"Who Scalped Whom?" Topic

"BOSCAWEN, N.H. – As monuments go, the one depicting Colonial heroine Hannah Dustin looks like any other, with one crucial exception: In her left hand she holds a fistful of human scalps.

The inscription underneath tells of her 1697 capture in an Indian raid, and how she slew her captors as they slept – 10 women and children. Later she returned for their scalps, having remembered they could fetch a bounty.

The idea of a settler scalping Indians might seem like a historical quirk. Most Americans assume that if there was any scalping going on in Colonial times, the Indians were doing it, not the English…."
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Amicalement
Armand

We learned scalping from the white folks but took it to a whole new level. :)

It would easy to say that scalping started with the French fur collectors (What I think was told me in school), but it has a much longer and complicated history:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalping

And sadly, Native Americans seem to have done it even before the Europeans introduced their version.

There is plenty of evidence that scalping was being done long before the arrival of Europeans.

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

I've come across one recorded instance of this practice on the colonial Australian frontier.

Well big deal -- I just purchased some unbelievable cheap Pittsburgh Pirate tickets just today??

And insofar as Europe and Asia, it goes back at least to the Skythians.

The Gauls didn't mess with the scalp, they just took the whole head !!!

I recently became aware that anthropologists, working in Mexico City, unearthed a "wall of skulls," polished human skulls with a sapling running through from the skulls from right to left. A dozen or more in line, with more above.

Done by the Aztecs. Allegedly they got to the point of holding team sport events, where the losing team was killed.

Allegedly they date from the 1300's, a hundred or more years before the arrival to Columbus in 1492. Scalping was a flesh wound by comparison!

GdeP

CHOCTAW: We learned scalping from the white folks but took it to a whole new level. :)

Then it would have emerged in European military culture long before it did in North America. Strangely Napoleon's men didn't scalp Russians at Austerlitz, nor did the British scalp the French dead at Waterloo. I also don't believe that the SS scalped any Americans at Bastogne.