BATTLE OFTHE SHRUNKEN HEADS

They’re the spooky star attraction of an Oxford museum. But now the gruesome trophies of a headhunting tribe have come under fire from protesters — and may be spirited away...

THERE can be few tourist exhibits as grimly fascinating as that which greets visitors to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.

Housed in a wooden cabinet labelled ‘Treatment of Dead Enemies’ it consists of seven shrunken human heads, each no bigger than a fist.

Some are suspended eerily from the top of the case, others rest glumly on shelves — but all have their mouths and eyes sewn shut and are thought to have fallen victim to the indigenous Shuar people who inhabit the Upper Amazon region between Ecuador and Peru.

They were unashamedly savage in their treatment of trespassers.

When the Spanish Conquistadors attempted to invade their gold- rich territory in the 17th century, the Shuars’ inventive methods of execution included pouring molten gold down the throat of a Spanish official who attempted to impose high taxes on them.

Now, however, they are far better-known for the cruel practice highlighted at the Pitt Rivers. According to the staff there, the question they are most often asked is ‘Where are the shrunken heads?’

And unfortunately for the curious, the answer may soon be ‘ back in the Amazonian rainforest’. Unhappy visitors this month labelled the exhibit ‘ a freak show’ and such concerns have led the museum, which was founded in 1884 by wealthy archaeologist Augustus Pitt Rivers, to review whether it should continue to exhibit the heads.

It’s not the first time the Pitt Rivers has come under criticism. Last year, two human scalps from North America were removed from the same cabinet after Native Americans claimed that such displays were disrespectful to the deceased.

And while there has been no complaint from the modern- day Shuar people, or any request to repatriate the heads, the museum now hopes to include the Shuar in discussions over the artefacts’ future.

If the ‘tsantsas’, as the Shuar call them, do disappear from the display there will undoubtedly be protests. Indeed in 2003, rumours about their removal led one museum-goer to decry it as an ‘unforgivable rgive act of censorship’.

But wherever you stand on the debate, one strong argument for keeping them at the Pitt Rivers is that they remind us of the role played by the unscrupulous European collectors who encouraged their gruesome trade.

SANCTIONING

the murder of women and children, not to mention the theft and mutilation of corpses, they profited from what was originally an important religious ritual for the Shuar.

To make the heads, the Shuar organised special raids on neighbouring communities, with war parties generally attacking one house and setting fire to the roof to flush out the inhabitants before killing them and decapitating any males of fighting age.

By doing so, they believed they could harness the power of the ‘warrior soul’ which resided in every man. The Shuar also believed that humans contained a second soul that turned into a demon called an ‘iwianch’ at the point of death.

Fearful that the iwianch would try to avenge its owner’s murder, the Shuar shrank the head in the belief that this would somehow imprison it. The method was particularly gruesome.

First, they peeled back the face, scalp and hair from the skull — before discarding the latter along with the eyes to end up with what must have resembled a rubbery skin mask.

With the eyes and mouth sewn shut to protect the iwianch from escaping, the skin was boiled in a pot to shrink it. it It was then dried on a spear before being filled repeatedly with hot sand to dry out and reduce the flesh further.

Once it was a quarter of its original size, the mask would be stuffed with rainforest vegetation to maintain its shape. Only then would it finally be ready to become the centrepiece of an elaborate ceremony which involved much singing, dancing and chanting as the warrior soul passed to the man who’d taken the head as his prize.

When the ceremony was completed, the heads were discarded.

‘The Shuar were not interested in the head itself once the power of the soul had been transferred,’ writes anthropologist Frances Larson in Severed, A History Of Heads Lost And Heads Found.

‘They were insignificant, like an envelope which once contained an important letter.’

This may explain the readiness with which the Shuar sold these relics to the Europeans who settled in Ecuador in the 1880s to make money from rubber plantations and the bark of the cinchona tree, a source of the quinine used to treat malaria.

Valuing the heads as curios, they exchanged them for weapons — the going rate being a gun for a head — and soon booming international demand from museums and collectors meant the Shuar began running out of tsantsas.

In an attempt to keep business steady, they tried to pass off shrunken monkey and sloth heads as the real thing. But there were telling detailed differences.

Collectors soon began to weed out fakes, forcing suppliers to resort to more disturbing methods.

Of the seven heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum, for example, only three bear the signs of having been part of authentic tsantsas rituals: their lips are sewn with cotton string and their earlobes have distinctive holes.

These are lacking in the other four heads, one of which was found to have been stuffed not with the leaves of Amazonian trees but with a copy of the Quito Times, an Ecuadorean newspaper.

But if they were not acquired through Shuar headhunting raids, where did they come from? One explanation may lie in the greed of taxidermists who tried to cash in on the trade in towns and cities across South America. They bribed local hospitals and morgues to give them corpses of the poor.

AND

there is also evidence that the Shuar started to view headshrinking as a way to get guns rather than as a ritual affair, using up to 500 men at a time in large-scale raids on their neighbours.

‘Some Shuar simply murdered people in order to sell their heads and, as demand grew, so the Shuar headhunters became less discriminatory,’ writes Frances Larson.

‘Historically, only men’s heads had been taken but now the Shuar began to take the heads of women and children for trade, even though they had no ritual significance.’

By 1910, one traveller to Peru said shrunken heads were selling for the equivalent of £110 today. As he explained in a letter to The Times, the curio shop in which he had seen them ‘ hanging up by their long hair’ was charging five times more for the head of a white man because it was such a rarity. That European settlers sometimes Macabre: Shuar tribesmen (top)

and an Oxford exhibit (inset) fell victim to the trade is suggested in the journal of Robert Ripley, the American cartoonist and amateur anthropologist famed for his Ripley’s Believe It Or Not ‘odditoriums’ across the world.

He claimed one German scientist who had entered the Amazonian rainforest in search of headhunters in the Thirties had returned as nothing more than a shrunken head with a red beard.

Whether or not that’s true, the Peruvian and Ecuadorean governments were sufficiently disturbed by the trade to outlaw the sale of shrunken heads in the Thirties. By the Sixties, the practice of making tsantsas stopped altogether.

The last of the Pitt Rivers heads was acquired in 1936. And while there is no suggestion that those who donated them had anything to do with the ‘guns for heads’ trade, very little is known about how they were acquired.

The museum hopes to carry out a study into the heads’ provenance. But unless and until all this is settled, the tiny human heads will continue to exert a deeply macabre fascination for visitors to the Pitt Rivers Museum.