Halssieraad

362-72 Quechan woman's necklace; vegetal fiber, glass, shell, cotton, padre beads; l. 72 cm.; ca. 1880. Traditionally the Yumans valued jewelry and the accounts of early explorers testify to the propensity of especially men to wear multi-stringed necklaces and nose and ear pendants of any kind of shell and coral procured in trade from the Gulf of California, and even as far away as the Pacific coast. Shells were used in their whole or were shaped into beads of various shapes and sizes. However, women also wore a variety of jewelry made from aquatic raw materials (Spier 1933:103; Forbes 1965:52-53,109-110; Ford 1983:713,719). This multi-stranded woman's necklace has a twined cord base, probably of native vegetal fiber, that has been partially wrapped and sewn into two thick coils by white and blue cotton string. At one end eighteen individually twined strands have their ends decorated with large opaque blue beads, also called padre beads, and small shells. The main ornament consists of a large shell carved as a jacla, with an appendage of six blue and white beaded strings. Very similar necklaces and pendants were collected by Johan Adrian Jacobson for the Museum of Anthropology in Berlin in 1883 among the Colorado River Yumans (Bolz and Sanner 1999:114, fig. 93), and by W.J. McGee among the Cocopas in 1900 (Williams 1983:108). (Hovens 2008-09)