for thought. There is not enough space for an in-depth discussion of all of these, but the entire book hands us several points of view and case studies to consider, combining both past and present.

The publication is also a visual reference, as many varieties of a certain type of ornament are shown in the images. The photographs are many and, as a result, often small, but they will bring you a good idea of the wide variety in dress and adornment. Think of buttons, rings, belt- and shoe buckles for example, but an overview of brass dangles that would have been worked into a bridal crown is presented as well, including their various executions and their meaning. In this respect, the book also offers a wide range of research possibilities by showing several examples of details that are waiting to be researched and documented before they become forgotten: how to create such an intricate bridal crown for example, or the meaning and provenance of a certain necklace (p. 46-47). There is still a lot that regional dress and jewellery has to share that is not fully understood, and the book makes an important contribution to the study of this type of heritage in highlighting these possibilities.

What you will get from this book is both an understanding of details of regional European dress as well as many avenues for exploring the themes and concepts beyond dress and adornment: you will find yourself pondering the many angles in this book long after you have read it. I thoroughly enjoyed it as an exhibition publication that goes beyond captioning the exhibited pieces, offering many thoughts on how we regard regional jewellery and dress, and what has created the circumstances under which we have grown accustomed to seeing them in a particular way. Why is regional dress from German-speaking Europe associated with the Oktoberfeste for example, and how did jewellery from North Africa, Southwest Asia and the Arab Peninsula end up in oriental dance? The book is bilingual, and the abundance of photographs will make you enjoy this book for quite some time!

Splendor and Shine in the Flow of Time. Ethnic jewellery and traditional costume in a changing world, by Irene Steiner.

92 pages, full-colour, bilingual German/English. Available with the author.

The book was purchased in the Kreismuseum Zons.

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Sigrid van Roode

Sigrid van Roode is an archeologist, ethnographer and jewellery historian. She considers jewellery heritage and a historic source. She has authored several books on jewellery from North Africa and Southwest Asia, and on archaeological jewellery. Sigrid has lectured for the Society of Jewellery Historians, the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden and the Sultan Qaboos Cultural Center, among many others. She curates exhibitions and teaches online courses on jewellery from North Africa & Southwest Asia.