The History of the Mohawk: Iron Age Ireland to Punk London

Shave both sides of the head, leave a strip of longer hair running from forehead to nape, and stand it up. That is the mohawk in its most familiar form, and since the 1970s it has been shorthand for punk and for refusing to fit in ^[1]. But the haircut is far older than punk, and its name hides a historical mistake. The people it is named after did not wear it, and the oldest surviving example was found not in North America but in an Irish peat bog.

A name from Hollywood

The mohawk takes its name from the Mohawk nation, one of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) peoples whose homeland was the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York. The link between the name and the haircut, however, owes more to the movies than to history. It was popularised by the 1939 film Drums Along the Mohawk, starring Henry Fonda ^[1].

Historically, Mohawk men and other Haudenosaunee men wore something different: a small square of hair on the back of the crown, with the rest of the hair removed. And it was not shaved. It was plucked out, a few hairs at a time ^[1]. James Smith, a colonist captured during the French and Indian War and adopted into the community, left a first-hand account. Men dipped their fingers in ashes for grip and pulled his hair out "as if he had been plucking a turkey", leaving a patch three or four inches square on his crown, which was cut and formed into three decorated braids ^[1]. The three upright eagle feathers on the traditional Mohawk headdress, the gustoweh, are said to represent those three braids ^[1].

In Britain the haircut is usually called a mohican, a name popularised by the 1971 BBC adaptation of The Last of the Mohicans. In that series, confusingly, the style was worn by characters representing the Huron ^[1]. It is also sometimes called an iro, after the Iroquois ^[1].

The Pawnee roach

The style that most resembles the modern mohawk was worn on the Great Plains. Among the Pawnee, who historically lived in what is now Nebraska and northern Kansas, a central crest of hair with the sides removed was common ^[1]. Warriors of other southern plains peoples, including the Kiowa, and of some Algonquian peoples such as the Mohegan and Lenape, also wore their hair shorn like a horse's mane, leaving a strip down the middle of the head. This hairstyle is known as a roach ^[5].

The same word also describes a separate headdress. Porcupine hair roaches, made from porcupine guard hair, deer-tail hair, moose hair or turkey beard, and often dyed red or yellow, were and still are worn by male dancers at powwows ^[5]. The headdress echoes the crest shape of the hairstyle, but it is regalia, not a haircut, and it carries its own meanings within each nation that wears it. When people today describe the punk mohawk as "Native American", they are usually flattening several distinct traditions, from different peoples, into one Hollywood image.

Herodotus and the crested Macae

The oldest written description of something like a mohawk comes from the fifth-century BCE Greek historian Herodotus. Describing the peoples of Libya, he wrote of the Macae, who lived on the coast to the west of the Nasamones and who "shave their hair to a crest, leaving that on the top of their heads to grow and shaving clean off what is on either side" ^[2]. In war, he added, they carried shields made of ostrich skin ^[2].

Herodotus was not always a reliable ethnographer, and he was describing people he had probably never seen. But the passage shows that, to a Greek writer of the 400s BCE, a shaved head with a central crest was distinctive enough to be worth recording as the mark of a particular people.

Clonycavan Man and his hair gel

The most remarkable early mohawk was discovered on 21 February 2003, when workers at a commercial peat-harvesting site near Ballivor in County Meath, Ireland, spotted human remains on a screen used to filter debris from harvested peat ^[3]. Radiocarbon dating showed that the man, now known as Clonycavan Man, lived between 392 and 201 BCE, in the Irish Iron Age ^[3][4]. Machinery had destroyed his lower body, but the bog had preserved his head and torso, including skin and hair ^[3].

His hair was the feature that drew public attention. It had been twisted and raised over the top of his head and held in place with a gel made of plant oil and pine resin ^[3][4]. Analysis showed the resin had come from south-western France or northern Spain, evidence of trade between Ireland and continental Europe at the time ^[3][4]. Some people promptly called it the world's first mohawk ^[4]. Strictly speaking, that label is a modern comparison: it describes the raised crest, and says nothing about what he or his contemporaries would have called the style.

The details are vivid. He was young, probably in his early twenties, and showed few signs of heavy physical labour ^[3][4]. Chemical traces in his hair suggested a diet rich in vegetables, which led researchers at the National Museum of Ireland to conclude that he died in summer or early autumn ^[4]. He had been killed violently, with blows to the head and face ^[3]. He was only about five feet two inches tall, and the raised hairstyle may have been a way of making him look taller ^[3]. Expensive imported hair products, and a body that showed no sign of hard labour, both point to a man of some status ^[3].

His discovery, followed three months later by that of Old Croghan Man in neighbouring County Offaly, led the National Museum of Ireland to set up its Bog Bodies Research Project ^[3].

Cossacks and the oseledets

A related tradition grew up in eastern Europe. Ukrainian Cossacks, especially when going to war, shaved their heads but left a long lock of hair on the top or front of the head ^[1][8]. This lock, called an oseledets, meaning "herring", or a chub, meaning "crest", was often braided or tied up ^[8][1]. It is not a mohawk in the strict sense, because it is a single lock rather than a strip running front to back, but it belongs to the same family of shaved heads with a deliberate crest. The oseledets became a standard feature of the popular image of the Cossack, and has seen revivals in the early twentieth century and again after Ukrainian independence ^[8].

Paratroopers in 1944

The mohawk entered modern popular culture through the Second World War. Many American paratroopers, notably in the 17th and 101st Airborne Divisions, wore mohawks to intimidate the enemy ^[1]. The best-known group was a demolition section of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment that became known as the Filthy Thirteen ^[6].

The inspiration came from Sergeant Jake McNiece, born in 1919 in Maysville, Oklahoma, and of Irish American and Choctaw descent ^[7][6]. Members of the unit wore Native American-style mohawks and applied war paint to one another, and photographs of them doing so caught the public imagination ^[6]. In June 1944 the section parachuted into Normandy with the 3rd Battalion of the 506th, with orders to secure or destroy bridges over the Douve River ^[6]. McNiece went on to make four combat jumps, including the pathfinder jump into Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge ^[6].

The style turned up again among some American troops in Vietnam ^[1]. It reached a wider audience in 1976 through Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, in which Robert De Niro's character, Travis Bickle, shaves his head into a mohawk before a political rally. The detail was suggested by Victor Magnotta, a friend of Scorsese who had served in Vietnam and who told them that a soldier with a shaved head and a small mohawk in Saigon was usually ready for a special forces operation ^[9].

Punk makes it a uniform

In the 1970s the mohawk was taken up by the punk subculture ^[1]. Early punks shaved, spiked or cropped their hair, and the mohawk sat alongside crew cuts and shaved heads ^[10]. By the 1980s, tall mohawks and spikes, often bleached or dyed in bright colours, had taken on a more extreme character than in the first wave of punk ^[10]. Variants multiplied, including liberty spikes, wide "deathhawks" and mohawks with a longer tuft left at the front ^[10].

Building a tall punk mohawk was a feat of engineering. Hair standing upright against gravity needed strong hold, and wearers relied on stiff gels, sprays and home-made fixatives. The look was meant to be confrontational, but it also demanded a regular routine of shaving the sides and rebuilding the crest.

The fauxhawk and the mainstream

Like many rebellious hairstyles, the mohawk was eventually domesticated. The fauxhawk imitates its silhouette without shaving the sides of the head, usually with a short peak running only over the top ^[1]. In London in the 1990s it was nicknamed the "Hoxton fin" after the fashionable Hoxton district, and in the 2000s it was popularised by footballer David Beckham, among others ^[1]. There are other variations, too, including the reverse mohawk, a shaved strip with hair on either side, worn by Peter Gabriel on tour with Genesis in 1973 ^[1].

At the other extreme, the mohawk has become a competitive sport. The record for the tallest full mohawk has been held by Joseph Grisamore, at 108 centimetres, and the record for the tallest mohican by Kazuhiro Watanabe, at 113.5 centimetres ^[1].

A note on hair and the scalp

Shaving the sides of the head does not change how hair grows, and a mohawk does not thin the hair in the crest. The main practical concerns are the products and handling needed to keep a tall crest upright: very strong fixatives, rough removal and repeated tight styling can stress the hair shaft and irritate the scalp. Anyone with persistent scalp irritation or hair loss should see a qualified professional; https://trichology.com explains how hair and scalp problems are assessed.

The mohawk in one paragraph

A crest of hair on an otherwise bare head is one of the oldest deliberate hairstyles we know of. Herodotus described it among the Macae of Libya in the fifth century BCE, and an Irish man held his raised hair in place with imported pine-resin gel between 392 and 201 BCE. On the Great Plains, Pawnee and other warriors wore a shorn roach, while the Mohawk people, whose name the haircut carries thanks to a 1939 film, actually plucked their heads to leave a small square lock. Cossacks wore the oseledets, American paratroopers took the mohawk to Normandy in 1944, Taxi Driver put it on screen in 1976, and punk made it a uniform. We post more crest haircuts from the archive on Instagram at @the_history_of_hair.