Georgia O’Keeffe, Drawing #12 was untitled, but her notes say: “Maybe a kiss?” From Some Memories of Drawings.
You must remember this, A kiss is just a kiss A sigh is just a sigh…
From “As Time Goes By”
When and how humans began to kiss is a lively debate–very lively! The Internet has different answers, many contradictory. Just this morning, I have read no less than five articles that claim to cover the history of kissing, and they all cite different ancient history. The oldest kiss is from Brazil–no Akkadia! Definitely tablets on Easter Island (what? Reddit?) Positively from Vedic love poems, Sappho, Sumeria…
Pendant from Tutankhamen’s tomb @1330 BCE. From Cairo Museum, photo by Jon Bodsworth.
All kept objects have a purpose.
It’s a basic rule of archaeology, the discipline where people dig up other people’s graves and trash. What gets buried with a person is generally thought to be valuable. What remains at settlements, even discarded, was thought to be there for a reason.
When it comes to carved objects, though, whose purpose is not shelter, food, or defense, the logic gets a little squirrelly. If scholars can argue the items are religious, like a “venus” figurine or ankh symbol, it might be filed under protection or belief systems. Let’s explore the purpose for personal ornamentation as the archaeologists call it. We just call it Jewelry.
“Ancient” American ice house,, Louisiana October 1938, Library of Congress photo by Russell Lee.
Nearly five years ago, I wrote a version of this post after reading Who Ate the First Oyster?, Cody Cassidy’s marvelous book, which chronicles stories of individual firsts. My approach focuses globally rather than on firsts. So far we have journeyed around the world to see what humanity has created, from Siberia to Chile to Australia to Germany to Egypt and to the Fertile Crescent.
I’ve leaned into anthropology and archaeology fairly heavily, although today’s journey will be more standard history. For this particular topic, we need to stretch the boundaries of “ancient” forward a little, tiptoeing into the Middle Ages, to understand this marvelous creation. Really, it’s why probably humans learned to control fire, stand up, carry our babies with us, and build giant pyramids. We needed to develop knowledge and skills to invent Ice Cream.
The road to inventing ice cream was a bit circuitous and meandered from the ziggurat-days of Ur to the sophisticated empires of the Far East and back to Fertile Crescent. The most important part of the invention happened near the beginning. Because to make ice cream, you needed ice.
