When I was trying to choose a topic for my I-Search paper, I browsed the internet, looking at sites about Latin America.  I was surprised to find a website claiming there was “proof” that aliens lived with the ancient Incas.  That proof was that skulls have been found in Peru with very unusual shapes.  This was interesting, so I browsed some more and found that there were many websites saying that the skulls were of human-alien “hybrids.”  I found this a bit hard to believe, and I also found websites on archeology that said that ancient skulls with unusual shapes were made through skull binding.  I decided that I wanted to know more, and chose this for my topic.

There were many things I did not know about skull binding.  I would find out that it was practiced by different people all over the Andes region, not just by the ancient Incas.  Different groups of people used different methods of skull binding, so their skulls had different shapes.  Some used cloth, others used boards, some used a special cradle, and others just used their hands.  The reasons for skull binding also differed, including to show group membership, to look beautiful, or to show class.

What I wanted to find out most when I started my research is why people bound their heads.  I also wanted to know who did it, and how they did it.  What I found out from reading research by anthropologists is that Artificial Cranial Deformation was a form of body modification prevalent in the ancient Andes; in other words, people found their babies’ heads to shape them to show their status.

Finding sources for my I-Search paper turned out to be hard.  The problem was that my topic was narrow.  I started at the SIS library, but I did not find many sources about my topic.  I tried the Shorewood Public Library, and found several books about the Incas, but only one that mentioned skull binding.  It was only when I used the UWM library website that I started to find good sources.  I went to the Subject Guides webpage and clicked on Anthropology.  The site told me that I should search a database called “Anthropological Literature.”  This database turned out to have good articles for my topic.  Since this worked out well for me, I decided to try another UWM source on anthropology, my friend Jean Hudson, who teaches anthropology at UWM.  She had two books at her house on osteology that she thought would be useful to me, and she was right.

I did a lot of my research on the internet.  This was how I found my topic in the first place.  The problem was finding reliable sources instead of silly websites about aliens.  It turned out that the words I typed into Google were very important.  When I typed “skull binding” I got a big list of UFO sites.  When I types “skull deformity” in I got UFO sites and medical websites about birth defects.  I did find one credible website with this search, and it called skull binding Artificial Cranial Deformation.  This was the important term to learn, because it is what anthropologists use (they abbreviate it ACD).  Even typing Artificial Cranial Deformation into Google still got me websites about aliens, but it also led me to anthropology sources.

I was interested in my topic from the day I chose it when looking at a website that called an unusual looking skull “The Starchild.”  I didn’t believe that aliens lived in Latin America, but it did make me wonder.  Why did people used to bind their heads into unusual shapes?  And why do people today looking at ancient bound skulls today think they see an alien?  (If we did meet aliens, why would look like humans with big heads?  They should look completely different from us.)

What I learned from my research can be divided into two main areas.  The first is the practical information: how did people bind skulls, and what were the practical reasons?  The second area is trying to understand why people do strange things: why do people alter their bodies in painful ways, and why do people see things they don’t understand and believe it proves there are aliens visiting Earth?

The most basic question I researched is why people in the ancient Andes bound their skulls.  Articles I read by two anthropologists say that about 88% of skulls found from the ancient Andes showed artificial cranial deformation.  So this was not a strange thing that only a few weird people did in the ancient Andes.  Most people had their skulls bound, and they must have done it for a reason.

What I found out is that different groups of people bound their children’s skulls for different reasons.  Many societies used skull binding to make themselves look different from other societies.  For example, the Kol’awa people bound their heads to look pointy, so their neighbors bound their heads to be wide and flat.   Anthropologists are excited about this, because they are able to see how societies interacted by looking to see how head shapes changed over time.

In some societies, different groups within the society bound their heads differently, so that you could see if a person was a ruler or an ordinary person.  Some societies only let the ruling class bind their skulls, and others used different methods for different classes.  Some people bound their children’s heads for religious reasons.  Others thought it would be good for their children’s health.  In some societies people believed having a tall head would make a man a better warrior.  In others people thought having a wide head would make a woman able to carry more on her head.  The reason I read most often to explain skull binding is that people thought it was beautiful.

I was interested to learn how people bound skulls.  I learned that in order for babies to be born, the bones of their skull have to slide over one another and compress.  This is why most babies are born with their heads pushed into a conehead shape.  Because the bones of their skulls are not fused yet, babies’ heads can be “moulded.”   So skull binding was always done on infants.  In some societies, babies’ heads were only bound for a short time, but in others they were bound for a few years.

There were several ways that people in the ancient Andes bound their babies’ heads.  The simplest way was for parents to do it by hand, but since moulding takes a while, this method wasn’t the most popular.  A much more popular method was to use cradleboards to hold babies.  A baby would be tied to a long board with a small board tied down over the baby’s head to hold it in.  This created a skull with a flat, sloping forehead.  In societies that wanted the head to be wide and flat in the back instead of the front, a board, flat rock or pad was tied to the back of a baby’s head. 

In other societies, people wanted a tall head instead of a flat one.  To make a tall, wide skull, pads were tied to the forehead and back of the head.  To get a tall, thin skull, four boards or pads were tied to the front, back and sides of the head.  Depending on the angle of the boards or pads, people could make an upright, tall skull, or one that slanted back.  Other societies wanted to bind the skull to end up with a conehead with ridges or rings around it.  This was the most complicated shape.  To make it, a system of bandages could be tied onto the baby’s head, or a special tight hat could be used.

I have explained why people in the ancient Andes thought it was important that they bind their children’s skulls, and how they did it.  Now I want to explain why people would do something so strange as squashing the heads of their children.  If someone bound their child’s head in America today, we would probably call it child abuse.  Were the people of the ancient Andes cruel and stupid compared to us?

It turns out that all societies have traditions of changing the body.  Anthropologists call this body modification.  Piercing is a common example.  Here in the United States , ear piercing is very popular.  In other societies, lips or noses are pierced.  In some groups people file boys’ teeth to points, bind girl’s feet so the toes curl under, or stretch women’s necks with many metal necklaces.  Tattoos and scars are used to decorate the body in some societies, which is painful.  We may think this is weird, but in America there are women who have their pinkie toes removed so they can wear very pointy shoes today! 

It turns out that people do body modification in different times and places for very similar reasons.  An ancient Inca, Maya or Nazca binding a baby’s skull is very similar to a modern American parent piercing a baby girl’s ears so she will look pretty, or getting a boy braces for health, or getting a teenager a nose job so she will be popular, or having a son circumcised because that’s what is normal here.  But is skull binding more drastic than these body modifications that we do today?

Today, if a baby has a head that is flattened, it is considered a birth defect.  Doctors tell parents that the baby’s skull must be reshaped to make it rounded.  So people today may believe that flattening a baby’s skull would be harmful.  Some old anthropologists thought that bound skull shapes proved that Latin American natives were primitive and stupid.  But today anthropologists say that skull binding did not harm the brain.  After all, in some societies it was practiced only by the ruling class, and if it made them stupid, they would not have remained the ruling class for long.  What skull binding did is to change the shape of the brain, but not its size or ability to work.  And the ancient peoples of the Andes actually knew a lot about the brain.  We know this because archeologists find skulls that show that people had been treated with trephination.  Trephination is cutting a hole in the skull to reduce pressure on the brain after the head has been injured.  Since many of the trephination holes are healed over, we know that the surgery worked.

When anthropologists look at skulls that have been bound, they see body modification, a common human thing to do.  But when many people on the internet look at these skulls, they don’t see humans at all: they believe they see aliens.  They see “unknown humanoid types” and “alien-human hybrids” and “star beings.”  UFO fans seem to think it is obvious that the skulls can’t be purely human.  What is really interesting is that they try to prove to nonbelievers that the skulls are alien by trying to disprove the idea that the skulls got that shape because they were bound.  On the UFO Digest site, it says that ordinary Nazca people bound their heads to try to copy the shape of the human-alien hybrids who had this shape naturally.  The Starchild Project site says that skull binding leaves a hole at the top of the skull (which isn’t actually true), and since the “starchild” skull doesn’t have a hole, it wasn’t bound.  The Hidden Mysteries website says that headbinding creates a flat skull, and can’t explain the conehead skulls photographed.  (This also isn’t true; the conehead skulls pictured on the site are the kind made by binding with bandages or a special hat.)  Obviously, the “proof” these websites give proves nothing. 

What I learned about doing research from this I-Search is that if you pick a narrow topic, it is hard to find information.  It also meant that I had to read articles written for anthropologists instead of articles written for ordinary people, which was hard.  It was difficult to figure out all the vocabulary.  I learned that it is helpful to ask an expert, and I was lucky to have an anthropology professor for a friend.  I also learned that it is important to avoid procrastination.  Having the research paper broken into stages with separate deadlines showed me that if I have to write a research paper on my own, I should break the work up and set myself deadlines for each part.

My most important findings were that skull binding was done in many different ways, and served different purposes in different societies.  Most interesting to me was to find out that a form of body modification very common at one time can disappear, and look very strange at another time.  The kinds of body modification we do today, like shaving and ear-piercing and plastic surgery, can be painful or expensive, but they seem normal to us.  But when we see some other society’s body modification, we may find it strange, ugly, frightening, or even alien.  But the people all over the internet who think they are seeing proof that aliens visited Earth really should do some research.  You don’t need to look for UFOs when you come across something strange.  You should try the library first.

What is most strange to me is that at least some of the website authors did do some library research about skull binding, but then they came up with ways to manipulate the facts to “prove” that the skulls they were talking about weren’t shaped by skull binding but by breeding with aliens.  They just seem to believe in UFOs more than they believe anthropology articles.  This shows that it is important not to trust everything you read online, because it may be written by someone with a very strange perspective.

Finally, the most important lesson I learned is that fashions are always changing.  Most people realize that clothing styles change over time.  What I learned is that body styles change over time.  If a child is born with a flat skull today, we say it has a birth defect, but a child born with the same skull in the ancient Andes would have been seen as unusually beautiful, like a child with bright green eyes today.

Bibliography

Gerszten, Peter C.  “An Investigation into the Practice of Cranial Deformation amoung the Pre-Colombian Peoples of Northern Chile.”  International Journal of Osteoarcheology.  Vol. 3, 1998: 87-98.

Hidden Mysteries—The Magazine.  TGS Services, web manager.  14 Nov., 2005.  <http://hiddenmysteries.org/themagazine/vol7/skulls.shtml>

Editors of Time-Life Books.  Incas: Lords of Gold and Glory.  Virginia : Time Life Books, 1992.

Merbs, Charles F.  Catalog of the Hrdlicka Paleopathology Collections.  California : San Diego Museum of Man, 1980.

“Remolding Used for Positional Deformity.”  University of Maryland School of Medicine Neural Network.  <http://www.neurosurgery-umms.com/Newsletter%5BRemolding%5D.htm>

Rhode, Matthew Paul.  Craniofacial Morphology and the Consequences of Intentional Cranial Deformation among Prehistoric Andean Populations.  Michigan : UMI Dissertation Services, 2001.

Rogers, Spencer L.  Artificial Deformation of the Head—New World Examples of Ethnic Mutilation and its Consequences.  California : San Diego Museum of Man, 1975.

Schijman, Edgardo.  “Artificial Cranial Deformation in Newborns in the Pre-Colombian Andes.”  Child’s Nervous System.  Vol. 21, 2005: 945-950.

The Starchild Project Data Site.  Lloyd Pye, content provider.  22 Nov., 2005.  <http://ww.starchildprojet.com/analysis-02.html>

Tiesler, Vera.  “Head Shaping and Dental Decoration Among the Ancient Maya.”  1999.  5 Nov., 2005. < http://www.mesoweb.com/features/tiesler>”

UFO Digest.  “Alien Skulls.”  22 Nov., 2005.  <http://ww.ufodigest.co,/skulls.html>

White, Tim D.  Human Osteology, Second Edition.  California : Academic Press, 2000.