- Collection type
- Object
- Description
- Leather thong strung with 10 creamy-white Lion teeth. Possibly a trophy ornament for ankle or arm. [EC 'DCF 2004-2006 What's Upstairs?' 30/11/2005]
- Date / Period
- Date made: Before 1841?, uncertain
- Date collected
- By 1841 ?
- Acquisition information
- Transferred: 10/02/1886
- Materials and processes
- Material Lion Tooth Cat Animal, Material Animal Leather Skin, Process Drilled, Process Strung
- Dimensions
- Length: max 70 mm tooth
- Object numbers
- Accession number: 1886.1.527 Other numbers: 527
- Research and responses
It seems likely that all the items given by Mrs (Anna Margaret) Birkbeck [née Gardner] (circa 1794-?) to the Ashmolean Museum, including those like this later transferred to the PRM, had belonged to her late husband George Birkbeck (1776-1841) and can thus be given be regarded as having been made and collected by 1841. [JC 22 12 2010]
This ornament is one of a number of objects borrowed from the Ashmolean Museum by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) for use as props in his photography. It can be seen in a photograph of Ella Monier-Williams taken by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) on 9 July 1866. Apparently only one print of this photograph survives: in a Monier-Williams family photograph album held in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford (MS MS Photogr. d 21; no. 72). See ‘“Dressed as a New Zealander”, or an Ethnographic Mischmasch? Notes and Reflections on Two Photographs by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)’, by Jeremy Coote and Christopher Morton, in Journal of Museum Ethnography, no. 28, pp. 150–72. [JC 22 1 2015, 25 6 2015, 28 8 2015]
Search terms: Ornament, Unidentified Object, Arm Ornament, Leg Ornament