Conflicting discourses exist in the current literature about whether the tsantsas should be attributed solely to the Shuar, the entire Chicham linguistic group (SAAWC), or only the Shuar and Achuar of the Chicham group. The anthropological literature has reported ceremonial tsantsas as war trophies of enemy heads that were collected after battle and shrunken by the Shuar and Achuar People of Ecuador and Northern Peru in an attempt to trap the avenging soul of the deceased and protect the victor from spiritual revenge. Tsantsas were either created for ceremonial purposes (considered to be “authentic”) or for the commercial market (not considered to be “authentic”). However, it is currently difficult to identify whether they are authentic, including whether they were created from human remains. South American shrunken heads, some known as tsantsas, are common in many museum collections. įunding: The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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General information regarding the IMPACT Radiological Mummy Database can be found here: Due to the sensitive nature regarding human remains, information regarding how to access the underlying datasets for this study on the Chatham-Kent tsantsa are found here. IMPACT focuses on the body, made artifact through cultural or natural intervention, in bioarchaeology, epidemiology, and social archaeology studies of past human societies and their genetic and cultural descendants.
The IMPACT Radiological Mummy Database is a large-scale, multi-institutional collaborative research project devoted to the scientific study of mummified remains, and the mummification traditions that produced them, through non-destructive medical imaging technologies. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: Data of the clinical CT scan and the two micro-CT scans may be accessed through the IMPACT Radiological Mummy Database. Received: NovemAccepted: JPublished: August 3, 2022Ĭopyright: © 2022 Poeta et al. PLoS ONE 17(8):Įditor: Caroline Wilkinson, Liverpool John Moores University, UNITED KINGDOM Investigating and redefining the examination and authentication procedures of tsantsas is crucial for future ethical curation, management, and repatriation efforts of this unique cultural material of the Shuar and Achuar Peoples.Ĭitation: Poeta LS, Ordóñez MP, Fournier E, Nelson AJ (2022) Correlative tomography and authentication features of a shrunken head ( tsantsa). Also, this study questions whether the previously conceptualized dichotomy of ceremonial or commercial might be better thought of as a continuum of practice. Conclusively, our correlative tomographic approaches provide new insights into the determination process of whether a tsantsa was created from real human remains or not. We use a correlative tomographic approach using several scans at successively higher resolutions to determine whether a tsantsa was created from human remains, and if so, what key features can best contribute to its authentication. This project seeks to integrate the use of micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scanning with methods used in previous studies (clinical computed tomography (CT) and visual inspections) to examine authentication procedures of shrunken heads ( tsantsas) held in contemporary museum collections.
These shrunken heads, called tsantsas, are meant to be the cultural material remains of ceremonies conducted by the Shuar and Achuar Peoples of South America. Museum personnel and the general public have become quite familiar with the presence of shrunken heads in museum collections, but the procedures to authenticate the history and origin of these unique cultural items are not yet reliable.
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