Featured Beaded leather whoosawhatsit

Not sure what the purpose of this piece is? A pendant? I thought maybe there’d be a little opening like a medicine pouch type thing. Doesn’t appear to be though. All of the five W’s elude me. I don’t recall where I acquired it. Maybe a repair with replacement beads on top row?

 

odd , indeed !

 

Me like it!

 

What didn’t occur to me until now is that it could just be a surviving fragment of something larger. It does seem to have a bit or few bits of age.

 

maybe a personal talisman.... & sinew sewn....
as part of a larger item........ possible...but I wouldn't know what ?

 

I can't say I have seen anything exactly like it, but I wonder if it might be an ear adornment.

 

a bit large for that , don't ya think?

 

point taken....

gotta luv the holy COW !!!!!!

 

Thanks guys. The ear adornment is an interesting idea. At least I wasn’t overlooking an obvious explanation/source. 2many, you’d think African over another likely source? I leaned more that way than any other way but was/am totally unsure in the end. Any thoughts on age? I don’t trust my personal ability to ascribe an accurate age to beads. I could see the whole thing being anywhere from 75-150 years old I suppose. Less likely the the more extreme side of the range.

 

I used the Maasai example just to show that ear ornaments can get quite large (responding to komo's comment).

But I really can't be sure about the origin or date. The color and texture of the leather look like it could be Native American, as does the use of sinew thread (if that is accurate). African bead workers had greater access to native and imported cotton threads as well as other fibers.

It looks like the beads are larger than typical seed beads, perhaps "pony beads" which is a type that appears earlier than the small seed beads in Native American work. Not much to go on in terms of design in the beadwork, and the limited colors. White and blues were favored colors from the earliest trade in glass beads.

As an example, here is a detail of a decorated shirt strip in the British Museum, attributed to the Crow. The combination of traditional quillwork with pony beads appears in the early to mid 19th cen., as the trade in glass beads was being introduced -

https://matotope.com/period-embroidery-beads-old-color-beads/

Note the irregular shapes of the beads, and variations in color. I was hoping to find this same piece in the Museum's online catalog to see if they assigned a date, but did not see it. I was able to find another Crow shirt in the collection with a similar combination of quillwork and beads, which they tentatively date to the 1850s -


https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/E_Am1924-1009-1

This is just to suggest a possible time period for your piece based on the beads, not that it was necessarily made by the Crow.

 

On the other hand, many groups in Africa who are noted for their beadwork seem to have favored larger beads for longer than their Native American counterparts. And I can't say that there are none that have used sinew thread.