Abstract
This chapter introduces the study of head-shaping practices and specifically refers to their enactment in Mesoamerica, where it counts as one of the most rooted, widespread, and at the same time diversified traditions worldwide. The artificial modification of the infant head is usually performed by female kin on their newborns, babies, and toddlers, a time in child development when the skull is still malleable. For this purpose, daily head massages, hard compression devices or soft constricting wraps, head bandages, and hats were employed. Societies have, for centuries, implemented this highly visible body modification for a plethora of motives that range from mundane aesthetics to political and ideological ideals, to gender identity, ethnicity, and other distinctions. Cultural cranial modification has grown into an established subject of interest to anthropological and health-related sciences alike. Here I introduce the research framework used in this volume by clarifying basic terms surrounding the attributes of head traditions and setting forth the goals and interdisciplinary scope of this work.
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Notes
- 1.
Two Neanderthal skulls from Shanidar, Iraq, evidence an artificial flattening of the forehead and slight transversal grooving of the vault behind the coronal sulcus (Trinkaus 1982, 1983). These go back to 45,000 years B.P. Another early finding of a similarly grooved cranium from the caves of Chou-Kou-Tien, in East China, dates to 30,000 years B.P. (Romano 1974, p. 197). In all these cases, the intentionality of the cranial modifications cannot be ascertained, since slight frontal flattening and postcoronal grooving could be equally the result of carrying heavy loads during early childhood and therefore be purely occupational.
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Tiesler, V. (2014). Introduction. In: The Bioarchaeology of Artificial Cranial Modifications. Interdisciplinary Contributions to Archaeology, vol 7. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8760-9_1
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