A suspicious shrunken head, a stolen tribal history
What's lost when wealthy Americans spend thousands of dollars on looted artifacts.
If you can’t even trust the guy who sold you a shrunken head on the streets of Peru, who can you trust?
It’s a question that anthropologist Andrew Nelson, a professor at Western University in Ontario, has considered in recent weeks while working on a new project with a nearby museum.
The goal is to determine whether a shrunken head that tourists purchased in Lima, Peru back in the 1940s is what it appears, or whether it’s a counterfeit that a local shop would have sold to foreign visitors who didn’t know any better.
Nelson and a team of researchers are examining the specimen with powerful cameras, advanced scanning devices and gathering evidence through ethnography, a kind of research that involves comparing an object to its natural setting.
“It’s a real head,” Nelson said during a recent phone call. “By doing a high-resolution scan we can see the real hair follicles, but it doesn’t have other kinds of real features that you’d expect in these ethnographic reads.”
A legitimate head could help scientists understand early societies in South America, and perhaps gather insight about tribes’ responses to conflict and climate change.
The problem is that there’s a long history of scammers gluing human hair to monkey or sloth skulls in a way that makes a fake shrunken head seem very real. Others would use goat skin, selling tourists a fake specimen for $25 or so.
And with so many frauds out there, experts say there’s a rich underground market for the real thing. The going rate for a single shrunken head is several thousand dollars, though the exact cost is difficult to know with certainty.
“There’s a reason hunters’ trophies tend to end at the neck. A head is more practical than a body. It’s easier to transport, it’s less time-consuming to prepare, and it confers the same bragging rights,” Mary Roach reported in Outside Magazine in 2011. “Today, I count 29 heads—most taxidermied, some shrunken—on display in the Adventurers Club’s spacious old headquarters in downtown Chicago.”
The U.S. is the largest customer base for looted antiquities, stolen art and bizarre artifacts, Tess Davis, executive director of the Antiquities Coalition, which works to protect ancient artifacts, told me. That’s partly because Facebook, with its lax content moderation, has made it possible for underground communities to trade stolen cultural property, as Slate’s Hannah Barbosa Cesnik found in December.
You might think a black market for antiquities would exist out of sight, a system of whispers and shadows requiring code words for entry. The reality is banal—disturbingly so. Accessing the black market for antiquities is no more difficult than requesting membership in the popular “Dogspotting” Facebook group. Facebook’s “Groups” feature lets users connect efficiently and (sort of) discretely to share the locations of loot like Egyptian coffins. According to the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project—the only group of its kind monitoring social media—Facebook is the wellspring of the modern illicit antiquities trade, where traffickers thrive because of the platform’s laissez-faire regulation.
Warring tribes in ancient Peru frequently would shrink rivals’ heads after a raid or violent conflict to avoid being cursed, says Professor Nelson.
“The idea was to capture the spirit of the guy they killed so he didn’t come back and haunt them,” he added. “People are kinky. The range of things that people would do is jaw-dropping.”
But there’s a limit to the kinds of things that anthropologists like Nelson can learn about their subjects thanks to looters, grave-robbers and other thieves who have spent thousands of years pilfering archaeological sites.
Last month, for instance, French police said they’d seized Roman coins, Bronze Age jewelry and more than 27,000 other artifacts from a single thief. A few weeks before that, cops in Greece nabbed a network of European auction houses that they said had spent years trafficking currency through a suspect known only as “The Godfather.”
It’s a market fueled by organized crime, money launderers and subsistence farmers in far corners of the world just trying to make an extra buck. The result, though, is to deny researchers the chance to find valuable artifacts in their original resting place, and thus learn more about the culture in which they existed. Meanwhile, the terrorist group ISIS has made millions of dollars in recent years by trafficking stolen antiquities.
Had researchers found Nelson’s shrunken head where it was left, for example, they would have had more insight into whether a warring tribe actually took the head, when that might have happened and why. Not to mention: They also might have been able to figure out to whom it originally belonged.
Since 1995, Nelson has studied the ancient society known today as the Moche. From the year 100 through 700 AD or so, the Moche people are thought to have functioned as autonomous but interrelated groups spread throughout the northern region of what’s now Peru. Other than suggestions that the Moche sometimes resorted to cannibalism, and evidence that they were advanced with ceramics, researchers still have a lot to learn about these communities, which helped build the largest known pyramid in pre-Colombian Americas, the Huaca del Sol.
Spanish invaders are partly to blame for that, as they destroyed countless cultural artifacts during their own looting efforts. Other thieves have been tempted by pottery, textiles and vibrant jewelry that still fetches high prices on the art market. Either way, 100% of the sites in Peru are affected.
“They did things like major human sacrifice and all kinds of blood sacrifice,” Nelson said of the Moche. “In terms of Peruvian culture — we know a lot about the Inca, right? — a lot of all that is wrong because it’s from the Spanish, and we don’t have anything earlier.”
John Verano of Tulane University and Steve Bourget, of the University of Texas at Austin, uncovered some of the gory details in the 1990s, as Colleen Popson wrote for Archaeology.org.
Bourget and his team uncovered a sacrificial plaza with the remains of at least 70 individuals--representing several sacrifice events--embedded in the mud of the plaza, accompanied by almost as many ceramic statuettes of captives. It is the first archaeological evidence of large-scale sacrifice found at a Moche site and just one of many discoveries made in the last decade at the site.
In 1999, Verano began his own excavations of a plaza near that investigated by Bourget. He found two layers of human remains, one dating to A.D. 150 to 250 and the other to A.D. 500. In both deposits, as with Bourget's, the individuals were young men at the time of death. They had multiple healed fractures to their ribs, shoulder blades, and arms suggesting regular participation in combat. They also had cut marks on their neck vertebrae indicating their throats had been slit. The remains Verano found differed from those in the sacrificial plaza found by Bourget in one important aspect: they appeared to have been deliberately defleshed, a ritual act possibly conducted so the cleaned bones could be hung from the pyramid as trophies--a familiar theme depicted in Moche art.
“As long as there have been tombs, there have been tomb raiders,” Davis says. “But now you can go on Facebook or social media and see artifacts that are available with the click of a button.”
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