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Name : Yup’ik smell mask
What it is : A dress masque chip at from driftwood
An example of a decorated Yup’ik mask carved from driftwood
Where it is from : Southwestern Alaska
When it was made : These mask date to at least the 16th century ; the one shoot above appointment to 1885 .
Related : Croesus stater : The 2,500 - year - former coin that introduced the gold criterion
What it severalize us about the past :
The Yup’ik hoi polloi , whose ancestors arrived in southwestern Alaskaaround 800 years ago , are known for their luxuriant and often - antic - looking masque . But this artistic custom was nearly eradicate in the late 1700s , as Russian missionaries likened the masque and their consociate ceremony to witchcraft .
Yup’ik masks vary dramatically in size of it and shape , anthropologist Dorothy Jean Ray pen in her 1967 book " Eskimo Masks : graphics and Ceremony , " with some as pocket-size as 6 column inch ( 15 centimeter ) and others up to 4 feet ( 1.2 meters ) long . These masks were traditionally carved from spruce driftwood found along the coast , with natural vulcanized fiber added for drift — undulate feathers of the sea duck , rawhide or baleen for appendage , or human or caribou fuzz blowing in the wind . Color was added from innate paint , such as white-hot fingerprint acid created from clean Lucius DuBignon Clay .
The first historic reference to Yup’ik masks was in a Russian traveler ’s diary write between 1764 and 1766 , in which the valet describe the Yup’ik dancing in the nude while wearing masks .
Masks were an essential part of Yup’ik religious praxis , according to Ray , and no two were alike . Typically , the Yup’ik shaman would commission a skilled statue maker to create a masquerade free-base on a dreaming or vision . villager then wore these masks during dances and festivals , such as whaling and Greenland caribou ceremonies connected to hunting pattern .
Each masque represented a particular tone and was a part of a enceinte tale waver by the priest-doctor , who was the representative of the earthly concern ’s unknown forces . Highly twisted , human - face - similar masquerade were often used to comprise other mythological being ; an retrousse oral fissure represented male beingness , while a downturned mouth represent distaff beingness .
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By the late 1700s , harmonise to Ray , Russian priests and missionaries reportedly destroy as many Yup’ik masque as they could find in their zeal to convert the autochthonous people to Christianity . Some masks pull round , only to be roll up by American naturalist Edward W. Nelson commence in 1877 and transport to museums in North America and Europe .
It is undecipherable how old the practice of Yup’ik masque devising is , as the custom follow their use in a ceremony was to dispose of the masks in the tundra or burn them , according to Yup’ik culture bearer . But archaeologist retrieve evidence of masksdating to the 16th centuryat a prehistorical site in the village ofQuinhagaknear the Bering Sea .
Although Yup’ik masque making was demonise by missionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries , the recitation isbeing revitalized todayas local community membersreclaim their precolonial practices .
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