Striking Objects

Striking Objects

CAMPUS

DEADLY INTENT?

In fights, bone daggers had a simple purpose: “To kill people,” says anthropology professor Nate Dominy. “The goal was to stab your opponent in the neck and twist.” Most of the time, however, “wearing one was like having a hammer in your belt. Sure, you could bash someone with it, but its day-to-day use was different,” says Hood visiting curator Robert Welsch. He says most daggers would have been used to open breadfruit or butcher pork.

THE HUMAN OPTION

Most bone daggers were sculpted from the shin bones of cassowaries, giant flightless birds native to New Guinea. The rarest and most valuable daggers were fashioned from the densest, thickest bone in the human body, the femur.

Made from the thigh bone of an enemy killed in combat or an honored ancestor, such a weapon was believed to imbue its owner with the dead man’s fighting spirit. “Like a Rolex, it had strong social capital,” says Dominy.

NO REFUNDS

“If a dagger broke,” says Dominy, “It became emptied of all its magic, social power, and symbolic prestige.” CT scans and computer analysis at DMHC of human and bird daggers reveal the curvier human ones are twice as strong. “They were carved to have great curvature to minimize the risk of damage,” says Dominy.

GET A GRIP

A dagger’s owner carved intricate power symbols onto his weapon’s handle. When a man grasped it, he believed he absorbed their mystic power. Occasionally women would use them to scrape coconut meat, according to Welsch.

FOWL FASHION

Cassowary daggers were flatter, straighter, and easier to wear, often in plaited armbands. “They’re decorative looking to attract the attention of girlfriends and to get the respect of male peers,” says Welsch, who lived in New Guinea villages for almost six years.

ERA OF THE DAGGER

Most bone daggers come from northern New Guinea, but some southern tribesmen wielded them, too. The Hood’s daggers date from 1900 to 1950, though such implements have been used for centuries.

BLADE RUNNER

The Hood’s daggers, along with about 1,000 other artifacts, were donated in 1990 by the estate of Beverly Hills, California, art dealer Harry A. Franklin.

CUTTING EDGE

Human bone daggers are extremely rare. The Hood has more than any other U.S. museum—even the Smithsonian.

ARTIFACT

The Hood Museum’s collection includes 25 bone daggers from New Guinea. Deadly and prestigious, these artistic daggers were used by villagers in combat and in daily life. “Their combination of abstract and representational images appeals to me, as does their union of symbolism and biology,” says anthropology prof Nate Dominy, who has studied the Hood daggers for almost a decade. “Few objects merge meaning and function so beautifully.”

Annie Phifer ’20