Research to distinguish whether `` dried neck '' made by South American tribes is for ceremonial or commercial purposes



The Shuar people who lived around present-day Ecuador and Peru had a religious culture of processing human heads into shrunken

heads called 'tsantzas.' However, as Europeans who were interested in tsantsa began to buy it, tsantsa was made not only for rituals but also for commercial purposes, and the existing tsantsa is a mixture of both. A new paper published by a Canadian and Ecuadorian research team shows that CT scans may be able to determine which ones were really made for ritual purposes by analyzing the tsantzas.

Correlative tomography and authentication features of a shrunken head (tsantsa) | PLOS ONE
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0270305

Not All 'Shrunken Heads' in Museums Are Real.
https://www.sciencealert.com/not-all-museum-shrunken-heads-are-the-real-deal-this-method-could-tell-us-which-are

Tsantzas were made by the Shuar tribe of present-day Ecuador and Peru, and were decorated with various decorations after processing and drying the human neck. There is some debate as to whether the Shuar were the only people who made tsantzas, or whether they existed in surrounding tribes, but ethnologists estimate that the ritual of making tsantsas dates back to the 16th century. It was believed that turning heads into tsantsas would trap an individual's soul. The community leader's head was also carved into a tsantsa.

Although there is no clear record of the ritual for making Tsantsa, the basic production process is considered as follows.

・The head is cut at the base of the neck and the scalp is cut open with a bamboo knife, sharp stone or shell to remove the skull.
• Boiling the skin of the head for up to two hours to kill microbes and shrink the flesh.
・Turn the face and head inside out, remove as much connective tissue as possible, sew the eyes together with palm fiber, and then turn it back on.
・Finally, the inside is filled with hot rocks and sand, and the mouth and incisions are closed with bamboo or stitched with fibers to dry.

It seems that the Tsantza made in this way was not carried by someone, but hung from a pole.


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European settlers who began trading with the Shuar in the early to mid-19th century became interested in tsantzas as exotic cultural relics and began buying them for money and selling them to collectors around the world. Tempted by the increased demand and high rewards, the Shuar not only sold the original tsantza, but also made it commercially for sale to Europeans. Some of the commercially produced tsantzas were processed from non-human animals such as pigs, monkeys and sloths, as well as unclaimed corpses from local hospitals. .

At the time of writing, tsantzas are held in museums around the world, but it is not easy to distinguish between ceremonially made and commercially made tsantsas, and some are genuine tsantsas. But there are also cases where animals have been processed for some reason. Still, by analyzing factors such as head anatomy and incisions, the shape of the eyes and ears, and the thread used for suturing, it is likely that the tsantzas were made ceremonially or commercially. It seems that it is possible to estimate whether there is a high possibility that it was made in

Therefore, a research team from the University of Western Ontario in Canada and the University of San Francisco Quito in Ecuador will analyze a tsantza called 'Chatham Tsantza', which is actually owned by the Chatham Kent Museum in Canada, using multiple CT scans. I did an experiment. This is a picture of Chatham Tsantsa used for this experiment.



Experiments have shown that chatham tsantzas are indeed made from human heads, and while some characteristics are consistent with ceremonial tsantzas, others are consistent with commercial tsantzas. was confirmed. Overall, the research team says it may not have been created ritually.

The research team pointed out that there is no clear line separating ritual and commercial tsantzas, and it is likely that they exist on the spectrum, so it is difficult to clearly define them. Still, he argued, analyzing tsantzas with non-destructive methods such as CT scans and inferring their provenance is important for the museum's ethical curation and display.

in Science, Posted by log1h_ik