Bioarchaeologist Matthew Velasco of Cornell University looked at 211 Collagua Indian skulls dating from about 1100 to the 15th century to find the reason for their unusual shape.
Approximately 300 years before the arrival of the Incas in Peru, in 1450, noble representatives of pre-Inca society were bandaged in infancy to give them an elongated shape.
Velasco believes that long skulls were a hallmark of the ruling elite of the collagua tribes, ScienceNews reports.
Skull reshaping is common in ancient communities around the world. To do this, either the technique of pulling the baby's head with a cloth or fixing it between two wooden blocks was used.
This is how the sign of belonging to special social groups was developed. Collagua women with artificially elongated skulls were less likely to die from accidents or attacks, and their diet was more varied, so researchers are leaning towards the elitist theory of modified heads.
In the representatives of the lower classes of the collagua tribe, the heads, on the contrary, were flattened from the back of the head.
By radiocarbon analysis of bone and sediment samples from 211 skulls, Velasco identified the early (between 1150 and 1300, 97 skulls) and later (between 1300 and 1450, 114 skulls) groups before the Incas.
Thus, up to 39% of the skulls of the first group were deliberately elongated and pointed or flattened. Probably, different groups of tribes had their own tradition of head modification, because of the 14 skulls with extreme elongation, 13 were skulls of low-ranking members of the community. In the second group, about 74% of the skulls are modified, of which 64% are sharply elongated.
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Shortly before the arrival of the Incas, nobles of the collagua adopted the elongated shape as their preferred style, Velasco argues.
Elena Yakovleva