scalping The practice of removing the scalp, ‘the haire skinne of the head’, from a slain enemy as a trophy, originated in ancient headhunting. The English word ‘scalp’ is derived from the Danish
skalp (shell, husk), which, like the Old Norse
skalpr (sheathe), belongs to the Indo-European verb stem
skel- (to cut), and is thus related to
skelo (Danish:
skaal, Swedish:
skål), the Germanic term for ‘drinking vessel’. According to Paulus Diaconus,
skelo was originally applied only to vessels made from
skulls, out of which the blood of vanquished foes was drunk both in Germanic and classical antiquity. Corresponingly, in Middle English scalp still meant ‘skull’, and only after the seventeenth century did the word take on the more common and specific meaning of the ‘skin of the head’. From that point on the word ‘scalping’ was used to describe the ‘peeling’ of the skin from the head of dead and, on occasion, still living enemies, and above all to its practice among several Indian tribes of North and South America, where it served to satisfy a thirst for glory and honour or simply as a means of revenge.
Although American native peoples were all too often accused of being the sole practitioners of scalping, in reality they did nothing others had not done before. Herodotus found the practice among the Pontic Scythians, and, according to the Maccabees, the ancient Persians tore away the scalp of one of their prisoners. Orosius reports that Romans scalped during the battle on the Raudine plain. It is highly probable that Germanic tribes behaved similarly, for we know that they ascribed magical powers to a shock of human hair, regarding it as the symbol of the free man. In Germanic law, if a court demanded the guilty party's head to be shaved it was considered an especially grievous sentence — in very serious cases the court could decree that the hair be ripped out with the skin. The Vandals used this form of scalping (
decalvatio) as a method of torture; several provisions of the
Sachsenspiegel, the oldest and most influential legal code of medieval Germany, are tantamount to the same thing. The shaved, bald heads of prisoners in Nazi concentration camps, as well as those of
bochesses (German-lovers) after the defeat of the
Wehrmacht in the zones occupied by Germany during World War II, are horrible reminders of that dreadful tradition.
Outside Europe, tribes in western Siberia practised scalping into recent times, as did the Naga peoples in the Indian state of Assam and various groups in the interior of Celebes. In 1845, the British traveller John Duncan watched the Apadomey regiment of the legendary black Amazonian army pass in parade before the king of Dahomey — bearing 700 scalps as trophies. Duncan's awe-struck description of the sight has been adapted many times, most recently in Richard Fleischer's
Conan the Destroyer, where Grace Jones plays a warrior woman armed with a knife and draped, as it appears, with scalps. In the Caribbean, scalp hunts were organized by runaway slaves, especially the ‘bushmen’ of Surinam, who, following African custom, used scalps for ceremonial purposes inside their fortified asylums (
palenques).
Among the native peoples of both Americas, scalping was originally not widespread and was practised only rarely and on a small scale. It was only after firearms and steel knives were introduced that the taking of scalps as booty became more frequent. Even then, scalping did not become extensive until the eighteenth century, when warring European groups adopted the custom of posting rewards for scalps in order to terrorize the foe of the moment. By that time, however, it was certainly no longer merely ‘reds’ scalping ‘whites’ and other ‘reds’, but also ‘whites’ scalping ‘reds’ and other ‘whites’. In the Kansas — Nebraska War of the 1850s, ‘damn'd abolitionists’ were scalped, as were some political opponents during the 1856 presidential election campaign between Buchanan and Fremont.
Peter Martin
Bibliography
Friederici, G. (1906). Skalpieren und ähnliche Kriegsgebräuche in Amerika. Braunschweig.
