The Jivaro Indians of the Amazon are best known for their practice of shrinking the severed heads of their enemies to about the size of an orange. They believed that a shrunken head would capture the soul of their enemy thus making the head-taker more powerful. Due to cultural restriction, making shrunken heads was a rare practice until the 1850’s when the western world came across these tribes and this strange ritual. Once news of the heads got to Europe and North America, everyone and their mother wanted one. Suddenly, the Jivaro tribes had themselves a monopoly in a booming shrunken head trade. As demand for these creepy things increased the Jivaro began trading heads for guns to make their work easier and faster. That’s right, the western world is probably responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent people who did nothing wrong except have a head that could be shrunken and sold to some guy who wanted to display it in his parlor or library. At some point this got to be a little too much for the government in Ecuador and the head trade was prohibited. Because demand for heads was still considerable other people took up the trade in hopes of cashing in. Heads were illegally stolen out of morgues or skillfully crafted out of leather and sold as genuine Jivaro shrunken heads.
I know what you’re all thinking now “Oh no! What if my shrunken head is a counterfeit?!” Never fear! After long, careful research and meticulous study I found, five minutes ago in a google search, a nifty list of ways to tell whether your shrunken head is the real thing ( www.head-hunter.com):
“In order to identify genuine shrunken heads, careful inspection is required. The following illustrates the most common characteristics of how to distinguish between authentic Jivaro shrunken heads and counterfeit shrunken human heads.
1. The head is less thoroughly shrunk and tends to exude a certain amount of oil
2. The lips show no sign of perforation which results from the “chonta-wood” pins used by the Shuar during the preparation, as well as the lips are sewn with light threads instead of a heavy cotton string
3. The top of the head is not pierced for the suspending cord
4. The facial hair has not been singed off, or the skin polished ( G. E S. Turner. Counterfeit Tsantsa in the Pitt Rivers Museum Man: A Record of Anthropological Science 1944 p.57 )”
So I wish you the best in your inspection of your shrunken head and hope that this bit of trivia made your day a little more interesting, thought-provoking, and nauseating, as it did mine.