Watching the Dancers

Four young girls have their backs to the camera. Wearing traditional holiday dress they are watching dancers from a nearby rooftop. The adobe structure is simple, yet sturdy. Description by Edward Curtis: "A group of girls on the topmost roof of, looking down into the plaza." – "The Hopi reservation was established in 1882, but until the beginning of the twentieth century the people were practically independent of governmental authority. Since that time official supervision, assistance, and sometimes blundering interference in harmless religious and personal customs, has become more and more effective, and the result is the gradual abandonment of the old order. In 1906 not a maid at the East mesa kept her hair in the picturesque squash-blossom whorls indicative of the unmarried state." Summary: Four Hopi women on the topmost roof of Walpi Pueblo looking down at the plaza. Four women wrapped in heavy blankets, wearing traditional dresses and hairstyles watching dancers, probably at some event or festival in Walpi Pueblo, Arizona, US. The women's hairstyle is called "squash blossom whorl" (the is a symbol of fertility), and it is the traditional hairstyle for unmarried girls in

Date

1906

Archive

Library of Congress (via Wikimedia Commons)

Type

photograph

Original size

3,245 × 4,014 pixels

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