On a January morning in 1586 in Yanque, Peru, leaders of two Indigenous peoples, the Collaguas and the Cavanas, recounted to Spanish conquerors their origins and ways of life in the hills and mountains that cradled the Colca Valley.
According to a Spanish translator and scribe, they explained a striking form of body modification: the binding of infants' and children's heads, so that they would grow to resemble mountains with which the groups identified.
The Collaguas "molded the heads of their newborns to lengthen and narrow them as high and elongated as they could so that in remembrance the head would have the form of the volcano from which they came," according to a written account, while the Cavanas "tie [the head] very intensely and make it flat and wide."
In a new book, "The Mountain Embodied: Head Shaping and Personhood in the Ancient Andes," Matthew Velasco, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Arts and Sciences, investigates the history, meaning and political effects of head shaping in the region. An anthropological bioarchaeologist - studying ancient populations through analysis of their skeletal remains - Velasco argues that the reduction of head shape to a marker of ethnic identity has been a colonial invention, one that masked great diversity in lived experience.
Velasco, who co-directs the Human and Animal Bone Laboratory, discussed his research with the Chronicle.
Question: How common a practice was head shaping as practiced by the Collaguas and Cavanas?
Answer: The historical sources would lead one to believe that head shape was an essential attribute of different ethnic communities in the highland Andes. But a key finding of my research is that the prevalence of this practice varied over time and across society. In the Collagua region, for example, most individuals who lived and died prior to A.D. 1300 did not have their skulls modified. In subsequent centuries, the popularity of practice surges, and nearly three-fourths of the burial population have elongated heads. I argue that this shift signaled a process of ethnic group formation, wherein the Collaguas' sense of identity and how they expressed it quite literally took on a more durable form, perhaps as they increasingly came into contact with outside groups, including the Inca empire. At the same time, we find individuals with and without modified heads buried in the same tombs. This suggests to me that head shaping was not universally practiced - even within the extended families that used these tombs.
Q: To those unfamiliar with it, head shaping might sound painful or abusive. Was it?
A: No - far from it. At a fundamental level, head shaping was a form of childcare. It was intended to help the child develop into a specific kind of person - not harm them. It is likely that binding and constricting a child's head caused some discomfort, but there is no evidence that it was physically harmful or placed the child at any social or cognitive disadvantage. On the contrary, my work suggests that head shaping may have conferred social advantages on individuals later in life.
Q: Why did these ancient people of the Peruvian Andes shape the heads of their infants and children?
A: I think if you were to travel back in time and ask someone from this region of Peru why they shaped the heads of their infants, they might simply say: "Because it's beautiful." That said, it is very likely that head shaping had other social and ritual significance. In the book, I argue that shaping the head of an infant was part of a larger rite of passage in which parents or close kin bestowed a child with land and resources. This is partly suggested by biochemical evidence from bones that shows that modified children grew up in different places outside of the Colca Valley proper, including evidence that their diets differed from one another and from their valley-dwelling kin. Thinking about head shaping in relation to inheritance might also help explain why we only see certain individuals within larger families with reshaped heads.
Q: What role did mountains play in the way heads were shaped? Were colonial Spanish accounts about that accurate?
A: The 16th century Collaguas tell the Spanish that they shaped the heads of their infants to emulate the mountain Collaguata, a snowcapped peak that they venerated as their origin place. I can't say for sure that their 14th century ancestors held the same belief, but it is undeniable that mountains play a central role in Andean cosmologies - past and present. Moreover, there are clues from ethnographies of modern Andean communities that link children to mountains, specifically. Part of the goal of the book is to unpack these ideas and ask how they can help us think differently about the meanings and motivations of head shaping in the past.
Q: Why do interpretations of head shaping as defining different ethnic identities fall short?
A: As I lay out in the book, when we begin with the premise that head shape symbolizes the ethnic group, we easily fall into the trap of stereotyping the people we study. In effect, we adopt the perspective that the Incas or the Spaniards took of the people they conquered. This perspective overlooks so much diversity on the ground level. By focusing on the different livelihoods of modified people, both as children and adults, we glimpse a more complete picture of social and family life in the ancient past.
Q: How does studying skeletal remains improve your understanding of ancient people's lived experiences in the Colca Valley?
A: We can think of one's skeletal remains as a record of their embodied experiences from the cradle to the grave. They can't tell us everything, but they provide unique insight into the lives of ancient people as individuals - which is especially useful for studying the vast majority of people in ancient history who left no written record of their exploits and whose names are unknown to us. The careful analysis of bones and teeth can tell us where someone was born, what they ate, and if they suffered from disease, malnutrition or trauma. In turn, documenting dietary and health evidence from skeletal remains can shed light on larger questions related to resource access, inequality and exposure to violence in past societies - topics that are no less salient today.
