signsThe tooth and the claw

The clearest documented European case is small and specific. The Pitt Rivers Museum holds a wolf's canine mounted in gold, from the Haute-Marne in north-eastern France, accession 1985.52.105, acquired before 1931 and transferred from the Wellcome Institute in 1985. The museum records it as worn by a child as a remedy for convulsions, and chewed or rubbed on the gums during teething. The practice is old: Pliny the Elder writes that a wolf's tooth could also stop a child being startled.

Illyrians used animal teeth against the evil eye, alongside shapes of the phallus, the hand and the leg — so the tooth sits in the same substitution set as the other signs in this atlas's eye family.

In the Pacific the tooth is a whale's and its meaning is social before it is protective. A Fijian tabua is a polished sperm whale tooth, given as sevusevu for atonement or esteem, and used in negotiations between rival chiefs. The dead were buried with their tabua. Originally the teeth were rare — from beached whales, or traded from Tonga, where the practice may have begun — but once the market was known in the early nineteenth century thousands of teeth, and fakes made from ivory and walrus tusk, entered it. That trade is where the European art of scrimshaw grew up. A Hawaiian lei niho palaoa is a neck ornament worn by aliʻi of both sexes, most nineteenth-century examples a whale tooth carved into a hook and suspended on plaited human hair. What it means is not known; it may represent a tongue that speaks the law, or a vessel for mana. Pre-contact ones were under two inches long and made of shell, bone, wood, stone and coral as well as whale ivory. The Bishop Museum holds one whose hair bundle has a circumference of 7.5 inches: a single eight-ply square braid cord 1,708 feet long, looped back and forth over a thousand times on each side.

Inuit use of amulets is documented but the sources read here describe the class rather than the material. The Netsilik used a great many, unlike the Iglulik; even dogs could have them; one boy was recorded with eighty, so many he could hardly play. The efficacy is attributed to the amulet's corresponding spirit, and amulets could be made by an angakoq or by a lay person.

Inference — a tooth is the part of an animal that did the animal's work, and it is the part that survives burial. Both of those are reasons it turns up; this atlas cannot separate them from the evidence read here.

This record does not name every people among whom teeth and claws are worn. Where a source names a people, that name is printed above. Where none does, the gap stays a gap.