Lip peg
A lip plug is a special type of body jewelry for both sexes, which has been known since prehistoric times and is common among many indigenous peoples . It is a pencil made of different materials such as wood, bone, stone, ivory or gold, which is inserted through a previously pierced hole in the lower lip .
Lip pegs are worn as an ideal of beauty, as a symbol of a certain social status within the group or to delimit one's own people from the outside. In contrast to the lip plate, it is not the widening of the lower lip that is in the foreground, but the clearly visible pen hanging from the chin. Other traditional forms of deforming face jewelry are pegs through the nasal septum or through earlobes.
The distribution area of lip pegs includes the Middle East, parts of Central Africa and North and South America. Archaeologically, lip pegs appear as grave goods together with earrings and other jewelry. So belong to the Stone Age finds from the 5th and 4th millennium BC In the area of the Northwest Coast Culture in North America, spindle-shaped lip pegs made of soapstone and bone . Aztecs wore gold jewelry, including eagle and snake-shaped lip pegs.
Until the beginning of the 20th century, the Eskimos used lip plugs, tattoos and body paints as body decorations .
The Zo'é , also known as the lip stake Indians , a small people in the Amazon , wear a thick wooden lip stake (poturu) as an indispensable sign of their cultural identity , which hangs permanently in front of the mouth in men and women and often leads to jaw deformities. Obstructed by the wooden stake, the Zo'é have to bite off the food from the side with their molars.
For the Tlingit , an Indian people on the west coast of Canada , lip pegs used to mark the social status of women. According to reports from the early 19th century, when the custom was still widespread, girls' lower lip was first pierced with a copper wire or a wooden needle during puberty . With the first signs of puberty, the girls were considered impure and locked away from the rest of society for several months. They had to spend this time of initiation in a windowless hut until the great feast of their release. After the marriage, the women received a wooden lip plug, which was replaced by larger and larger ones as they got older. Tlingit female slaves were not allowed to wear lip stakes. The female gender of the wooden ritual masks in human and even animal form was recognizable by the lip stake, while the male masks were depicted with whiskers on the upper lip and chin.
See also
Web links
- Grant Keddie: Symbolism and Context: World History of the Labret and Cultural Diffusion on the Pacific Rim. Circum-Pacific Prehistory Conference, Seattle, August 1-6, 1989 (PDF; 1.7 MB)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Grant Keddie, p. 3
- ↑ Elisabeth Noll: Ethno-archaeological studies on mussel heaps. Tübingen writings on prehistoric and early historical archeology, vol. 7, Münster a. a. 2002, p. 190, ISBN 9783830912101 , online
- ↑ Michael Gleau: Longing for distant lands. As a dentist, Roland Garve treats the last indigenous people on earth. Bayerisches Zahnärzteblatt, May 2007, p. 24f (PDF; 85 kB)
- ↑ George Thornton Emmons (author), Frederica de Laguna (ed.): The Tlingit Indians. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 70. University of Washington Press, Seattle 1991, pp. 205, 266, ISBN 978-0295970080