Examines a variety of tattooing, scarification, painting and adornment techniques used in Africa, Asia, America, and Oceania since the eighteenth century with a discussion of body adornment in rituals and religion

This unrivalled collection of striking photographs traces more than ten thousand years of cultural history - from the body painting of stone-age peoples to the self-inflicted piercing of punks and the enduring image of the carnival clown in modern industrial society - illustrating an art form that is finding new relevance in the world of today. To set the plates in context, a distinguished team of art historians, ethnologists and archaeologists has provided enlightening commentaries which document the development of an extraordinarily broad spectrum of body painting, tattooing and scarring techniques.

Celebrates body decorations through color photographs and commentaries that describe the evolution of different practices throughout history and its role in specific special occasions.

Elaborating the history, variety, pervasiveness, and function of the adornments and ornaments with which we beautify ourselves, this book takes in human prehistory, ancient civilizations, hunter-foragers, and present-day industrial societies to tell a captivating story of hair, skin, and make-up practices across times and cultures. From the decline of the hat, the function of jewelry and popularity of tattooing to the wealth of grave goods found in the Upper Paleolithic burials and body painting of the Nuba, we see that there is no one who does not adorn themselves, their possessions, or their environment. But what messages do these adornments send? Drawing on aesthetics, evolutionary history, archaeology, ethology, anthropology, psychology, cultural history, and gender studies, Stephen Davies brings together African, Australian and North and South American indigenous cultures and unites them around the theme of adornment. He shows us that adorning is one of the few social behaviors that is close to being genuinely universal, more typical and extensive than the high-minded activities we prefer to think of as marking our species – religion, morality, and art. Each chapter shows how modes of decoration send vitally important signals about what we care about, our affiliations and backgrounds, our social status and values. In short, by using the theme of bodily adornment to unify a very diverse set of human practices, this book tells us about who we are.

Over the course of numerous voyages to Africa's Omo Valley, Hans Silvester became fascinated by the beauty of the Surma, Mursi, Hamer and Kurma tribes, who share a taste for body painting and extravagant decorations borrowed from nature. This collection of photographs captures these accoutrements.

This volume provides a history of human decoration and adornment.