Puberty Collar
date: label: Accession Date
content: 7 Nov 1907
name: label: Collector
content: Lt. George T. Emmons
label: Donor Name
content: Bureau Of American Ethnology
notes: label: Notes
content: From Card: "Horseshoe frame covered with tanned skin decorated with rows of beads and dentalium and fringed with worsted strung with beads and dentalium. Worn for about a year by young girls released from confinement described in No. 24838."
label: Notes
content: Source of the information below: Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center Alaska Native Collections: Sharing Knowledge website, by Aron Crowell, entry on this artifact http://alaska.si.edu/record.asp?id=668, retrieved 8-24-2012: Puberty collar, Tahltan Athabascan. This woman's necklace from the Tahltan people of the upper Stikine River in British Columbia is a wooden collar covered with tanned skin and decorated with beads, dentalium shells, and wool tassels. At the time when a girl first started menstruating she withdrew from the community for a year or more, wore special clothing, and underwent training in the skills of women. For her "coming out" when she reentered society, a woman of high rank and wealth would put on a beaded ceremonial collar like this one.
label: Notes
content: This object is on loan to the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center, from 2010 through 2027.
label: Notes
content: Illus. Fig. 1.9 p. 16 in Thompson, Judy. 2013. Women's work, women's art: nineteenth-century northern Athapaskan clothing. Gatineau: Canadian Museum of Civilization. Identified there as a girl's neck ring, worn after puberty and before marriage, ca. 1900.
label: Record Last Modified
content: 12 Feb 2022
label: Specimen Count
content: 1
place: label: Place
content: Stikine River, British Columbia, Canada, North America
topic: label: Topic
content: Ethnology
culture: label: Culture
content: Tahltan
setName: label: See more items in
content: Anthropology
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: NMNH - Anthropology Dept.
identifier: label: Accession Number
content: 047997
label: USNM Number
content: E248388-0
objectType: label: Object Type
content: Collar
physicalDescription: label: Length - Object
content: 50 cm