Ever since getting back from Buffalo and the Lockwood collection I’ve had so-called peace medals on the brain.
This isn’t a totally new interest for me, but came up as I was preparing my 2018 article:
Liv Mariah Yarrow, The tree and sunset motif: the long shadow of Roman imperialism on representations of Africa, Classical Receptions Journal, Volume 10, Issue 3, July 2018, Pages 275–311. (link without paywall).
The key portion is below. When I published this I had not yet thought more about the Lewis’s speech and its rhetorical antecedents. (a blog post).
Above is a pretty standard design. The ANS has arguably the largest collection in the world (link to all photographed specimens in their collection).
My interest started from the reception of classical iconography of the clasped hands. This blog post is inspired by the image of the native leader wearing a medal. This is a key feature of the Morro Velho medals used as a form of slave control. Again discussed briefly in my 2018 article. I did go the UTAustin and read all the mine’s archival records looking for details of the production of this medal and have my own scans. It was a book plate engraver in London who made them not one of the major token/medal producers. I need to circle back to that project and get that published. Maybe the connection to early peace medals will get me more motivated to do that.
For the prevalence of these medals in the Lewis and Clarke expedition don’t just use key word medal but also meadal a common spelling variation. A theme of these journal entries is that size matters to recipients.
The other thought I want to write about down the road is the occasional cuff on the indigenous hand on the clasped hand medals. The white wrist is a military cuff, the eagle seems to be a fictive(?) medal bracelet with a design at once patriotic and tied to the distinctive fauna of the land.
Is the axe a weapon of war ‘tomahawk’ or is it meant to represent the felling and clearing of trees to make way for agriculture? Notice it is on the ground in the design of the top medal.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 