Sunday 10 March 2013

What to do with your enemy… Visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford


We visited the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford yesterday and it is a wonderful place. Stacked full of the strangest artefacts and the occasional surprise, it is really a worthwhile experience. Amazingly, I asked whether photography is allowed and they said yes.

The next bit is a little on the gruesome side, but it gives some insight in how enemies were treated by some of the South American tribes in Victorian times. The tsatsas (shrunken heads) are really small. And they were made by removing the skull and insides and then placing heated rocks inside the head.

All of these objects were placed in a single glass cupboard and didn't take up a lot of space.

A painted skull:

A more, shall we say down-to-earth and very ordinary skull, its jaw wired shut:

A shrunken head (Apologies for the poor image quality, the original had an unfortunate green smear all over it, but I didn't want to leave it out):

The same head, from a different angle:

Another Tsatsa:

And one with a very peculiar nose:

This one looked positively gruesome:

And one last shrunken head:

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