Parents have been meddling with their children’s heads, if not their minds, since prehistoric times. To achieve the desired forms — flat, round, conical — the pliable skulls of newborns were typically either wrapped tightly in cloth or bound between boards. The origins of this practice, known as artificial cranial deformation, have been traced to early Homo sapiens in Australia about 13,000 years ago, and, amid some scholarly contention, potentially to Neanderthal populations 45,000 years ago.
The practice has been documented on every continent except Antarctica. In the region that is now Peru, early inhabitants apparently believed that a sloping forehead was an advantageous feature, with the earliest evidence dating back to the fourth millennium B.C. The stretched, sloped skulls found among the remains of the Paracas culture (active from roughly 800 B.C. to A.D. 100) have even fueled the fanciful idea of an unearthly origin.
“Paracas skulls conform to stereotypical images of aliens in 20th-century pulp science fiction,” said Matthew Velasco, an anthropologist at Cornell. “In other words, modern artists made head shape into something extraterrestrial, which seems like a pretty flimsy basis to argue for space alien influence on ancient societies.”
In his new book, “The Mountain Embodied,” Dr. Velasco details the cranial modification traditions of the Collaguas and Cavanas, neighboring peoples that lived in the Colca Valley of highland Peru. During the Late Intermediate Period, from about 1100 to 1450, the Collaguas employed methods to make their heads assume a longer, narrower shape, while the Cavanas sought to make their heads wide and squat. Over time, the Collaguas’ elongated look became the dominant style of cranial modification in the valley.
These deliberate alterations resulted in craniums that mimicked the silhouettes of mountains sacred to their respective cultures. Dr. Velasco quotes a 16th-century Spanish scribe and translator who wrote that the Collaguas wore tall, brimless hats called chucos and fashioned head shapes to pay homage to Collaguata, the distant volcano that they considered their ancestral home. The Cavanas, the translator observed, sculpted the skulls of their babies in tribute to Gualcagualca, the snow laden peak that loomed over their town.
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