Human Head Encased in an Iron Cage

It’s been a while since I posted anything quite so macabre as this but the image of a group of boys making this grim discovery as they played in the sands at Hempstead, L.I., in the mid-1930s, had a grim allure for some reason. Perhaps because of its links with the golden age of piracy. 

According to Corbis Images the cage is ‘evidence of an early pirates’ torture device,’ namely, gibbeting. In the earliest recorded examples of gibbeting from the 17th century, the criminal would be bound in the metal cage and hung from a scaffold until they died of starvation, and it was a popular method of execution for piracy, highwaymen, murderers, and… sheep stealers. The positioning of such a structure next to public roads served as a warning to other potential criminals that they too might suffer the same fate.

Mari Lwyd

Mari Lwyd is a Welsh tradition celebrating New Year, taking place over a period from Christmas to late January. It is a form of wassailing, a luck-bringing ritual in which the participants accompany a person disguised as a horse from house to house, singing at each door in the hope of being rewarded with food and drink.

The Mari Lwyd consists of a mare’s skull on a wooden pole; a white sheet is fastened to the back, concealing the pole and the person carrying it. The lower jaw is sometimes spring-loaded, so the ‘operator’ can snap it at people. Within the Mari party there was usually a “Leader”, smartly dressed, who carried a staff, and other stock characters, such as the Merryman, who played music, and Punch and Judy. 

The skull is carried through the village; in front of every house traditional songs are sung. The singing sometimes consists of a rhyme contest between the Mari party and the inhabitants of the house, who challenge each other with improvised verses through the door; the contest lasts until one side gives up. Punch and Judy were troublesome characters; Punch tapped on the ground in time to the music and rapped on the door, whilst Judy brushed the ground, house walls, and windows, chasing anyone unwise enough to get too close. 

Once inside the entertainment continued with the Mari running around neighing, snapping its jaws and frightening children while the Leader pretended to try and restrain it. The tomfoolery was lighthearted though and participants would be rewarded with cakes and ale, and sometimes a gift of money as well. 

I take part in a strange modern derivative of this insanity every year, though my village isn’t really posh enough to have a horses skull so I think we use a goat’s…

Advent Calendar of Oddments 2012: December 12th

Crushed Skull

I was hanging about at the British Museum today when I happened upon this - the crushed skull of a guardian of the ‘King’s Grave’:

This skull comes from the ‘King’s Grave’ in the Royal Cemetery at Ur. The main tomb was in a rough stone chamber at the bottom of a large pit. The bodies of six soldiers wearing copper helmets and carrying spears lay at the foot of the ramp which descended to it, over eight metres below the modern surface. The helmets were broken and crushed flat by the weight of the soil which had been thrown back into the grave during the burial.

The soldiers were presumably intended to be the guardians of the tomb for eternity. If so, they failed in their duty because the central tomb had been robbed in antiquity. Including the six soldiers, sixty-three victims in total, most richly adorned, filled the floor of the pit.

The soldiers’ helmets closely resemble those worn by the soldiers on the Standard of Ur.

Dedicated to Anne Staneway Obt 8 Mar 1780 AE 20: There is white enamel, domed crystal, the sepia painting and high relief tomb motif with the skull and crossbones on top, painted on the tomb is ‘tempus fugit’ (or ‘time flies) as the winged hourglass . There is the willow, cypress and all this sits underneath a piece of domed crystal.

This piece stems from 1780, a time when Neoclassicism had become entrenched in mainstream culture and thought. Death, for its morbidity and harkening back to earlier times of less affluence and social mobility, had lost the memento mori symbolism. The meaning of the memento mori symbolism, while still in use somewhat for trinkets to denote the original intent (of understanding mortality), rather than be staunch reminders of death that had been popular in previous generations. This is why this ring is such a curiosity.

[The Art of Mourning is a fabulous website for all kinds of momento mori jewellery and other death-related curiosities]

Image: Painting by Paul Kane, showing a Chinookan child in the process of having its head flattened, and an adult after the process.

Artificial cranial deformation, head flattening, or head binding is a form of permanent body alteration in which the skull of a human being is intentionally deformed. It is done by distorting the normal growth of a child’s skull by applying force. Flat shapes, elongated ones (produced by binding between two pieces of wood), rounded ones (binding in cloth) and conical ones are among those chosen. It is typically carried out on an infant, as the skull is most pliable at this time. In a typical case, headbinding begins approximately a month after birth and continues for about six months.

Intentional head moulding producing extreme cranial deformations was once commonly practised in a number of cultures widely separated geographically and chronologically, and so was probably independently invented more than once. It still occurs today in a few places, like Vanuatu.

Cranial deformation was probably performed to signify group affiliation, or to demonstrate social status. This may have played a key role in Egyptian and Mayansocieties. Queen Nefertiti is often depicted with what may be an elongated skull, as is King Tutankhamen. It could be aimed at creating a skull shape which is aesthetically more pleasing or associated with desirable attributes. For example, in the Nahai-speaking area of Tomman Island and the south south-western Malakulan, a person with an elongated head is thought to be more intelligent, of higher status, and closer to the world of the spirits.

[With thanks once again to the wonderful pink-porcupine]

19th Century Chinese Carved Hornbill Ivory Casque

Sophisticated dentistry allowed Native Americans to add bling to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago, a new study says.

Ancient peoples of southern North America went to “dentists”—among the earliest known—to beautify their chompers with notches, grooves, and semiprecious gems, according to a recent analysis of thousands of teeth examined from collections in Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (such as the skull above, found in Chiapas, Mexico).

It was 5 February 1945 and the war was in its endgame. In the skies over the Reich, planes dropped their bombs on a mail train bound for Linz, before a second wave of more insidiously incendiary cargo was released. Mailbags filled with around 3800 propaganda letters – some containing sinister stamps of Hitler wearing a grinning skull – were dropped into the wreckage, ready to be recovered and delivered to the Germans by the postal service. It was the first mission of Operation Cornflakes.

Operation Cornflakes was a WWII Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Psychological Operations campaign designed to dupe the German postal service into inadvertently distributing propaganda through the mail. Nearly 100,000 properly addressed envelopes were stuffed with anti-Nazi subversive material like the Allies’ German language propaganda leaflet, with the aim of it ultimately landing on the breakfast tables of German households each morning – cue the Kellogs-inspired code name.

Adding subliminal insult to psychological injury, forged postage stamps were enclosed subtly designed to resemble the standard stamp bearing Adolf Hitler’s face – except that close inspection would reveal his face had been manipulated to look like an exposed skull, or similarly unbecoming imagery. Furthermore, the country-identifying text along the bottom of the stamp was changed from ‘Deutsches Reich’ (German Empire) to read ‘Futsches Reich’ (Collapsed or Lost Empire). MORE.

The wide prevalence of smoking in Victorian England left smokers’ teeth in as bad a condition as it left their lungs. The Museum of London studied the skeletal remains of people buried in a Victorian cemetery in Whitechapel, east London, in the mid-19th century, and found that the majority had some dental deformity caused by smoking from clay pipes. Two front teeth, sometimes four, had grooves worn into them from long term pipe smoking.

Osteological analysis of 268 adults buried between 1843 and 1854 found that some disfigurement had occurred in 92 percent of adults exhumed, while wear associated with habitual use of pipes was evident in 23 percent.

“In many cases, a clear circular “hole’ was evident when the upper and lower jaws were closed,” said Donald Walker, human osteologist at Museum of London Archaeology Service.

Males were affected far more frequently than females.

Of course many of these teeth were also stained brown on the inside, and the adult skeletons with pipe notches also had a higher prevalence of lesions inside the surface of the ribs, most likely from lung disease. Even children weren’t left unscathed. The skeletons of young adults showed evidence of pipe notches, which since the notches take a few years to develop means they had taken up smoking as children to have already worn grooves into their incisors.