Tweezers

Shell tweezers, New Georgia, Solomon Islands, 19th century

Copper-silver tweezers, Ancient Peru, AD 1000–1400

Left: Collected by Henry B. T. Somerville 1893–1894, and donated by him in 1895; 1895.22.101
Right: Donated by Louis Colville Gray Clarke in 1938; 1938.1.32Before the relatively late advent of metallurgy in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, tweezers (and a host of other implements including needles, fish-hooks, and awls) were made from shell or wood. They occurred in both symbolic and functional form and were often deposited as grave goods. Facial depilation, particularly the plucking out of beards, using tweezers is still known in the highlands of Peru and Ecuador.

A variety of tweezers appeared in different regions; in Ecuador and West Mexico, they took the slim 'beam' shape, similar to that of modern Western tweezers, whereas a semi-lunar form was favored in Colombia. This round-bladed shell design first appears in northwest Argentina, made between 200 BC and AD 650, but it was most abundant in later cultures of coastal Peru and the southern Andean highlands around AD 1000–1400. All Mesoamerican tweezers were generally made in the same way – cold-worked from a single piece of metal, commonly copper-tin bronze or an alloy of copper-silver.

Bivalve shells were used as tweezers in other part of the world. This example comes from New Georgia in the Solomon Islands, Melanesia and has been inserted into the dried outer husk of a fruit for protection and better grip. The collector, Henry B. T. Somerville, amassed several hundred items from the New Georgia and the neighboring islands on an expedition voyage in the 1890s, and he later donated them to the Pitt Rivers Museum. He noted that among the indigenous peoples he studied, the fashion in beards was "curious, the hair being shaved or plucked out, leaving only a small tuft an inch or so long in the middle of the chin," and that additional facial depilation was done at funeral feasts.