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CHAPTER 1
The Earliest Hats and Hat Decor
With the weather worsening and more snow forecast, avid mountain hikers Erika and Helmut Simon decided to move to lower ground in the European Alps where they were on one of their frequent walking holidays. But noticing something dark protruding from the snow and ice, they stopped to investigate. What they discovered that day proved eventually to be one of the most important archaeological finds of recent years. The Simons — and other hikers and climbers that later joined the scene — assumed that the ice-preserved corpse in front of them, somewhat shriveled, stained dark brown in color, and with its head and shoulders poking out of the melting snow, was that of a mountaineer who had fallen to his death, maybe the previous century.
But it soon became obvious that Ötzi the Iceman, as he came to be known from his place of discovery high in the Ötztal Valley close to the Italian/Austrian border, was much older. Very much older. A hunter and perhaps a local tribal leader, Ötzi lived around 3300 B.C. in the late Neolithic, a time when the Stone Age was making way for the first copper tools of the Chalcolithic or Copper Age. He had been killed by a flint arrowhead that had severed an artery near one shoulder. Ötzi had bled to death. His body had been preserved in deep snow and ice, at or near where he had been killed, for well over 5,000 years. It was September 1991, and the discovery set the archaeological world alight.
Europe's oldest known human mummy: brown-eyed, gap-toothed, and tattooed, Ötzi — on display since in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy — has provided not only an unprecedented insight into the life, clothing, and food of early Copper Age humans, he has provided us with the oldest hat ever to be found.
Ötzi's hat resembled a modern-day Russian ushanka fur hat without the flaps (see plate 3). It was made entirely of pieces of brown bear (Ursus arctos) skin, stitched together to form a hemispherical shape and worn with the fur on the outside. A bearskin chinstrap held it in place. Providing warmth and waterproofing — function not decoration — it would have been an excellent choice of material in regions with cooler and wetter climates.
None of the rest of Ötzi's clothing — his long coat and his leggings — were made of bear hide; instead, these were made of strips of domestic sheep and goat hide, stitched together with animal sinew. So why just his cap? Maybe because, for Copper Age man, hunting bears with spears, with bow and arrows, or by digging large pit traps would have been a hazardous undertaking fraught with risk of injury or worse. It was far easier to use domesticated animals as a supply of hides; the hide from a brown bear kill (or maybe one found dead) would be used sparingly and perhaps reserved for wearing by those in the higher echelons of society.
When he was discovered, Ötzi was carrying a yew bow and a deer-hide quiver of arrows with flint arrowheads. Experiments with a model of his bow have shown that the type of arrows he carried could kill an animal thirty to fifty meters distant, so it is quite possible for bears to be killed by a group of hunters working together.
Brown bears would have been moderately common in the forested hills and valleys across most of northern Europe in the Copper Age. It's very unlikely that the low density of human population at that time would have threatened their numbers and distribution until the early Middle Ages when forest felling and agricultural development gathered pace, fracturing the habitats they relied upon. Indeed, Ötzi's fur hat was made from a genetic lineage of brown bear still seen in this area of the European Alps today. Ötzi is thought to have been a local tribal leader, and maybe his status allowed him to wear the best material available. Or brown bears might have been present in particularly high numbers in that part of the Alps at that time. There is certainly nothing to suggest that Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples commonly wore bearskin caps, even where brown bears were present and might have been relatively common. Most of that evidence comes from the discovery over the last couple of centuries of bodies buried in peat and preserved by it. These so-called bog bodies have mainly been found in Germany, Denmark, and Ireland, all countries with large peat deposits.
Emmer-Erfscheidenveen Man, a bog body discovered in Drenthe in the Netherlands in 1938 and dated to between 1310 B.C. and 1050 B.C. (mid- to late Bronze Age) is famous for the extent of his preserved clothing though almost all of his body was decomposed. He had a woolen cap made of sheepskin, deerskin shoes, a cowhide cape, and woolen undergarments, suggesting a mixed hunting and farming economy where he lived. Unlike Ötzi's bearskin cap, this Bronze Age man wore his sheepskin cap with the fleece side against his head. Female Bronze Age bog bodies often had hairnets or woolen caps made using a primitive needlework technique to produce an elastic material similar to netting and made from wool or plant fibers. Tollund Man, dated to 400 B.C., an incredibly well-preserved bog body discovered in 1950 in Denmark, wore a well-crafted, pointed leather cap also made of sheepskin. It was secured with sheepskin leather straps.
Using protein analysis of eleven items of Iron Age bog body clothing found in Denmark (proteins remain better preserved than DNA in wet peat), Dr. Luise Brandt, then at the University of Copenhagen, found that two were from cattle, three from goats, and six from sheep. No wild animal skins were used to make any of the items of clothing.
Brown bears are known to have become extinct in Denmark — maybe also in the Netherlands — around 3000 B.C. because of hunting and because much of their wooded habitat was already cleared for primitive farming. So the Danish and Dutch bog bodies could not have had local bearskin for clothing. In Germany, where many other bog bodies have been found, bears didn't become extinct until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, yet no German bog bodies have been discovered bearing bearskin hats either.
The earliest human hunter-gatherer communities would have been reliant on whatever wild animals they could kill both to supplement their diet and to provide them with clothing. In wet and cold climates, headwear would surely have been essential and might have made use of deerskin or bearskin to provide warmth and waterproofing. By about 6000 B.C., the first European farmers had begun to breed sheep and cattle, and to grow crops. But because brown bears were highly dangerous animals to kill, maybe Iron Age farmers took the safer option, even where bears were still present, and used domesticated animal skins instead. Ötzi's hat might have been the exception rather than the rule.
Apart from Ötzi in the Copper Age and the few Bronze/Iron Age bog bodies found with hats, no other early hats have been discovered. As a result, we rely on depictions of hats in drawings and as part of sculpted figures to gather what understanding we can of the earliest hats and the degree to which they used wild animal parts in their construction.
The earliest are the so-called Venus figurines; small figures (between 1.5 and 9.8 inches high), mostly distinctly female in form, they are carved from soft stone, bone, or mammoth ivory or are made of clay and fired. Most have been found in Europe, though some are from further afield such as Siberian Russia. Of the more than two hundred found, most are dated to the Paleolithic between 24,000 B.C. and 19,000 B.C. though some date back to 33,000 B.C.
Characterized by having small heads, wide hips, and legs tapering to a point, many exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, and vulva. Arms and feet are usually absent, and the head in most is faceless. Expert opinion regarding the function and significance of these exquisite figurines is decidedly mixed: from fertility symbols, Stone Age dolls, depictions of women or of a mother goddess, as religious icons, or even the equivalent of pornographic imagery. Their true meaning might never be known.
Their heads often have a checkerboard-like pattern formed from a series of shallow channels cut at right angles to each other. Historically thought to be a representation of a hairstyle or a wig, many anthropologists now believe that these depict woven hats made from plant fibers, their exquisite detail reflecting the important role played by textiles in Upper Paleolithic (roughly 50,000 B.C. to 10,000 B.C.) cultures. But it is impossible to know whether such depictions mean that hats like these were worn in real life by Paleolithic Age women. "There are a number of plants whose pollen has been recovered from Upper Paleolithic sites in both Moravia and Russia that could have been used to make cordage [fibers twisted or braided together], nettle being the most appealing," comments Dr. Olga Soffer, emeritus professor at the Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, and a leading expert on perishable artifacts.
A smaller number of ivory figurines, dated to around 18,000 B.C., has been found in Siberia. The Paleolithic people who carved them inhabited partially subterranean dwellings excavated into the ground; they positioned large animal bones to hold the walls with reindeer antlers used to construct a roof (probably covered with animal skins) for protection.
They appear to depict a very different sort of head covering from that depicted on the figurines found in Europe. Here they seem to be wearing stylized hooded parkas and footed trousers or even overalls, a reflection, maybe, of the very much colder climate they had to endure. Recent detailed analysis by Dr. Lyudmila Lbova and Dr. Pavel Volkov at the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, part of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, has concluded that, far from representing idealized female forms, these figurines also include male forms and children.
Their hooded clothing, often with fur helmets (hats covering the head and shoulders) seems to be made from animal skins and furs to help protect them against the harsh winter conditions. Herds of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) — known as caribou in North America — would have been common on the Arctic Siberian tundra, and their southward migration every autumn, and its reverse in spring, would surely have been unmissable opportunities to kill both mature and young animals for their meat and hides. The figurines depict different hats, hairstyles, and other accessories, and their makers use different carving techniques to highlight a range of materials including fur and animal skins. The most popular outerwear depicted appears to be fur overalls with hoods, obtained presumably from killing deer, bears, seals, and other mammals. Native inhabitants of many parts of Siberia — such as the Itelmen of the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian far northeast — wore similar mammal-hide and fur clothing in recent centuries.
Initially migrating from northeast Siberia across the Bering Strait around 2000 B.C. to what is now Alaska — and on to Arctic Canada and Greenland — the Inuit made their clothing out of animal skins and furs. Parkas with hoods made from caribou or seal skin were the norm, and caribou were not difficult to hunt and kill. But over the centuries, these northern deer have declined substantially and are today estimated to number about three million across their huge Arctic range from Alaska through Greenland to Arctic Russia.
In warmer parts of the prehistoric world, animal skins and furs were rarely used for hat making. Their warmth was not required. Early hats depicted in drawings include an ancient Egyptian tomb painting of a man wearing a conical straw hat, dated to around 3200 B.C., presumably lightweight and made to protect against the sun. The ancient Greeks usually went bareheaded, but when men traveled they wore the petasos, a practical sunshade of wool felt or straw with a wide brim and held on by a chinstrap. Women wore a version made of fine straw with a tallish, conical crown. Other early Greek hats include the pílos, a simple, brimless skull cap, usually conical in shape and made from wool felt or leather, the latter almost certainly obtained from domestic livestock.
Both the petasos and the pílos became popular in ancient Rome too, the pílos particularly so with Roman soldiers and sailors. It was also worn at festivals and public games by athletes. The pílos is often confused with the Phrygian cap, made of leather or wool, a soft conical cap worn with its point pulled forward. Associated with the ancient Greeks since about 400 B.C., with several peoples in eastern Europe, and given to Roman slaves who had won their freedom, the Phrygian cap was worn as a symbol of liberty during the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution.
The helmet of the Roman warrior was a development of the beautifully designed Greek warrior's helmet; some worn by more senior ranks had a short crest, either of horse hair or of trimmed feathers, usually from ostrich. They were often dyed red; sometimes other colors too. Many ceremonial hats worn by ancient Egyptian nobility were highly decorated with jewels and elaborate braiding, though there is little evidence of animal parts used in their construction or decoration with the exception of an occasional single ostrich feather.
Only the depictions of gods the ancient Egyptians worshiped had any semblance of animal-derived decoration on their hats or headdresses: the Four Feathers Crown worn by the Egyptian god of war, Anhur; a feathered crown worn by the god of fertility and sexuality, Min; or the even taller feathers depicted on the crown of Anuket, the goddess of the Nile cataracts and the fields. All probably depict the feathers of the North African ostrich (a subspecies of the common ostrich, Struthio camelus), once a common flightless bird across much of Egypt but now reduced to a few remnant populations, a state of affairs that cannot be blamed on the ancient Egyptian gods.
Though very largely confined in ancient Egypt to the gods they worshipped, headdresses — ornamental head coverings — rather than hats, the more functional garment, have long made substantial use of animal parts, feathers in particular, in many other parts of the world. In the Aztec Empire of Central America, which flourished between about 1345 and 1521 (when it was overthrown by the Spanish), ordinary people didn't wear hats of any sort. In utter contrast, the upper echelons of Aztec society were notable for their extravagant dress, headdresses included. Made in the shape of a large disc representing the universe and the sky, their exquisite headdresses could be over forty inches high and sixty inches across. There was no mistaking who was most important in hierarchical Aztec society.
Feathers were the most important components of their headdresses, and the species of bird from which the feathers were obtained determined the social standing of the wearer. The most precious were those of quetzals, birds slightly larger than mockingbirds, six species of which inhabit tropical forests in South and Central America. All of them are highly colored — including metallic greens, scarlet, and gold — and some sport elongated tail feathers that were of special importance for headdress decor. If you need impressively colored feathers, it is not easy to find any better suited than those of quetzals. To obtain them more easily, the Aztecs even bred these forest birds in captivity.
At the height of the Aztec Empire, five of their provinces with cloud forest were compelled to furnish tributes annually in the form of as many as 2,500 "handfuls" of mostly tail-streamers from resplendent quetzals (Pharomachrus mocinno). Assuming that each "handful" contained ten to fifty such feathers, this would have meant a harvest of between six thousand and thirty-one thousand resplendent quetzals per year. Even if the lives of the birds were spared — and despite the edict of death on those who killed them, it seems inevitable that a large proportion might have been seriously injured in the capture and plucking process — the figure is still astonishing and indicates that the species must have been very much more abundant than it is today or that their captive breeding was very effective.
The most impressive Aztec headdress still in existence is referred to, erroneously, as that of Motecuhzoma II who ruled the empire between 1502 and 1520 and was the emperor at the time of the Spanish invasion (see plate 4). Oddly, it is held in the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna, Austria, but how it got there is not at all clear.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Hats"
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Copyright © 2020 Malcolm Smith.
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