An unusual mummified head discovered in Bolivia more than a century ago isn’t what it seems, a new study finds.
Originally thought to be the remains of an Inca man, the mummified head is actually from someone from a different culture who had incisions cut into their skull, possibly as part of a ritual, the research reveals.
The new analysis is an attempt to place the individual in their archaeological context and to “give them back their local history,” according to the researchers.
“These remains are not just bones in an anthropological collection,” museologist and art historian Claire Brizon of the Cantonal Museum of Archaeology and History in Lausanne, Switzerland, told Live Science. “They are the remains of individuals in their own right.”
Brizon is the senior author of the new study, published Aug. 27 in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, that analyzed the mummified head. It consists of its mummified skin, face, cranium, jaw and part of the neck. Remarkably, the top of the head is roughly conical and bears a prominent lesion from an attempted trepanation — the process of drilling or cutting a hole through the bone of the cranium.
But there are no signs that the trepanation was done in response to trauma, which suggests it might have had a ritual or social purpose, the researchers wrote in the study.
Related: The Incas mastered the grisly practice of drilling holes in people’s skulls
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Collected in Bolivia
The new analysis determined that the head was from an adult man who died at least 350 years ago and that he had undergone “cranial deformation” as a child — a relatively common practice in pre-Colombian South America that was achieved by tightly binding an infant’s head for many years.
In addition, the trepanation attempt on the top-right side of his skull was not completed, for some reason; deep incisions were made in the outer layers of the bone, but it had not…
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