Ancient Hand Skills Volume 45.3
WARRING STATES STRATIFIED HORNED COMPOUND EYEBEAD OF ZHOU DYNASTY, one of the most complex and precise glass beads ever made, composed of 169 separate pieces of glass; this bead was made between 475-221 B.C., not long after glass was introduced into China. It is remarkable that ancient Chinese glass beadmakers could become so skilled so quickly in a new medium. It is 1.9 centimeters high. Courtesy of the late Albert Summerfield. The adjacent polymer replica, closely matching the devitrified original bead, was made by polymer artist Kathleen Dustin as her interpretation, paying homage to the ancient craftspeople, 2.5 centimeters high (Liu 2001, 2015). Photographs by Robert K. Liu/Ornament, unless noted otherwise.
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN JEWELRY IS AMONG THE MOST PRECISE IN ANTIQUITY, so why are some amulets so poorly made? Looking at the three Thoth amulets on the left, we see an example of the very precise, the poor but still recognizable, and the hardly recognizable. This is due to their practice of degradation, in which very important and recognizable amulets are made in very wide degrees of accuracy, possibly as a result of what the clients were willing to pay. ARRAY OF TUART AMULETS, the hippopotamus goddess of children/childbirth: three to left measure exactly 2.08 centimeters high, even though they might not have been made in the same mold, a measure of the faience makers’ precise skills in antiquity (Liu 1995, 2000).
UPPER PALEOLITHIC ORNAMENTS of the Solutrean culture (19,000 B.C.), excavated from Grotte Jouclas, France: top row shows pierced teeth (Canis, Cervus, Rangifer, Bos); bottom row are pierced shells of dentalium and Glycymeris. Courtesy of Logan Museum of Anthropology, Beloit College (Liu 2010). GROOVED ELK TEETH from Russia, 8000-6000 B.C.; this technique for stringing was probably learned from Neanderthals, eliminating the difficult task of drilling a hard and valuable object. Courtesy of Marijana Benesh.
PERFORATED SHELLS AND SHELL BEADS, from precolumbian inland North America; whole shells with ground perforations, sometimes made by predatory molluscs or wave action, and disk beads of mother-of-pearl; cup-shaped, barrel and disks, most from Mound builder cultures (Liu 2008a). Many of these types of shell beads/pendants closely resemble those from very ancient times, perhaps as old as 300,000 years ago (Bednarik 2015). Courtesy of the late D. Mort, J. Plath and G. Schmick.
How did human hand skills evolve and how does this relate to contemporary craftspeople? This is a very difficult question to answer. It requires looking at studies of how various ancient artifacts were made, a lot of speculation and extrapolating from one’s own evolution in hand and mental skills, especially hand-eye abilities, if one is also a maker.
Surprisingly, in certain media modern craftspeople are not necessarily as skilled as our ancient counterparts, despite our access to better tools, vision devices and materials. For example, with glass ornaments, metalsmithing and for faience, the ancients were better. During the Islamic Period, their glass beads far exceed what any contemporary beadmaker can do. In metal, the ancient East Indians of the Sunga Period (185-172 B.C.) made extremely fine granulation that current craftspeople cannot match. With faience, virtually the oldest medium used for ornaments, there are almost no extant artists, certainly none that could equal the work of Dynastic Egyptians. There was one American faience artist, but she is now elderly and ill; there are or were some German artists, but I am not in touch with any.
What has helped me in this quest are my background as a biomedical scientist, especially as an ethologist (one who studies the comparative behavior of animals, including fellow humans, thus requiring many close observations of sometimes very similar animals) and of having many interests. I essentially trained myself to be a writer, photographer and jeweler, vital to my past fifty years as coeditor of Ornament. Although I took art classes at college, my siblings and I were all fairly good illustrators and artists, inherited in part from our mother, Mary.
My drawing skills were close to professional, necessary for any craftsperson; during college, I worked summers as a modelmaker and in graduate school, I practiced gyotaku, a Japanese art form of fish prints, in which I made a major innovation. But I was also a maker, especially of scale models, and somewhat less frequently of jewelry. My late engineer brother, John, started me on making scale models around 1948 and also taught me essentially to have the outlook of a mechanical engineer, which is very helpful when one is a maker. Due to my professional and personal interests, I was and am a serious collector, of models of naval ships, aircraft, other military models, and scale construction machinery, as well as contemporary, ethnographic and ancient jewelry, artifacts and art. Thus throughout my life, now at eighty-seven, I have been comparing the skills of makers of many different types of objects in very different media and time periods, from the present to antiquity.
For example, my lifelong avocation of collecting, making and writing about naval ship models of WW II has given me useful insights into the skills of makers and the processes they used. The models in my ship collection date from WW II recognition models to almost the latest 3D-printed ship models, covering a span of over eighty years, although such models have been extant since WW I. Some are the result of highly industrialized processes, others handmade, as well as those using specialized metal casting or recent 3D-printing techniques. Standards of accuracy or excellence in crafting such models have obviously changed during these decades, mirroring the evolution and progression of ancient humans in making and valuing their own ornaments or tools through time.
Because of having done much research when writing for Ornament and my other interests, in order to ensure accuracy, my judgements as to skills are usually based on thorough background knowledge of the objects that I judge as to the skills involved in their making, necessary when making a determination to cover an artist’s work, or judging entries in a competition. In either case, one’s decision in such cases should always rest on a solid basis, not personal likes or dislikes, although that is a factor hard to ignore. The criteria on what one judges vary, but are often so ingrained and effortlessly ticked off in one’s mind as one studies or judges an object or an array of them. This especially pertains to someone frequently judging the skills used in the making of many different types of objects.
MOLLY HASKINS CUT AND PASTE KILN-FORMED GLASS, whereby a very soft Wasser glass is cut into pieces, glued together and heated in a kiln to transform into very different shapes, as shown above in left image (Liu 2004/2005a). A CARNELIAN FLAKED BEAD ROUGHOUT, VERSUS A CONTEMPORARY COPY OF A REAL INDUS VALLEY LONG BICONE BEAD AND AN ACTUAL INDUS VALLEY LONG BICONE. The process of making such beads today is very similar to that practiced around 2500 B.C. in the Indus Valley (Lankton et al., 2003). It took 3-8 days to drill each long bicone bead in antiquity (Kenoyer 2003). Ancients used stone drills, versus diamond drills now for replicas.
AUTHENTIC ANCIENT AND IMITATION INDONESIAN JATIM BEADS: two halves of broken real Jatim bead shows thin layer of mosaic glass over monochrome core. On same row are two authentic Jatim beads, showing the same characteristic elongated mosaic patterns at the perforation, due to the hot-pinch method of manufacture. Above broken halves is large imitation Jatim made in 1990, with very little resemblance to the prototype; on the same row to right is imitation made in 1995, showing rapid progress by Indonesian glass beadmakers of perfecting their imitative skills in just five years (Liu 2001).
Whether one is writing/researching an article or working on a project to make something, there is often total immersion, so that one’s waking and sleeping hours are subconsciously fixated on the work. At such times, really meaningful insights can occur. Having a relaxing environment often helps, such as showers, when one is totally relaxed and free of stress. At night, I often wake up to jot down a note to include something in an article, or to check out a certain reference, or if making something, to remind me to try out a new process or technique. At times, I am so excited about a possible new technique that I can hardly wait to get into the studio.
Proof of concept is the hard part, where you attempt to translate an idea into something material or three-dimensional, or to improve your manual skills, train of thought or insight. Sometimes, the work process goes so smoothly, that hours flash by in the studio and everything clicks, or the thoughts pour out effortlessly onto your computer keyboard.
Perhaps an example helps: as a former ichthyologist, anything having to do with fish is worthy of study. Thus, in graduate school at UCLA I became interested in the Japanese art of gyotaku, whereby fisherman would print their catch on paper, somewhat like the Western concept of having a taxidermist mount your catch into something that could be permanently displayed as a trophy. For gyotaku, the fish would be laid out, with fins positioned as in life, then sumi ink would be painted onto the fish, careful to keep the ink only on what would be visible from a bird’s eye view, to prevent distorting the shape of the fish in the resulting print. Dry rice paper is carefully laid onto the fish, proceeding from head to tail, the paper being pressed down onto the fish. In this way, the wet ink is transferred onto the paper, yielding often a striking image of the fish or other marine life, but perhaps not very detailed. This is called the direct method, and the ink can be washed off and the fish still consumed, as sumi is not toxic. A more accurate and detailed gyotaku can be achieved in the indirect method, in which wet rice paper is laid over the fish, then cotton balls or tampons are dabbed into ink, then these ink-laden objects are lightly pressed or dabbed against the paper and the underlying fish, leading to a more delicate and detailed print, almost as if one were doing a rubbing but requiring a much longer time. If the ink were colored, one could duplicate the color of the fish.
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Having access to fresh fish bought at the market, fish collected during ichthyology field classes or from far off and exotic places like Eniwetok, site of early atomic bomb tests, enabled me to practice gyotaku easily and frequently, giving me the opportunity to try combining these two techniques. In my method, black ink is applied onto those parts of the fish that one wants to print, permitted to dry; then slightly damp rice paper is applied to the fish, essentially molded onto it. By pressing down on the slightly moist paper, the dry ink is transferred or wicked onto the paper, making a very accurate and detailed impression of all the fish’s anatomy: the fins, spines, scales, mouth, body shape, eye socket, etc. This process is possible because the slight amount of water in the moist rice paper dissolves the dry ink, permitting an impression of that portion of the fish that has been pressed upon. As the paper dries, it actually keeps the three dimensional surface features of the fish being printed. Because the pupil of the fish eye is not a distinct structure that can be printed, this is the only part of a gyotaku that is permitted to be painted by a brush. Thus, through much trial and error, I was able to make this direct/indirect method work most of the time, even being able to print sharks, notoriously difficult due to having tiny teeth-like scales or denticles, instead of distinct scales like bony fishes.
While I perfected this direct/indirect method of printing fish some six decades ago, I can still feel that elation that was hard to describe, as if I had done something really notable or making an important achievement or advancement in this field of art. Maybe this is what happens when ancient craftspeople made advances, improvements or new techniques, such as learning to slightly heat wood sticks in the fire to straighten them, or finding a particular rock that would flake or knap well, yielding really good stone tools. This connection between the ancient craftsman and myself is comforting, and a little thrilling as well.
When I make jewelry, I have felt similar levels of joy as I was able to heat bend black bamboo into pleasing or unusual shapes or heatshrink polyester into graceful planes over a wire matrix, especially since these techniques have not been practiced by other jewelers. In my other avocation, that of making scale models, especially in very small scales, when one is shrinking an actual 100 foot object into something one inch or 2.5 centimeters long, the process is essentially that of creating illusions, making a miniature that accurately resembles the prototype, in a very simplified form that is often only millimeters long, but still representative of the real object. This type of making requires considerable hand-eye skills, knowledge of the prototype, great accuracy, and an ability to reduce physical structures into the most simple yet recognizable form. Probably any serious craftsperson would have engaged in similar practices during their career, evolving their skills through work, constant practice and the desire to improve.
ANCIENT STRATIFIED EYEBEAD FROM SYRIA, showing a possible mistake by the beadmaker in 300-600 B.C. Using a blue/white glass rod, the maker produced the eyebead, but should have ended the trailing more carefully. Sometimes errors like this, or an incomplete process or a broken ornament tells us much about how ancient objects were made and the skill of the maker (Liu 1995).
OBSIDIAN CORE AND DERIVED EARFLARES, from precolumbian Mexico/Mesoamerica: the obsidian core displays two smooth, tapered areas, from which the two finished, polished and perfectly round earflares were knapped, flaked or sawn. The actual lapidary process is not known, but must have required great skill to remove the two volcanic glass ear ornaments, as well as lapidary grind them to their final shape and polish. Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Liu 2023).
MANDARIN COURT NECKLACE COUNTERWEIGHTS, showing different levels of lapidary grinding quality of eternal knots into the glass, poorest at top. Not only does this show levels of skills, but also perhaps willingness to pay for quality by the Qing court officials who wore such necklaces (Liu 2014).
Through Ornament’s coverage of craftspeople in many media and our attending and supporting the best craft shows, we have been exposed to many of America’s top craft artists, as well as those of the world, past and present. Their work with shell, stone, faience, glass, ceramics, and metal have been written about, as seen in the references in this article. Especially notable are Zhou Dynasty composite and glass beadmakers, Islamic glass beadmakers and Tuareg craftspeople. These latter nomadic peoples are remarkable in that both sexes excel in multiple crafts utilizing many media, yet working with the most elementary of tools, usually made by the craftsperson themselves. Tuareg metalsmiths are the best of this media in Africa (Liu 2012, 2015, 2018, 2019, 2024).
Some contemporary craftspeople display and maintain excellent skills over decades, like the enamel jeweler Marianne Hunter, or are constantly evolving in their designs and techniques, like the basketmaker Jill Heir, who incidentally has an engineering background. Of the scores of similarly talented craftspeople that we know, I mention these two since we communicate often, frequently on a daily basis, permitting a detailed, ongoing record of our exchange of ideas about crafts and life.
Besides those who sponsor craft shows that display the best of American craft, Craft in America is an organization that has been a major force in bringing crafts to the American public, through their series of excellent documentary films on craftspeople shown through PBS. Especially relevant and ambitious is their Craft Dictionary, which seeks to visually show every craft technique, all under the able guidance of Carol Sauvion, a longtime craft gallerist turned filmmaker and one of the driving forces behind Handwork 2026, during which American craft will be emphasized and celebrated.
The thought processes or skills of work by contemporary or ethnographic craftspeople is often accessible, as shown in images and their captions in this article, but those of ancient makers are only available as extant artifacts, such as rock paintings/cave art, tools or jewelry, especially beads or other perforated ornaments. Recently cave art dated to 51,000 years ago was found in Sulawesi caves in Indonesia, interpreted as a pig and three humans, although hardly apparent to my eyes. Previously, the oldest modern human cave paintings were from the Lascaux or Chauvet cave paintings in France dated to 21,000 years ago, of easily recognizable animals, often very dynamic and dramatic art. Non-modern humans, such as the Neanderthals, made cave art dating to 65,000 years ago in the Aradales caves in Spain, but of non-figurative art. Did it take some thirty thousand years for modern humans to learn to make realistic images of animals, given that all ancient hominids must have possessed good observational skills to survive in their dangerous world of numerous and fierce predators that they portrayed?
During the research and writing of this article, I viewed a recent documentary film entitled Neanderthal: The First Artist (youtube.com/watch?v=fHzbsfBfUo8), where researchers studied the traces on the walls of a French cave, La Roche Cotard, as well as stone tools and a unique face-like rock carving, dated by a new technique, OSL, to be about 60,000 years ago. This was the first dated context of cave art and figurative art made by Neanderthals, as Homo sapiens did not enter this area until 45,000 years ago. Based upon studies of other material culture, others have postulated that modern humans both interbred and learned from Neanderthals. The three grooved elk teeth from Russia shown earlier in this article may be an example of modern humans adapting a Neanderthal technique.
Prominent paleoarcheologists have seized upon beads or other perforated objects like pendants as excellent artifacts to measure ancient human skills as they evolved into modern humans (Bednarik 2005, d’Errico et al. 2003). Some ancient ornaments consisted of gastropod shells, with a hole or perforation, sometimes made by predatory molluscs or wave action, thus offering an easy way of using them as beads or pendants. That they functioned in this way was confirmed by examining them with high-powered optical instruments that showed string wear or abrasion in their perforations. Whether the perforation was natural or made by humans, they were used as ornaments, signifying these early humans’ recognition of symbolism, as well as practical sensibility. Other beads, like ostrich shell disks, widespread in both the ancient world and in ethnographic jewelry, were made to a high level of perfection not necessary for their function as strung ornaments, demonstrating ancient humans’ ability to recognize the concept of perfection, something contemporary craftspeople all strive to practice, although those of us who collect such ethnographic ornaments, like imported ostrich shell beads from Africa, can readily see a wide range of skills in the making of such beads, ranging from crudely chipped disks to finely polished, round disks.
Does this reflect inherent skills, knowledge of what the users of such beads would accept, or some economic factor of lessening labor costs?
QING DYNASTY AND CONTEMPORARY CHINESE DESIGNER FOOTWEAR, left image of platform shoes worn by upper class Manchu women, who did not bind their feet like Han women. Courtesy of Freer Gallery. Right image of platform shoes by Chinese designer Guo Pei, at an exhibit at the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. This is meant for wealthy contemporary Chinese women, now the upper class. These footwear reflect the copying of a hundreds-of-years-old tradition of elevating the height of wealthy women, seen also in other cultures, such as the platform clogs worn by Turkish women, with their servants only permitted to wear lower height clogs.
Something as seemingly simple to us, like putting shells or shell beads on a string, lead to a remarkable series of important advances in human skills. A strand of beads on a string meant the ability to tie knots, which lead to being able to construct netting, and strings are the starting point of textiles/cloth (Barber 1993). In fact, sometimes it is hard to differentiate beads from spindle whorls, the basic tool for spinning fibers, so could an ornament like an appropriately shaped bead have been adapted to become a tool like the spindle whorl (Liu 1978)? The origin of a significant tool or technique is something every contemporary craftsperson must contemplate often, as to how and why it was developed. Tools and techniques are the instruments that enable us to practice and express our manual skills.
After over three hundred thousand years, how does the contemporary craftsperson compare with those of antiquity? We now have much better ability to see, vital for all makers, as well as power tools and other manufacturing devices, all of which lead to greatly decreased amount of time in carrying out manual tasks, as well as enabling more complex processes. Time is money now, most likely not valued by ancient craftspeople like we do. Even with modern tools, it takes a long time to work well materials like stone, shell, wood, and metal. The high levels of skills involved in the making of ancient glass, stone, shell, and metal throughout the world as portrayed in this article would be a challenge for any contemporary craftsperson. Would any of us have the patience to use the slight abrasive property of the skin of our hands to polish jade ornaments, like the Maori did, as related to me by our dear friend Steve Myhre, a fine New Zealand carver and author on stone, shell, wood, and bone art?
Ancestral craftspeople practiced and honed their skills since what they made was necessary for their life and survival, as might be still the case for some Native Americans and people like the Tuaregs, since crafts are so integral to their lifestyle.
Most of contemporary craft is not involved with ritual, religion, hierarchy nor necessities, as were the many ethnographic/ancient objects shown here. Craftmaking is vital to the economic life of their practitioners, and perhaps to the aesthetic, emotional life of those who buy and support the work of contemporary craftspeople. Besides the necessity to earn a living, makers also fulfill their intellectual and emotional needs by their craft, deriving enormous satisfaction when their work meets their own expectations, in addition to the rewarding aspects of physical work.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I thank the late Carolyn L. E. Benesh, Patrick R. Benesh-Liu, our present and past staff, contributors and the members of the Benesh and Liu families, who supported and nourished Ornament and myself through half a century, as well as all the craftspeople who have enriched my life through our interactions and exchanges.
SUGGESTED READING
Barber, E. J. W. 1993 Prehistoric Textiles: The Development of Cloth in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages With Special Reference to the Aegean. Princeton, Princeton University Press: 512 p.
Bednarik, R.G. 2008 Beads and Cognitive Evolution. Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture. Volume I(III): 285–318.
Chrisman-Campbell, K. 2019 Guo Pei. Couture Beyond. Ornament 41 (2): 40-45.
F. d’Errico, C. Henshilwood, G. Lawson, M. Vanhaeren, A-M. Tillier, M. Soressi, F. Bresson, B. Maureille, A. Nowell, J. Lakarra, L. Backwell, and M. Julien 2003 Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music—An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective. Journal of World Prehistory 17(1): 1-70.
Kenoyer, J.M. 2003. Stone Beads and Pendant Making Techniques, in A Bead Timeline: Vol. 1 Prehistory to 1200 ce (J.W. Lankton Ed.): 14-19. Washington DC: The Bead Museum.
Lankton, J. et al. 2003 A Bead Timeline. Volume I: Prehistory to 1200 CE. Washington, DC, The Bead Museum: 95 p.
Liu, R.K. 1978 Spindle Whorls: Pt. I. Some Comments and Speculations. The Bead Journal 3 (3 & 4): 87-103.
—1995 Collectible Beads. A Universal Aesthetic. San Marcos, Ornament Inc.: 256 p.
—2000 Comparison of ancient faience ornaments. Ornament 23 (3): 56-61.
—2001 Fakes...Deducing attitudes from artifacts. Ornament 24 (4): 24-31.
—2002 Ancient arts. Slit-ring earrings. Ornament 26 (1): 38-39
—2004/2005a Cleveland Museum of Art. Ornament 28(2): 36-37.
—2004/2005b Molly Haskins. Cut and Paste: Kiln-formed glass beads. Ornament 28(2): 58-61.
—2006 Prehistoric Mosaic Jewelry of the American Southwest. Ornament 30 (2): 54-59.
—2008a Ancient Shell Ornaments of the Americas. Ornament 31 (4): 50-55.
—2008b Museum News. Harvard Art Museum. Arthur M. Sackler Museum. Ornament 32 (2): 18-19.
—2010 Beads: Prehistory to Early Twenty-First Century. In: Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion. Vol. 10 Global Perspectives. J.B. Eicher (ed). Oxford, Berg Publishers: 33-46.
—2012 Islamic Glass Beads. The Well-Traveled Ornament. Ornament 36 (1): 58-63, 70.
—2014 Photography of Personal Adornment. Photographic Techniques for Jewelry/Artwear Craftspeople, Researchers, Scholars and Museum/Gallery Staff. San Marcos, Ornament Inc: 160p.
—2015 Zhou Dynasty Glass and Silicate Jewelry. Ornament 38 (4): 52-58.
—2018 Tuareg Amulets and Crosses. Saharan/Sahelian Innovation and Aesthetics.. Ornament 40 (3): 58-63.
—2019 Tuareg Jewelry. Craft as Lifestyle. Ornament 41 (2): 46-53
—2023 Precolumbian Stone Ornaments. Lessons of the Earth. Ornament 44 (2): 24-29.
—2024 Islamic Glass Beads revisited. A Global Trade. Ornament 44 (3): 26-33
Robert K. Liu is Coeditor of Ornament, for many years its in-house photographer, as well as covering ethnographic and ancient jewelry, and events related to wearable art, both in and out of the Ornament studio. 2024 marked the fiftieth year of Ornament Magazine, which he and his late wife Carolyn Benesh began in 1974. He feels equal parts of incredulity and pride at reaching this milestone. Not always conscious of what was central to his interest in personal adornment, in recent years he has realized that the driving force behind his research and writing has really been the evolution and comparison of human skills, whether expressed in ancient, ethnographic or contemporary jewelry, or in scale models and mechanical vehicles, and how they are made and operate. A lifetime avocation of scale modelmaking culminated in the publication in 2021 of a book on naval ship models of World War II, published in the United Kingdom. He continues to write in this field. Chinese and other faience, composites and glass, whether ancient, ethnographic or contemporary are among some of his research interests, as well as vintage Chinese folk jewelry. For the current issue, he tries to write about ancient skills, a very difficult subject, as it entails studying ancient artifacts and trying to deduce when and what types of skills were being practiced, along with one’s own development of skills if one were a maker.
