Is that shrunken head really human? Combining imaging methods yields clues

We rarely have time to write about all the cool science stories that come our way. 12 days of Christmas series posts. dried head (pure) Museum collections are authentic.

Tim Burton’s 1993 animated feature film nightmare before christmas, there is a scene where a little boy receives a shrunken head as a Christmas present from Jack Skellington. It doesn’t work out for the boy or for the parents. However, there was a time in the early 20th century when these macabre objects were in such great demand by Western collectors that they created a lucrative market for counterfeits. In many museums around the world, shrunken heads (also known as pure But how can curators determine if those items are genuine? Certain advanced image processing methods can help, according to an August paper published in PLoS One.

Headhunting and head-shocking practices are documented primarily in the northwestern part of the Amazon rainforest, and in certain tribes such as the Shuar people of Ecuador and Peru. I’m here.However pure It was usually created by making an incision behind the ear to remove the skin and flesh from the cranium and discarding the skull. The nostrils were filled with red seeds and the lips were sewn up. The skin was then boiled in water saturated with tannin-rich herbs for fifteen minutes to two hours to allow the fat and grease to float to the top. The head was then dried with hot stones, molded into a shape resembling human features, and the eyes were closed. To prevent – and sometimes beads, feathers, or other ornaments were added for decoration.

traditionally completed pure According to the authors of the August paper, they were not worn, despite what existing anthropological literature says. The shrunken head was a popular collectible among Victorian-era priests, European and American explorers eager to bring back their exotics for personal collections. Ultimately, after 1860, a commercial market developed as the practice became more widely known. pure They were often made from animal skins (usually pigs, monkeys, or sloths), but some were made from human heads collected from morgue corpses. Nonetheless, the manufacturers claimed their products to be authentic.

Lauren September Poeta of Western University, London, Ontario, and her co-authors, pure Today, what is kept in collections around the world is commercial, and there are few reliable ways to identify its true origin. Curators have typically relied on visual inspection or CT scans for authentication. I was.But Poeta othersNote that standard CT scans do not fully elucidate four important features: sutures, eye anatomy, ear anatomy, and scalp anatomy. So they decided to see if combining CT scans with high-resolution micro-CT scans could improve the resolution of these features.

team is pure Acquired by the museum from a local family who purchased it while exploring the Amazon River Basin in the 1940s from the collection of the Chatham-Kent Museum in Chatham, Ontario. The only record of its origin is that it came from the “Peruvian Indians”, and there is no conclusive evidence that it was of the Chatham tribe. pure It was real. The researchers used machines at the Ontario Museum of Archaeology to take a clinical CT scan of the entire object and two micro-CT scans—one of the entire head and one of a high-resolution scan of a portion of the scalp. I did.

Poeta and her colleagues believe that Chatham pure Although it was made from a real human corpse, it was not possible to determine whether it was made for ceremonial purposes or for commercial purposes. The lips and other parts are sewn with modern threads, suggesting commercial production. “In fact, the distinction between ceremonial and commercial manufacturing may be harder to define than is commonly believed. pure Either/or is likely not a dichotomy, but on the spectrum,” the authors wrote.

You may learn more by being a test subject pure of known origin to correlative tomographic imaging. The authors conclude that conventional CT scans continue to be useful in reconstructing rudimentary visualization of these fascinating artifacts, allowing researchers to detail them without risking damage from repeated handling. However, we concluded that micro-CT scans can determine whether certain artifacts are present. pure Made of human material, it provides high-resolution details of specific features.

DOI: PLoS ONE, 2022. 10.1371/journal.pone.0270305 (About DOI).