Mysterious shrunken heads collected by a lost Peruvian tribe have confounded anthropologists for decades. Theories about what they were used for range from fertility rituals to communicating with the dead to trophies of war.
Nobody knows for sure, but now we know that the Nazca, famed for their desert-spanning geoglyphs, shrunk the heads of their own people.
Head shrinking is done by removing the skull, cooking the skin until it is about a third smaller, and then filling it with rocks and sand. When researchers analyzed severed, shrunken heads found on the southern Peruvian coast, they saw the same location-specific dietary chemical signatures identified in corpses (whose heads were not shrunk) buried in the region.
This makes the trophy-of-war hypothesis a bit less likely, though the Nazca may simply have gone to war against themselves. (War was certainly a recurrent theme in their artwork, as seen in the pottery detail above.)
Next on the research continuum is more shrunken head analysis: Were they always taken from locals? Or did patterns change over time? This could illuminate political developments among the Nazca, who vanished 1200 years ago.
"This small scale agrarian society was succeeded by an empire with regional authority," said Ryan Willams, curator of Chicago's Field Museum, in a press release. "For the first time people were governed by others who lived hundreds of miles distant. Understanding how this came about may help us better understand how these forms of government first emerged."
Citation: "The geographic origins of Nasca trophy heads using strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotope data." By Kelly J. Knudson, Sloan R. Williams, Rebecca Osborn, Kathleen Forgey and Patrick Ryan Williams. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Vol. 28, No. 1, Jan. 5 2009.
Images: The Field Museum
See Also:
- Neanderthals Not Dumb, but Made Dull Gadgets
- The First Aid: Iceman May Have Dressed His Own Wounds
- Yucatan Jungles Are Feral Maya Gardens
- Scientists Find Contents of Prehistoric Messenger Bag
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