Once removed from the pot, the head shrinks to about a third of its original size, while the skin turns dark and rubbery in texture. The headhunter artisan would then turn the skin inside out to scrape off any leftover flesh with a knife. The scraped skin is then turned back to its original side and sewn together after hot stones and sand are inserted inside the head to contract it from the inside. This process also tans the skin, like any other animal hide, preserving it so it lasts longer.
Once the miniaturized-head reaches the desired size, the artisan uses more hot stones on the outside of the face to both seal it and shape the features. Charcoal ash is rubbed on the skin to darken and keep the avenging soal from exiting the head, as the ancient tribesmen believed. Then, the mini-head is hung above a fire to harden and blacken. Finally, the wooden peg in the lips is removed and the mouth is sealed for good with a string. As you might imagine, the first westerners who saw these tsantsas were terrified.
They were also fascinated by them and brought many back home to Europe. In time, shrunken heads became quite fashionable among collectors and demand surged. Demand was so high that scammers started trading in fake shrunken heads, made from the heads of sloths or other animals. The fakes are so good that it can be very hard to tell the difference. So much so that many specimens in museum collections are not actually human heads. Imitation tsantsa are often made out of goat or monkey skin.
A trained eye can spot the differences between an authentic tsantsa made from a human head and one from a non-human animal by carefully looking for nasal hairs.
It is also rather difficult to replicate a shrunken human ear, whose intricacies are challenging to duplicate. A DNA test is your best bet though when discriminating between genuine and fake tsantsa. Today, tsantsas remain important religious symbols in the Shuar culture although human head shrinking itself is all but nonexistent.
The practice was banned in South America in the s along with the trading of the heads. 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 :. 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 head was shrunk even further by inserting hot stones and sand to make it contract from the inside. 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. Then, an incision is made on the back of the ear and all the skin and flesh is removed from the cranium.
Fat is removed from the head's flesh and a wooden ball is placed under the flesh so that it will keep the form. Originally, shrinking heads had a religious significance for the tribes in the northwestern region of the Amazon rainforest. The tribes believed in the existence of three main spirits: Wakani: innate to humans thus surviving their death. Arutam — literally "vision" or "power", protects humans from a violent death.
0コメント