Before we head into June, I need to feature a museum on my blog this month so let me introduce you to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.Everyone knows Oxford for its prestigious university and tweed jackets. Haha, I’m not sure about senorita, more like morbid treasure hunter!Now that is judge strange. Demand for tsantsas quickly outgrew supply, which led to the creation of fakes to meet demand. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford is reconsidering its display of shrunken heads, which are currently shown in a case labelled Treatment of Dead Enemies. Head-hunting was a way of circumventing this limitation by appropriating the identity of someone from another group.From the 1870s to the 1930s tsantsas were acquired by foreigners near the Ecuadorian and Peruvian borders, most of whom had gone there to find Chincona trees, whose bark is a source of quinine, which was used to treat malaria.
I saw a bunch of shrunken heads in Borneo when I was with the Iban headhunter tribes. It was not the head that was important, but the deceased man’s soul.
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However, the practice of making shrunken heads is very real, namely in the forests of Peru and Ecuador where the Jivaroan tribes have long practiced this macabre tradition.
This states that “careful thought should be put into the reasons for, and circumstances of, the display of human remains”.Along with the Pitt Rivers Museum, tsantsas are held by most major museums of ethnography, such as the Smithsonian’s Natural History Museum (Washington, DC), Quai Branly (Paris) and Ethnographic Museum (Berlin). The Pitt Rivers Museum has 12 tsantsas, which were acquired from six different collectors from 1884 to 1936. Next time!
The eye sockets and mouths were sewn shut to prevent what is regarded as the dead man’s soul escaping.
The resulting shrunken heads are the size of a large orange.The purpose of taking and preserving the heads of enemies was to obtain the powers that had been located in them. They were created by peeling back the skin and hair of a human skull of a dead male enemy, with the bones, brain and other matter being discarded. British explorers initially collected their heads (shrunken to the size of a child’s fist) as they saw them as exotic curiosities. So to pique your interest I’m going to leave you with a few photographs I took inside and if you want to know what they are, and what they were used for, I guess you’ll just have to come and visit! I imagine they serve more for anthropological reasons now, but there is no denying it, they’re a curiosity alright!It’s strange how as the face shrinks it gives the impression of abnormally long eyelashes!At The Culture Map, we aim to share exciting travel tales and showcase the inspiring diversity of our world. The skin and hair were then soaked briefly in hot water, with sand poured inside the cavity. This museum is a must for anyone visiting Oxford, especially if travelling and knowing about different cultures is a topic you’re particularly fond of because most of the 300,000+ objects inside the museum were donated by scholars, anthropologists, explorers and travellers.But before dashing off, I’ve got a little information about the shrunken heads. This collection originates from tribes in the Amazon, up until the 1960s men would traditionally take the heads of their enemies to prove their manhood and to avenge the death of relatives. But what about its decapitated and shrunken heads?Lots of people associate Oxford with Harry Potter too, so its funny that the Pitt Rivers Museum is kind of like all the stuff you would expect to find thrown into a witch’s cauldron.Located at the back of Oxford’s Natural History Museum, through a dimly-lit doorway, lies the Pitt Rivers Museum, (a museum within a museum – naturally, I felt very spoilt) it possesses a looming presence even before entering, pulling the eyes closer by a magnetic string of curiosity.Inside the Natural History Museum that leads to the Pitt Rivers MuseumOr perhaps it’s just me and my incessant need to know what lurks on the other side of darkness. This museum looks incredible – looks so condensed and crammed full of treasures.
I’ve been meaning to write my own How cool is that?
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