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INTACT MAURITANIAN JEWELRY, including leather bracelets with Kiffas, leather bag with strap decorated with Kiffas and carved conus shells and an ensemble of three triangular Kiffas from a hairdo. Strands of fine Kiffa or Muraqud beads surround the intact jewelry. The largest Kiffa would be around 2.5 centimeters long. Courtesy of Thomas Stricker collection. Photograph: Alex and Thomas Stricker. HANS ERNI WALL MURAL showing a Mauritanian woman applying powderglass placed in marine shells to bead core and another during the firing of beads. The woman in the background is manipulating the beads with metal tools while the beads are being heated on a sheet of metal over a charcoal fire. Courtesy of the Musée d'ethnograhie Neuchâtel in Switzerland, whose cafeteria houses these murals done by famous artist Hans Erni, part of Mauritanian society and culture. The society of approximately two million in the late 1970s consisted of an equal mixture of Arab, Berber and Black African stock. About eighty percent were nomads, a lifestyle that is especially dependant on the arrival of the annual rainfall, to feed their herds with fresh vegetation. Those nomads—among them our Kiffa beadmakers, were already over the edge, when the rain failed to come a third successive year. Hundreds of thousands of animals and over ten thousand people had already died the previous year. Many more would share their fate that year. Miles long were the treks of those trying to escape from the south, in hope of finding food, water and a safe haven in one of the few cities in Mauritania's north, where the arrival of international aid was expected. The Mauritanian Sahel had not experienced anything of this magnitude in its entire recorded history. When Mauritania would raise from the ashes, it was no longer the country it had been for almost a thousand years. 59 ORNAMENT 36.1.2012 natural hair. Depending on region and the woman's class and rank, the tresseuse or female hairdresser, uses carved conus shells, cowries, carnelian, and other stone beads, mecca-rings (khorb), crosses of silver and gold (boghdad) and various kinds of little glass beads. Among them, dominating yet still invisible to outsiders are the Kiffas under the veil. Lozenge and hemispherical, rarely conical types, are also sewn onto braided leather bands worn as bracelets on the left wrist. It is not known definitely when the first Kiffas were made but I was lucky to find two of the old beadmakers who told me they learned their craft from their grandmothers, just as these grandmothers did themselves, which leads to around 1820-1830 for a date when Muraqad certainly existed. Comparative studies among the approximately nine thousand beads in my collection and the Thomas Stricker collection point toward a very limited amount of beadmakers being active during the first half of the twentieth century. A reliable judgment is naturally difficult, but I assume that no more than twenty-five to thirty women were engaged in the craft during that period of time or even fewer beadmakers, possibly no more than ten to fifteen with a distinctive style of decoration. A guesstimate on the total numbers of Muraqad made during the last fifty years of regular production (1925 1975) would yield approximately one hundred fifty thousand beads (plus/minus fifty thousand) as a reasonable number (based on twenty beadmakers at work over fifty years, with each of them making a single bead every other day) leading to a maximum of one hundred eighty-two thousand beads. Making and wearing Muraqad is part of the old Mauritanian culture, which no longer exists. Even in remote villages and isolated encampments, one will not find women who care to craft or wear what Western collectors call Kiffa beads, based on speculation that these beads originated in Kiffa, a town of forty thousand in the south of Mauritania. A tragedy caused these beads to appear on the radar of bead collectors during the second half of the 1980s. A series of severe droughts during the 1970s and early 1980s, followed by a rapid progression of desertification, was the primary cause, but not the only one to extinguish the main