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Amber

From Antiquity to Eternity

Amber

I love books that deepen our understanding of one particular material, and so when I met dr. Rachel King briefly early in 2022 and she told me she was finishing a book on amber, I was excited! And rightly so: Amber. From Antiquity to Eternity is a most engaging and important discussion of all things amber.

Amber

What stands out from the first lines is how very well this book is written. It is accessible, relatable, easy to follow, but by no means simple. The volume explores the world of amber in great detail and with obvious knowledge. Given the amount of information and the complexity of the topics presented, clarity of writing is of great importance: you will enjoy the lucid and engaging style of Dr. King!

Amber discusses amber from a great many angles. In eight chapters, the past, present and future of this material that has enticed humans for millennia are presented. The first of these deals with definitions: what is amber, where is it found, what different types exist? In this chapter, the wide reach of this book becomes apparent. Themes like ecosystems, the science behind investigating amber and research angles yet to be pursued all are discussed. The next chapter picks up on this theme of research in presenting what earlier scholars believed amber to be. This results in a delightful overview of legends and myths, some of which may reflect actual archaeological finds – and with that, the next chapter on the use of amber artefacts by humans begins.

This focuses mainly on Europe and China, and contains a great overview of amber finds from prehistory and the early Middle Ages. The following chapter picks up the narrative in later periods and highlights the amber trade in all its aspects. How and where to find amber is followed up upon by the economic, political and social aspects of the amber industry. An excursion to the Dominican Republic shows the harsh reality of amber mining, and as such makes us reflect on not just past monopolies on the mining and selling of amber, but also of the present and future of the amber industry. The amber industry is fraught with illegal and unsafe extraction and trade: just one example is how in 2015, 90% of the amber from Ukraine has been extracted without permission (p. 94). This book certainly gets you thinking on the darker sides of those pretty amber jewellery items that are offered for sale far and wide.

It will come as no surprise that this material, that has played such an important part in trade networks and political power plays, has been imitated as well. I am obviously aware that amber is widely faked, but I did not know how far back this went – did you know a recipe to imitate amber existed in China some 1,800 years ago, and that imitations of amber have been found in Spain that date back 4,000 years? And there is so much more involved in imitations: from smell to inclusions, from weight to colour – and increasingly innovative and scientific ways to expose forgeries.

The chapter on jewellery is a varied introduction in the many forms amber is worn as adornment. That is not just as personal adornment, but also as precious objects to show wealth and status, such as handles, mouthpieces or inlays. In this chapter the colonial use of amber as commodity is addressed, and its fragrant capacities and its meaning in ritual are touched upon as well. This is a dazzling and kaleidoscopic portrait of the use of amber, which is continued in the next chapter on artworks in amber. The final chapters deals with lost amber in again a variety of angles: not just actual lost pieces, but also the loss of status and knowledge. In this chapter, the role of private and public collections in preserving amber surfaces. As many pieces with spectacular inclusions find their way into private collections, scientists may not always have access to study these (p. 217) – and studying amber and its eternal world within from a scientific perspective is relevant for not just our past, but our future as well. (so if you do have a collection: please give some thought on how to pass your collection on to the future)

The focus of this beautifully illustrated book is mainly on Europe and Asia. The use and meaning of amber in other parts of the world are only touched upon in a few instances, but that does not diminish the relevance of this book. What makes Amber so important is its wide scope. It places amber not just in an art historian or historical context, but also in a social, environmental and humanitarian context. Throughout the book, attention is called to the ethical and sustainability challenges with amber, the knowledge that can be gained from it about our climate and planet, and the inevitable choices that present themselves. The attractive way in which the author presents an accessible overview of the history and uses of amber as well as serious food for thought in one fluid narrative is rare, and I enjoyed every page of this book. Possibly the most powerful line I read is the last one, in which past and future of our planet meet: I highly recommend reading this book, as it will not only tell you everything you would want to know about amber itself, but also eminently shows the importance of our choices in studying and treating it for humanity – which stretches so far as our very survival.

Amber. From Antiquity to Eternity, by Rachel King, 2022.

272 pp., full-colour, in English. Published by Reaktion Books

Available online and with the publisher.

I purchased the book in the British Museum.

More on amber in jewellery is in this article. If books like these are of interest to you, join the Jewellery List and have reviews of new books sent to you!

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.

Losing sight

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | Opinion

the decline in knowledge

Losing sight

Traditional jewellery is disappearing at a fast rate. It is no longer made in the quantities past generations would need, and it is being sold both in the countries of origin as well as in the regions of the world where collectors live. These days, that is not just ‘the West’, but also for example China: amber and coral are bought in bulk by Chinese collectors. But besides the jewellery itself, another valuable asset is disappearing at an even more alarming speed. That is knowledge about what this jewellery actually is – and what it represents.

That loss of insight is for example visible in the flawed identification of pieces of adornment. Sometimes these can be way off the mark, such as the Bedouin face veil shown in the gallery below. It was offered up for auction as a body ornament/necklace from Turkmenistan (1). The dorsal ornament from Turkmenistan, pictured below as well, was offered as a Saudi jewel. We might have a good laugh about such a mismatch (and I usually do), but the rate in which these appear is indicative of a much more serious matter.

Now you might think ‘Of course these are misidentified, they are being handled by cultural outsiders’ and that would certainly hold true in a number of cases. But incorrect attributions also, and increasingly, occur within the countries of origin themselves. The photograph in the gallery below shows several splendid Yemeni necklaces – I photographed these in the exhibition Splendour and Shine in the Flow of Time. When I posted this photograph on my Instagram-account, I received dozens of messages from Algerian followers insisting this was Algerian. The Turkmen jewellery, which I photographed on the Amsterdam Tribal Jewelry and Textiles Fair, received a lot of attention as well, with many people writing me these pieces were from Kabylia. These are just a few examples: I receive messages every single day of people who genuinely believe a piece of adornment stems from their culture, even if it hails from another continent, another culture, another language family entirely.

The loss of accurate knowledge also manifests in constructed images presenting as reality. Lebanese singer Myriam Fares launched a new music video early in 2022, in which she claimed to dress and perform in Amazigh tradition: the jewels and dress she used in an online dress-up challenge however were random and had very little to do with actual Amazigh adornment. (2) The comments on this particular post range from appreciation to anger: misrepresenting Amazigh culture on a global stage by an Arab performer is adding insult to injury in an already strained dynamic. Being respectful about adornment has much wider implications than just ‘looking the part’: it includes understanding what jewellery actually means. The photograph of the young woman included in the image gallery (click ‘next’ on the right side of the gallery) is another example of a non-existent, exotic-looking ensemble. Constructed reality in older photographs is a well-known phenomenon, as I addressed in another blog post. It is however still very much alive today, where photos are made specifically to share one narrative or to convey one particular message. There is no such thing as neutral photographs, yet we often accept them as reliable sources of information. When we no longer recognize that a dress is worn the wrong way, or mismatched with ornaments that would not belong with it, the power of misinformation that is shaping our world view will only grow stronger.

Bedouin face veil

Turkmen dorsal ornament

Yemeni necklaces

Turkmen jewellery

Modern mashup

You might also think ‘So what? A wrongly attributed piece, what’s the big deal?’. Incorrectly identifying pieces of adornment is not my point here. That happens all the time, and many of those glitches can be avoided with a little more research. My point is that ascribing pieces of heritage to another culture has consequences. In the continuous struggle for identity and acknowledgement that many cultures face, it is imperative to be aware that spreading misinformation is not helping, to say the least. It can even be outright damaging, if the misattribution occurs willfully and intentionally – rebranding heritage to fit a new narrative is one of the most vicious ways of erasing the past.

Piece by piece, accurate insights in dress and adornment are diluted further with chunks of misinformation that are repeated over and over again – the Internet is as fast as it is patient. Images are easily copied and shared, with the accompanying background information disappearing and being replaced by brief, and often wrong, captions. With the watering down of conducting proper research to simply ‘Googling’, these nuggets of misinformation continue to be repeated and shared. The meticulous work of Wafa Ghnaim of Tatreez and Tea is just one example of the time and effort it takes to bring back the detailed meaning of Palestinian tatreez from the brink of oblivion, and there are many more researchers that work tirelessly to ensure not only material culture survives, but its cultural, social, economic and historic meaning as well. One of the most important factors in this ongoing effort is that the results are shared widely, so they are accessible to people worldwide: the databases of both the Textile Research Centre and the Zay Initiative are just two examples of accessible information.

And we need those efforts more than ever. Because we have now arrived at that point where the transfer of knowledge to the next generation is crucial. If we lose sight of both the details of and the wider world behind adornment, if we let the stories of both wearers and collectors slip through the cracks of time, the remaining jewellery pieces will have lost their voice as a historic source forever.

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Do you own a collection? Please do try and document it as much as possible. Every little note helps! A free guide on how to get started with that is here.

Are you wondering what to do with your collection? Please consider the work of the Qilada Foundation – my non-profit initiative aimed at repatriating collections and everything they represent to their countries of origin.

References

1) Catawiki lot 59513855, auctioned on June 17^th 2022

2) The choreography did, however: this was copied straight from a choreography by Kif-Kif Bledi, a group of performers who are known for their deep study of dance and identity. The contemporary twists they add to traditional dance made the choreography easily identifiable as a creation of Kif-Kif Bledi as shown in this video– the intellectual property dispute is still ongoing.

Sigrid van Roode

Hair: untold stories

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | 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

More on personal adornment in exhibitions and museums? Read about other collections here! Want to be kept in the know on new and forthcoming exhibitions and museum installations? Join the Jewellery List and have news delivered to your inbox!

Sigrid van Roode

Cartier and Islamic Art

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | European jewellery, Reviews

in search of modernity

Cartier and Islamic Art

Jewellery exchange between the Islamic world and the Christian world has existed for millennia. Byzantine jewellery is at times indistinguishable from early Islamic jewellery, and cross-cultural influences still exist in the traditional jewellery worn around the Mediterranean. These are all evidence of a long, shared history. But what happens when a high-end European jeweller feels ‘stuck’ in his repertoire, and actively seeks inspiration in another culture? The book Cartier and Islamic Art is a lavish publication exploring how eastern designs formed a source of inspiration for the work of one of the most famous jewellery houses of the West.

This book accompanies the exhibition of the same name, that was held in Paris and will be on view in in the Dallas Museum of Art from May 14, 2022 to September 18, 2022. A point to note in advance is that this is a book about aesthetics and forms, not about cultural meaning or significance: it is an art historian exploration of the creations of Cartier. The terminology used reflects a Western point of view entirely, such as the definition of what ‘Islamic arts’ actually are. You will find not just pieces created by Islamic cultures, but also jewellery from the Hindu world, and the ‘arts’ themselves exclude for example calligraphy. Let me elaborate on that a little. As for example Charlotte Huygens explains in her essay ‘On the History of Art in the Islamic World’ in the 2018 publication Splendour & Bliss, the term Islamic Art was coined in the colonial era, when the Islamic world was viewed as a monolithic entity, the counterpart of the West – the era in which Cartier started out to look for inspiration. That world view shines through, amongst other things, in the imprecise way the Cartier archives label both their creations and its inspiration: ‘Persian’, ‘Arab’, ‘Oriental’ are regularly used interchangeably. Nowadays, the denominator ‘Islamic Art’ is still used, but with the connotation of its cultural pluriformity, and it is to be understood as such in this book as well. The many essays in this book however do much more than simply illustrate how Cartier jewellery was inspired by Islamic art. They show us how to what extent abstract Western arts, notably Art Déco, are indebted to the Islamic world, and that is a great deal.

The essay on ‘Islamic Art “revealed”: a path toward modern design’ is one of the most powerful contributions in this publication. I am usually wary of wording like ‘revealing’ in the context of the Islamic world, but the use of quotation marks here reflects the sentiment of the essay itself. Its authors unpick how the Islamic arts were introduced to a European audience: through wars, displacement and colonial greed (p. 40). The success of world exhibitions and the subsequent adaptations of Islamic art forms lead to new experiments in the design field, moving away from Orientalist interpretations (p. 46) to the first attempts at abstract expression. This historical context is pivotal for understanding the jewellery created. The private collection of Louis Cartier is central in the next essay, where stunning manuscripts and inlaid works were not just collected to satisfy a personal curiosity, but also to be shared and loaned to exhibitions that in turn furthered European interest in the Islamic arts.

The arts from the Islamic world and beyond did not just form design inspiration, but brought new techniques to Europe as well. The essays on India explore how wealthy clientele from India brought their jewellery and gemstones to Cartier in order to have them updated or set in new jewels. These latter however had to conform to Indian tastes, and so the technique of stone setting known as kundan found its way to the Cartier ateliers, along with other ways of looking at forms and types of jewellery. The essay on Cartier’s Lexicon of Forms, although it uses terms like ‘Arab’ and ‘Persian’ loosely, showcases how forms derived from Islamic art and architecture were translated into design elements: not as mere copies though, but adapted and transformed into a new visual language. Even the graphic arts of Cartier were transformed based on the structures and patterns learned: the influence of Islamic art is profound and stretches well beyond jewellery design.

As the timeframe in which the ‘Lexicon of Forms’ came into existence, with all its imprecise denominators as I pointed out above, was at the apex of colonialism, it will not come as a surprise that the origin of some designs is not always clearly identified. An example is the necklace featured on p. 218, designed in 1971. It is described as inspired by Berber (which we now would indicate as Amazigh, following the people’s wish to be named in their own language) fibulae from Kabylia in Algeria (p. 187). While that may certainly hold true for the necklace itself, the pendant seems to me to be based in Tuareg tereout tan idmarden pendants as worn in the Hoggar mountains of Algeria. I was pleasantly surprised to see jewellery of ordinary people (instead of the possessions of shahs and Mughal elite) serve as inspiration for these high-end creations as well, and wonder if other contemporary jewellery examples that form part of North Africa’s and Southwest Asia’s heritage might still go unidentified.

The design and photography of this book are simply fabulous. Both original pieces and Cartier creations are photographed in crisp clarity. The large format allows for endless comparing and admiring, and what I particularly loved are the blow-ups of tiny details at the beginning of each chapter and even the cover: the cover image is a detail of a cigarette case, only 8,7 cm in height! Short intermezzo’s, like a brief essay on the pen boxes of the shah, Mughal jewellery from India or book bindings, provide informative examples on how details traveled to other designs. Each chapter is well referenced: don’t skip the endnotes, they feature many more details and discussions!

Cartier and Islamic Art is a detailed journey into the creative process of this famed jewellery house, placed in the context of its time. From inspirational exhibitions, visits and experiences, via drawings and designs to the breathtaking jewellery creations, this book places western designs and its teachers from the Islamic world side by side. For me, this book was an eye-opener in how deeply rooted abstract jewellery of the early 20th century is in Islamic art: a development in the field of jewellery that has been explored in depth for the first time in this publication. It is a visual feast of stunning, elegant Cartier designs and a wealth of superb original artworks from Southwest Asia, North Africa and India, accompanied by in-depth essays: I am sure you will thoroughly enjoy both!

Cartier and Islamic Art. In Search of Modernity. by Heather Ecker et. al. (eds). Thames & Hudson, 2021

315 pages, full-colour, in English. Available with the publisher, in bookstores and online.

The book was received as review copy by the publisher.

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Sigrid van Roode

Personal Adornment

by dr. Sigrid van Roode | Reviews

the construction of identity

Personal Adornment

When you have been reading other articles on this blog, you know personal adornment as a historic source is one of my main research interests. Who are we? Who do we want to be? Who do we definitely want to disassociate ourselves from? How do we want others to perceive us? We use our personal appearance to create our personal and group identity in many ways, but it creates who we are in as many ways. And it always has, as becomes more and more clear of studies into personal adornment in the past. Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity presents a superb overview of the many possibilities that jewellery research in an archaeological context has to offer. While I speak of ‘jewellery’, the book deals with bodily adornment in the widest sense.

First, let me walk you through the book. This is a series of papers resulting from a conference session, and reading them made me wish from the first page I had had the opportunity to attend that conference! Eight chapters discuss case studies from across the globe and from varying timeframes, and a thorough introduction at the beginning and a concluding chapter at the end bookend these, providing the necessary cohesion between the chapters. On the very first page of text, which is really only just the acknowledgements, the editor Hannah V. Matson expresses her hope that readers ‘will contemplate how items of bodily adornment may serve not as nonutilitarian items of wealth or decoration, nor as symbols or materializations of underlying social relations and categories, but as active and key components in the constitution of identity.’ (p. v): if that does not make one want to dive fully into the pages ahead, I don’t know what does!

So, what to expect in this volume? You will find the first chapter very useful in its comprehensive presentation and discussion of the evolving views in archaeology when it comes to personal adornment. Jewellery is (for the most part) no longer treated as ‘Look, lots of jewellery! This must be a princess!’, but as a very relevant source that ties in with virtually every aspect of past worlds we are trying to understand. Jewellery actively constructs identity, and in a way, reality. Let me illustrate that briefly by means of another recent study, by Karsten Wentink, on prehistoric grave goods including personal adornment. He argues that the deceased were buried with objects that reflected a world of travel and all the social codes that went with that: drinking beer together, extending hospitality, being a gracious guest by sharing stories of places far and wide…Apparently, they expected this for their final journey as well, and personal adornment buried with them was making that a reality for the afterlife.

What I found particularly interesting in Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity was the section on personal adornment and social memory. Just like ornaments can be actively creating reality, they can commemorate and even re-create a past, and as such are incredibly powerful parts of our lives. Mette Langbroek touches upon this aspect of medieval beads as well in her chapter Beads from Dorestad in the volume Dorestad and its networks. Communities, Contact and Conflict in Early Medieval Europe, and reading a more elaborate introduction in the theoretical underpinnings of personal adornment and its mnemonic modalities through which people (in any timeframe) negate their present was absolutely enriching.

This entire book is filled with food for thought, as you can tell by the number of sticky notes in the above image of the book. We see how in the early Neolithic a shared use of ornamentation leads to new group identities in which hunter-gatherers and farmers interact (paper by Perlès), how dress and language both form deep expressions of identity that disappear together from the record (Olko), how objects of adornment can be group property instead of individual property (Prociuk, which reminded me strongly of how certain healing beads with the Bedouin in southern Palestine are group property as well), the changes in early Medieval society that are not just reflected in brooch types, but actually instigated by them (Glørstad), and many other case studies of jewellery research at its best. This is exactly how one would like to see jewellery studies approached: as an integral part of and source about the past, not just as adornment.

This is obviously very much an academic book, but very well readable due to its clarity of writing (the paper by Cifarelli is the most jargon-heavy in its theoretical approach at times), and the introductory and final chapters both do a great deal to integrate all the fascinating research in between into a coherent framework. Having read this book, you will have a clear and up to date overview of the deep possibilities jewellery research has to offer: not just for archaeological pieces, but for any type of personal adornment. If you are a curator or academic researcher in the field of personal adornment, this is simply a must-read, and if you love jewellery and your interest in its capacities beyond the ornamental has been piqued, this is a great introduction into the length and width of jewellery as a research field!

Personal Adornment and the Construction of Identity. A Global Archaeological Perspective (2021). Edited by Hannah V. Matson.

224 pp, b&w with 10 colour plates, in English.

Available with the publisher Oxbow Books and in bookstores (offline and online) worldwide.

The book was gifted as review copy by the publisher.

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Sigrid van Roode

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