When the Spanish conquistadors reached the Andes, they were struck by the shape of certain natives, with elongated, almost pointed heads, which they immediately assimilated to a form of monstrosity. They describe brains bleeding from their ears, eyes popping out of their sockets – all horrified tales that nevertheless do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. As bioarchaeologist Christina Torres (University of California, Riverside) summarizes in a Live Science article, “That doesn’t seem to be the case.”: if the skulls were modified, the brains functioned normally normally.
This voluntary cranial deformation consisted of shaping a baby’s skull, while its bones were still malleable. A simple strip of fabric, sometimes combined with planks, was enough to guide the growth of the skull. In most societies where the practice is documented, it begins around six months and stops after one to two years, often under the guidance of the mother or a midwife. “It was a slow, gradual process.”insists Christina Torres, and not brutal torture as one might imagine.
The risks exist, but they remain marginal in the archaeological archives. Christina Torres cites the case of a child who died because his head was too compressed, but this appears to be an exception. On the other hand, bandages that are too tight or changed too rarely can cause serious skin infections that can even eat away at the bone, scalp infections or jaw joint problems, notes bioarchaeologist Christine Lee (University of Mississippi). Most of the time, the brain adapts to this remodeled envelope, without detectable effect on cognitive abilities.
How do archaeologists tell if a skull was intentionally modified? For a long time, we were content with a few measurements and a trained eye, at the risk of causing the discipline to drift towards the racial craniometry of the 19th century, which classified humans into different races based on their skulls. Today, we are using more 3D analyzes and mathematical approaches.
The result of these analyzes is clear: cranial deformation appears on all continents, with the exception of Antarctica. The oldest known clues come from Australia, at the Kow Swamp site in the state of Victoria, where artificially flattened skulls date back at least 13,000 years. The practice then exploded in the Neolithic: remodeled skulls were found in Europe around 12,500 years ago, in China around 11,000 years ago and in present-day Iran around 10,000 years ago.
Head like a mountain
The first written explanations are largely biased. Christopher Columbus, as early as 1492, noted flat heads among the inhabitants of the island of Hispaniola and imagined that mothers voluntarily squeezed babies’ heads between two planks… to protect them from blows from the Spaniards. Other Spanish chroniclers invoke ethnicity, military rank, courage, the ability to carry loads, health or an ideal of beauty, as the anthropologist Pilar Zabala Aguirre has shown by compiling more than a hundred testimonies. Often, these interpretations serve above all to reinforce the supposed superiority of Christian Europe.
From the 20th century, anthropology began to consider cranial deformation as one cultural variation among others. The motivations then appear multiple and sometimes contradictory. Among the Collagua of Peru, witnesses report that parents want their children’s heads to resemble the mountain from which they come. Among the Caddo of Oklahoma, different skull shapes correspond to distinct clans, according to Christine Lee.
But things get complicated when we look at the family level. Matthew Velasco, a bioarchaeologist at the University of North Carolina, showed, by analyzing the DNA of groups of relatives buried together in the Andes, that biologically related individuals can have very different heads, as if there were no systematic norm.
A simple fashion effect
For many pre-Hispanic Andean societies, cranial deformation is primarily a matter of child rearing. “It’s basically a way of raising children”summarizes Christina Torres. She compares it to changing a baby, having it circumcised or baptizing it: “You bandage your children’s heads because that’s what we do to our children.” Starting around six months coincides with the appearance of the first teeth and the introduction of new foods, a time conducive to rites of passage.
In prehistoric China and Japan, cranial deformation seems reserved for the elite and is akin to a marker of prestige, or even an extreme form of aesthetics comparable, later, to foot binding in China, believes Christine Lee. In Europe, between the 4th and 7th centuries, the phenomenon peaked among the Huns and in the Eurasian steppes. Researchers readily speak of a fashion, associated with social rank.
The paradox is that these transformations are not always visible at first glance. Hair hides a lot, emphasizes Christine Lee. In certain families, only specialists or hairdressers could guess, under the hair, a more conical or flattened skull than average.
The Toulouse deformation
In Papua New Guinea, the Arawe still shaped their children’s heads in the 1930s to obtain an elongated style, considered aesthetic. In Congo, the Mangbetu practiced “lipombo” – tight bandages giving a long, conical head, a symbol of beauty and power – until it was banned by the Belgian colonial administration in the 1950s.
In France also such skulls existed. Until the beginning of the 20th century, parents in the southwest used a system of bandages applied from birth, sometimes for several years, supposed to protect the infant from shocks. This “Toulouse deformation” disappeared at the start of the First World War. “It is not a barbarity from which societies have gradually turned away, however specifies Matthew Velasco. It is largely independent of the level of social complexity.”
On the scale of human history, reshaping a baby’s skull is only a variation of a much more general act of modifying the body. The oldest tattoos date back at least 5,000 years in Europe, teeth filing and metal grills appear among the Mayans 2,000 years ago, neck elongation in Southeast Asia is more than 1,000 years old. Today, we continue to pierce, tattoo and aesthetically reshape ourselves without it being shocking.
“Cranial modification is part of a universal practice: the modification and presentation of the body”summarizes Matthew Velasco. Behind these headbands and these elongated skulls, he sees above all the desire of adults to“invest in the future of their children”.
