SHRUNKEN HEAD GOING HOME

And now for some "headline" news. In what is likely to be one of the weirder stories you will read lately is this report from NBC News. It seems like Mercer University of Macon, Georgia (home of The Allman Brothers and Southern Rock!) can't stand the guilt of an authentic shrunken head that they have had on display for years and are sending it back to its place of origin in Ecuador. Let's hope that this doesn't catch on and we start emptying out our museums full of other once-living exhibits, like wildlife and dinosaur bones. Oh, but wait -- read on.

You can read other WOM posts about shrunken heads HERE.

Once on display, this ceremonial head is returning to the Amazon

Researchers say their tests show the object is what it was supposed to be — a genuine shrunken human head — opening the door to its return to Ecuador.

By Tom Metcalfe | May 11, 2021 | nbcnews.com

A grim artifact that had been on display for decades in a Georgia university has been authenticated as a human head taken from a slain enemy by an Amazonian warrior almost a century ago — and it is now on its way back to where it came from.

Researchers at Mercer University in Macon say their tests show that the shrunken head — called a tsantsa in Amazonian languages — is a genuine shrunken head made in a laborious ceremony of removing its skull and flesh, stitching shut its eyes and mouth, boiling it and then filling it with hot sand and stones.

In 2019, Mercer University repatriated the verified tsantsa to the Ecuadorian Consulate in Atlanta. It's not clear whether it has yet been returned to Ecuador, but the researchers said they hope it will ultimately be part of a collection, perhaps at a museum, where it will be treated properly.

"We wanted it to be viewed by people who could appreciate it in an appropriate context," said Mercer University chemist Adam Kiefer, a co-author of a study of the shrunken head published Monday in the journal Heritage Science.

"This is not an oddity — this is somebody's body, this is somebody's culture, and it's not ours," he said. "So from our perspective, repatriation was essential, and we were very lucky that our university supported this endeavor."

Shrunken heads were popular curios and keepsakes in some parts of the Western world in the 19th century, and many fakes were made to meet the demand — some of which were illicitly created from bodies taken from cemeteries and morgues. That led to justifiable concerns that the tsantsa at Mercer University may have also been fake.

Kiefer and his colleagues at Mercer, biologist Craig Byron and biomedical engineer Joanna Thomas, were tasked with verifying that the shrunken head was genuine after academics decided it could be of cultural importance and Ecuador's government asked whether it could be authenticated.

After several scientific tests, researchers established that the object was a human head, probably from a slain enemy.

The researchers studied it using a variety of techniques, including  computerized tomography, or CT, scans, which allowed them to reconstruct a three-dimensional model of the tsantsa both with and without its long hair. Thomas said the CT scans verified that the head underneath the hair had been cut open to remove the skull and then stitched up again as part of the ceremonial process that created it. The CT scans were also used to create a three-dimensional model to take its place in the university's collection.

Their tests showed that the shrunken head met 30 of the 32 criteria scientifically accepted for verifying authentic tsantsas, including the tiny hairs visible on its skin and in its nostrils, as well as its distinctive three-tiered hairstyle, which was characteristic of the peoples who then lived in the Ecuadorian Amazon region where it was from, Kiefer said.

The tsantsa at Mercer became part of the university's collection after the death in 2016 of a member of the faculty, biologist Jim Harrison, who acquired it during a trip into Ecuador's remote Amazon region in 1942 while serving in the military during World War II. The tsantsa was stuffed with a local newspaper to protect it during its transport from Ecuador to the United States in 1942.

Harrison wrote in a memoir that he had traded with local people for the tsantsa. "It was Indiana Jones," Kiefer said. "When this was collected, science was different, everything was new ... but almost 80 years later, we recognize its cultural importance, along with the science."

It's thought the ceremonial process of making tsantsas may have originated as a way to overcome a tradition of blood feuds among some peoples of the Amazon jungle; it seems to have been intended to trap the spirit of the slain warrior within the shrunken head so its supernatural power could be transferred to the community of the victor.

Curiously, Harrison's tsantsa also appeared as a movie prop in the 1979 John Huston film "Wise Blood," a version of a novel by the writer Flannery O'Connor, who had lived near Macon. It was glued onto a prop body for the movie, and the damage that was caused could be seen by the researchers.

Universities and museums now often try to repatriate many of the human remains that were once on display in archaeological and anthropological collections.

In the U.S., the Smithsonian Institution has been repatriating human remains and other culturally important objects since the 1980s, particularly to Native American communities. It has repatriated more than 6,000 objects, including several tsantsas that were sent in 1999 to representatives of the indigenous Shuar people in Ecuador and Peru.

Last year, the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom removed a display of tsantsas that had been morbidly popular for decades. 

"Visitors often referred to them as gruesome or disgusting or a freak show or gory," said Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum's director. "People were not understanding the more cultural meaning of the tsantsas ... so we were not doing a very good job of how we were curating the display."

The museum has been negotiating for four years with South American universities and indigenous groups to repatriate the tsantsas; any human remains and cultural objects acquired in the future will be dealt with under strict regulations the university has adopted, she said. 

"We have to take things case by case," she said. "It's often a long process."

Watch a video of this story HERE.

HE SELLS SHRUNKEN HEADS BY THE SEASHORE

As strange as it seems, in the late 1940's and 1950's shrunken heads were big business in the United States. Tiki culture was in full swing and anything termed "exotic", including alcoholic drinks and Polynesian accouterments of the unusual infused the peculiar tastes of popular entertainment. As novelties, the dried up little craniums fascinated curiosity-seekers and were a surprising commodity for those who had a line on procuring them from exotic locales and could supply the demand.

Based in Miami, Florida, Graydon Burland sold authentic shrunken heads to anybody who was willing to pay $150 to $1,450 for them. This photo feature from the first issue of MAN TO MAN (December 1949-January 1950) shows examples of his wares. Of course, there's the obligatory pretty lady in the picture as a juxtapose between the beautiful and the beastly.

At the time that this article was published, shrunken heads had been banned from exportation from Ecuador, the main supplier of the odd objects d' art, as well as banned for importing to the States.

MY NIGHTMARE WITH ECUADOR'S HEADHUNTERS!

The following story appeared in the March 1969 issue of ACTION FOR MEN. It describes the author's story of his trip to South America in search of the last native headhunter outposts on the continent. Over a period of days, he witnesses the (forbidden by law) head-shrinking ceremony, courtesy of his guide. The process is described in gruesome detail.

If the title of this post sounds familiar, that's because it's the title of an essay that I wrote that appeared on Bob Deis's superb cultural site, MEN'S PULP MAGS. After reading today's MMW post, get thee hence to this site by clicking HERE.

BONUS:
How Does One Actually Shrink a Head?
How does one take a regular sized human skull and miniaturize it?
By Rose Eveleth
SMITHSONIAN.COM
MARCH 20, 2013

Shrunken heads are a key part of the “scary tribal people” setup. And some cultures did, in fact, create miniature heads for religious and spiritual purposes. But how does one take a regular sized human skull and miniaturize it?

The process is gruesome, according to Today I Found Out. First, the skin and hair had to be separated from the skull to allow them to shrink at different rates. Then, the eyelids were sewn shut and the mouth was stuck closed with a peg. And for the actual shrinking, the heads were put in a big pot and boiled for a very specific amount of time. Then, Staci Lehman writes:

Once removed from the pot, the head would be about 1/3 its original size and the skin dark and rubbery. The skin would then be turned inside out and any leftover flesh scraped off with a knife. The scraped skin was then turned with the proper side out again and the slit in the rear sewn together. The process wasn’t done yet. The head was shrunk even further by inserting hot stones and sand to make it contract from the inside. This also “tanned” the inside, like tanning an animal hide, in order to preserve it.

Once the head reached the desired size and was full of small stones and sand, more hot stones would be applied to the outside of the face to seal and shape the features. The skin was rubbed with charcoal ash to darken it, and as tribesmen believed, to keep the avenging soul from seeping out. The finished product was hung over a fire to harden and blacken, then the wooden pegs in the lips pulled out and replaced with string to lash them together.

When Westerners and Europeans started traveling and discovering cultures that practiced head shrinking, they were both terrified and fascinated. Many of them brought back shrunken heads and souvenirs. In the 1930s, a shrunken head sold for $25—$330 in today’s dollars. In fact, they were popular and lucrative enough that unscrupulous head-peddlers started trading in fake shrunken heads, made from the heads of sloths and other animals. And telling the difference between a real and fake shrunken head can be hard. In fact, one researcher claims that most shrunken heads on display at museums (including the American Museum of Natural History) are fake. Forensic researchers write about some of the ways to tell:

Tsantsas, or shrunken head, are an ancient traditional technique of the Jivaro Indians from Northern Peru and Southern Ecuador. Tsantsas were made from enemies’ heads cut on the battlefield. Then, during spiritual ceremonies, enemies’ heads were carefully reduced through boiling and heating, in the attempt to lock the enemy’s spirit and protect the killers from spiritual revenge. However, forgers have made fake tsantsas out of sloth heads, selling them as curios to international travelers. Morphologic criteria can help in the distinction of forged and authentic tsantsas. Presence of sealed eyelids, pierced lips with strings sealing the mouth, shiny black skin, a posterior sewn incision, long glossy black hair, and lateral head compression are characteristic of authentic tsantsas. On the other hand, fake tsantsas usually present few or none of those criteria. To establish authenticity of the shrunken head, we used all of the above-mentioned morphologic criteria along with microscopic hair examination and DNA analysis.

If you don’t have a DNA sequencer handy to identify your human head, William Jamieson Tribal Art says to look at the ears:

Imitation tsantsa are classified under two categories, being either non-human or human but prepared by someone other than the Jivaro tribesmen. As the most common non-human fakes are often made out of goat or monkey skin, one must pay particular attention to distinguishing between authentic and replicas. Indications of counterfeit tsantsa are characterized by looking for nasal hairs which is a notable distinction between identifying authentic heads and non-human replicas. In addition to this, it is also quite difficult to duplicate a shrunken human ear. The ear should remain in its original form only smaller. Fakes generally cannot match the intricate details of the human ear.

As for many topics of cultural anthropology in which the culture in question still exists and its members would like to be treated as people, head shrinking is a bit contentious. In the Shuar culture, shrunken heads (or ”tsantsas”) are extremely important religious symbols. One anthropologist writes:

That Shuar have killed people to make powerful objects, whereas we have made powerful objects to kill people, does not sustain any meaningful distinction between the savage and the civilized.

Is is hard for many people to not see shrinking of heads as a gruesome act. (Shrunken heads were found in the German concentration camp at Buchenwald, but never identified.) And many say that no new shrunken heads have been made for twenty years. In South America, many countries outlawed selling human heads in the 1930s. Whether or not heads have been shrunk since is still up for debate, but at least now you know how it happens.