Those of you who’ve seen Apocalypto may find yourselves wondering why a number of its characters sport funny-shaped heads and jewels embedded in their teeth. As it turns out, in this regard Mel Gibson is just being anthropologically correct: some Mayans really did modify their skulls’ shape and have dental bling installed.
According to the digital scholars at Anthropology.net, the skulls were probably elongated by strapping boards to an infants’ skull and constricting the bones from developing in a normal pattern. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing (without doing some gruesome tests of our own) what effect this had on practitioners, neurologically or otherwise. If it’s anything like the brutal practice of footbinding in China, however, which effectively crippled millions of women between 900-1900 by making their feet into four-inch hoof-like things, then it likely had a profoundly negative effect on health.
Most Mayan skull modifications have been discovered in ornately-adorned burial sites, leading anthropologists to believe that the procedure was a status symbol — not unlike breast implants in our Hollywood glitterati today. In either case, IMHO you’ve got to be a pretty dedicated follower of fashion to go under the knife for beauty — or the skull-constricting wooden hat, for that matter.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it the Olmecs, not the Mayans, who practiced skull-binding? I saw this article on Anthropology.net and I wonder if it might be mistaken.
posted by veronica on 12-11-2006 at 8:34 pm
I could go on and on about the Maya. They are incredibly awesome and the most wickedly bitchin civilization I learned about in my undergraduate career thus far. I ain’t gonna talk your head off but here are a few facts that may interest you ~
- Not only would they stud their teeth with gems but they’d extract their own teeth and insert jaguar dentures!
- Blood sacrifice was necessary to keep the universe in motion and, besides war captive heart removal, the elite would do their part by stabbing their wieners and clitorises with sea urchin spines and collecting the blood in big bowls.
- They had the 365 1/4 day calendar down before anybody, they knew the position of Venus to a thousandth of modern calculations, and they predicted that this current and final incarnation of the universe will end on the Winter Solstice 2012.
posted by Amanda on 12-12-2006 at 12:11 pm
Yeah Veronica, I’m with you. I haven’t seen the article on Anthropology.net but I don’t recall ever hearing about the Maya binding or boarding heads in school. Maybe it was the Olmec. They were cool, too.
posted by Amanda on 12-12-2006 at 12:14 pm
Among the body modification practices, let us not for get to ad corseting. Women had their torsos bound in order to produce extreme hour-glass shapes in the name of beauty. Not only did the practice alter the rib cage but also the internal organs.
posted by jen on 11-12-2007 at 8:27 am
Veronice: Tp answer your question, a number of cultures practice “skull-binding”. Keep in mind however, that many cultures including many indigenous American cultures used cradleboards (“cradle boarding”) for their babies and this practice also modifies the shapes of the skull.
posted by Whitney on 11-12-2007 at 9:48 am
The ancient maya DID practice “skull- binding”. along with a few other primitive cultures.
posted by renee on 3-11-2010 at 5:50 pm