SCALPING

'Scalping' is the act of removing the scalp, usually with the hair, as a portable proof or trophy of prowess in war. The practice has been known in Europe, Asia and Africa. Scalping is also associated with frontier warfare in North America, and was practiced by Native Americans and white colonists and frontiersmen over centuries of violent conflict.

Contents

Scythia

Northern Europe

North America

External link

References in Popular Culture

References

Scythia

Scalping was practiced by the ancient Scythians of Eurasia. Herodotus, the Greek historian, wrote of the Scythians in 440 BC: ''"The Scythian soldier scrapes the scalp clean of flesh and softening it by rubbing between the hands, uses it thenceforth as a napkin. The Scyth is proud of these scalps and hangs them from his bridle rein; the greater the number of such napkins that a man can show, the more highly is he esteemed among them. Many make themselves cloaks by sewing a quantity of these scalps together".''

Northern Europe

Scalps were taken in wars between the Visigoths, the Franks and the Anglo-Saxons in the 9th century according to the writings of Abbott Emmanuel H. D. Domenech. His sources included the ''decalvare'' of the ancient Germans, the ''capillos et cutem detrahere'' of the code of the Visigoths, and the ''Annals of Flodoard''.

North America

Certain tribes of North American Indians practiced scalping, in some instances up until the 19th century. According to ethnohistorian James Axtell, there is abundant evidence that the Native American practice of scalping existed long before Europeans arrived. Axtell argues that there is no evidence that the early European explorers and settlers who came to the Americas were familiar with the ancient European practice of scalping, or that they ever taught scalping to Native Americans. Axtell writes that the idea that Europeans taught scalping to Native Americans became popular recently, during the 1960s. This idea quickly became conventional wisdom because it fit the tenor of the times of the countercultural 1960s, writes Axtell, but he argues that archaeological, historical, pictorial, and linguistic evidence contradicts this notion.
It is believed that contact with Europeans widened the practice of scalping among Native Americans, since some Euro-American governments encouraged the practice among their Native American allies during times of war. For example, in the American Revolutionary War, Henry Hamilton, the British Lieutenant-Governor of Canada, was known by American Patriots as the "hair-buyer general" because it was believed he encouraged and paid his Native American allies to scalp American settlers. When Hamilton was captured in the war by the Americans, he was treated as a war criminal instead of a prisoner of war because of this. However, both Native Americans and American frontiersmen frequently scalped their victims in this era.

External link

★ British Scalp Proclamation of 1756

References in Popular Culture

In the movie Kill Bill Vol. 1 the character of O-Ren Ishii is killed by scalping by "the Bride"

References

★ Axtell, James. "Scalps and Scalping" from ''Encyclopedia of North American Indians''

★ Answering Myths about American Indian Science (Takes the view that scalping was probably introduced to Indians by Europeans)