How were Tsantsa - dried human heads created?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tsantsa were in vogue in Europe and North America. They can be found in museums, auction houses and private collections, exhibited as if to demonstrate the barbaric customs of evil savages who kill their fellows by the hundreds for the sake of an infernal trophy. The reality, as usual, is even more unsightly: most of the demand for dried human heads was created just by white people who actively lobbied for this market in the enlightened West.

Let's find out more about this …

In a picturesque area on the banks of the Pastasa, along the Cordillera de Cutucu mountains, not far from the border with Peru, a small tribe, called the Shuar, has lived since ancient times. Achuars and Shiviara are close to them in traditions and national characteristics. These ethnic groups today sacredly keep the traditions of their ancestors. One of them is making amulets from human heads.

The area known as the Transcutuca was once inhabited by tribes related to the Khivaro culture. Today, the nationalities that have chosen these lands are the most numerous. The Shuar originally settled in the province of Zamora-Chinchipe. But gradually they expanded their territories. This was largely due to the fact that the Incas and the Spanish conquistadors began to crowd out the Shuar from the west.

Despite the fact that the inhabitants of the Amazon have always been wild and ruthless by nature, the territory is clearly divided between different tribes. Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Shuar were a warlike people. The colonists called them "hivaro", which meant "savages." Often they cut off the heads of their enemies and dried them.

“They still cut their heads, although they hide it. Far away in the jungle. And dried, reduced to the size of a fist. And they do all this so skillfully that the head retains the facial features of its once living master. And such a “doll” is called tsantsa. Making it is a whole art that was once practiced by the Shuar Indians, who were reputed to be the most famous bounty hunters in Ecuador and Peru. Today, when the Shuar became "civilized", the ancient traditions preserve the Achuar and Shiviar, which are close to them in language and customs - their sworn enemies. And - no less sworn enemies among themselves. In our days, the old enmity has not disappeared anywhere. She's just veiled … ", - these are the testimonies of eyewitnesses.

In ancient times, Europeans experienced a pathological fear of the ruthless tribes of the Amazon. Today, whites roam freely through the territories of the formidable Shuar, while the same only glance at the pale-faced with suspicion.

It is known that the heads sold in the shops of Ecuador are fakes. Real tsantsa are quite expensive and are in incredible demand among true collectors. Therefore, Europeans often specially come to the selva in order to acquire a real human head the size of a fist. After all, you can make pretty good money on this.

Before, every murder was answered with murder. Blood feud flourished. So any warrior who killed the enemy knew for sure that the latter's relatives would take revenge on him.

In fact, until the middle of the twentieth century, and in remote areas and later, Jibaro lived in conditions of constant sluggish military conflict. And their houses were closed with walls made of split trunks of the uvi palm tree: this is what they do when they expect an attack. However, these days, a person who has obtained a head can often pay off without risking losing his own.

They are paid off with cattle. Cows brought into the jungle by missionaries and mestizo colonists. The price ranges from eight to ten cows, each costing eight hundred dollars. Everyone in the forests where the Achuar live knows about the existence of such a practice, but it is not customary to advertise it. Thus, the white customer, having paid the ransom to the warrior, plus money for the work, can get the coveted tsantsa, which he either keeps for himself or resells on the black market with great profit for himself. This is an illegal, risky, very specific business, and it may seem dirty to some. However, it has existed for at least the last one and a half hundred years. Only the price of the heads was different at different times. And, at least, it is based on ancient military traditions.

How does the head decrease? Of course, the skull cannot change its size. At least today, the masters of the Achuar tribe are not capable of this, however, people say that once their skill was so great that it was possible to create such a thing. In general, the process of making tsants is rather complicated and time-consuming.

On the severed head of the defeated adversary, a long incision is made on the reverse side, going from the crown to the neck down, after which the skin is gently pulled from the skull along with the hair. This is similar to how the skins of animals are ripped off in order to subsequently dress them or stuff a stuffed animal. The most responsible and difficult thing at this stage is to carefully remove the skin from the face, since here it is firmly connected to the muscles, which the warrior cuts with a well-sharpened knife. After that, the skull with the remnants of the muscles is thrown as far as possible - it is of no value - and the Indian proceeds to further processing and making tsants.

To do this, human skin bound by a vine is dipped for a while in a pot of boiling water. Boiling water kills germs and bacteria, and the skin itself shrinks and shrinks a little. Then it is pulled out and planted on the tip of a stake stuck in the ground so that it cools. A ring of the same diameter as the future finished tsantsa is made of the kapi vine and tied to the neck. Using a needle and a string of matau palm fiber, the warrior sews up the incision in his head that he made when he ripped off the skin.

The Achuar Indians begin to shrink their heads on the same day, without delay. On the bank of the river, the warrior finds three rounded pebbles and heats them in a fire. After that, he puts one of the stones through the hole in the neck inside the future tsants and rolls it inside so that it burns adhered fibers of flesh and burns the skin from the inside. Then the stone is removed and put into the fire again, and instead of it the next one is thrust into the head.

The warrior produces an immediate reduction of the head with hot sand. It is taken from the river bank, poured into a broken clay pot and heated over a fire. And then pour it inside the "head", filling it a little more than half. The tsantsa filled with sand is constantly turned over so that the sand, moving inside it, like sandpaper, erases adhering pieces of meat and tendons, and also thinns the skin: it is easier to reduce it later. This action is repeated many times in a row until the result is satisfactory.

The cooled sand is poured out, re-heated on the fire and again poured into the head. In between, the warrior scrapes the inside of the tsants clean with a knife. While the skin from the head of a killed enemy is dried in this way, it continuously shrinks and soon begins to resemble the head of a dwarf. All this time, the warrior corrects the distorted facial features with his hands: it is important that the tsantsa retains the appearance of a defeated enemy. This process can take several days or even weeks. At the end, the scalp shrinks to one fourth of its normal size, becomes completely dry and hard to the touch.

Three five-centimeter sticks of solid wood of the uvi palm tree are inserted into the lips, one parallel to the other, which are painted red with paint from the seeds of the ipyak shrub. A cotton strip, also dyed red, is tied around it. Then the whole tsantsa, including the face, is blackened with charcoal.

Naturally, during the drying process, the scalp shrinks. But the length of the hair remains unchanged! That is why the hair on Tsantsa seems disproportionately long in relation to the size of the head. It happens that their length reaches one meter, but this does not mean that tsantsa was made from the head of a woman: among the Achuar, many men still wear longer hair than women. However, although not so often, there are also reduced female heads.

Few people know the fact that the Shuars in the old days also sent women on "headhunting". It was a kind of gender equality. In addition, women could participate in numerous raids.

At the end of the 19th century, bounty hunters experienced their renaissance: tsantsa were in great demand in both Europe and America. The easiest way to get the dried heads was by raids on indigenous villages - and more of them were carried out every month.

European settlers were just beginning to move towards the Amazon lowlands. People came to this wilderness for quick money: here they got rubber and cinchona bark. Bark remained the main ingredient in quinine, a drug used for centuries to treat malaria. The missionaries made contact with the jungle tribes and established minimal trade relations.

At first, the Europeans practically did not exchange their firearms, rightly fearing to arm half-naked savages, who have a custom of chopping off enemy heads. But Tsantsa bewitched the settlers and workers: enterprising European merchants began to offer the Indians modern weapons in exchange for an outlandish souvenir. Immediately in the district, tribal wars broke out, which, however, also played into the hands of the Europeans.

To satisfy the ever-growing appetites of the market, and at the same time to make easy money, some cunning people went to the production of cheap fakes. Heads of corpses were ransomed from morgues, even body parts of sloths were used. The counterfeiting business turned out to be so simple and brought in such profits that crowds of people began to engage in it. Europe has been flooded with fakes - in fact, experts say: 80% of the existing ones in the world are fakes.

In Europe and North America, heads were highly prized. The wealthy gathered on the walls of their living rooms entire private collections of tsansa, while museums competed among themselves for the most odious purchase. Nobody even took into account that we were talking about collecting dried human heads - everything was somehow not up to that.

While Tsansa remains a unique cultural feature of the Amazonian Indian tribes, other peoples also had their own variations on how to cook dried head. The Maori called them toy moco - a European experienced an attack of interest in these skulls back in the 1800s. The tattooed heads of leaders were especially popular among merchants; the Maori, having learned about that, began to massively tattoo and kill slaves, passing them off as their rulers. The enterprising Maori even tried to expand the assortment: having tapped a dozen or two missionaries and made toy moco out of their heads, the Indians came to the next marketplace. They say that Europeans gladly bought up the heads of their fellows.

The same thing happened in New Zealand as in the Amazon. Tribes with modern weapons rushed to slaughter each other to meet the demand for dried heads. In 1831, the Governor of New South Wales, Ralph Darling, vetoed the toy moco trade. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, most countries have outlawed the hunt for dried heads.

The Khivaro carefully guard the tsantsa manufacturing technology, but the information leaked nevertheless. This is evidenced by the fact that at one time on the black markets began to sell Negroid "dried heads" made in Africa. Moreover, a channel has been established through which these talismans are sent from Africa to London, and from there to all European countries. Collectors from different countries vie with each other for the right to own another terrible tsantsu.

Moreover, tsants are made not in African tribes, but in large guarded villas. At the end of the last century, in the capital of the Central African Republic, members of the group were caught, who put the process of cooking tsantsa on a conveyor belt. Thousands of corpses were supplied to the villa, located on the outskirts of the city, from all over the country, not only blacks, but also Europeans; women's heads were very much appreciated. However, all the same, the members of the group knew only an approximate recipe for making tsantsa, since the heads they sold after a while began to rot and disappeared (only a few survived).

Western interest in exotic dried heads waned over the decades, but never completely disappeared. For example, advertisements for the sale of tsants were a common occurrence in a London newspaper in the 1950s.

Meanwhile, today these tribes of the Amazon are being massacred. In the 60s, by means of seismic exploration, scientists discovered rich oil deposits in these territories. Forests began to be massively cut down, oil pipelines were laid to transport oil, and many species of animals disappeared. Those who tried to resist the powerful pale-faced were also mercilessly killed. However, Achuars, Shuars, Shiviars continue to constantly fight with oil and gas companies. Often, tribal representatives repeat: “If you came here to help us, then it’s not worth wasting time. If you have been led by the belief that your freedom and our freedom are interconnected, then let's work together.” However, few are willing to help the natives.