Correlative tomography and authentication features of a shrunken head (tsantsa).

Museum personnel and the general public have become quite familiar with the presence of shrunken heads in museum collections, but the procedures to authenticate the history and origin of these unique cultural items are not yet reliable. These shrunken heads, called tsantsas, are meant to be the cultural material remains of ceremonies conducted by the Shuar and Achuar Peoples of South America. This project seeks to integrate the use of micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) scanning with methods used in previous studies (clinical computed tomography (CT) and visual inspections) to examine authentication procedures of shrunken heads (tsantsas) held in contemporary museum collections. We use a correlative tomographic approach using several scans at successively higher resolutions to determine whether a tsantsa was created from human remains, and if so, what key features can best contribute to its authentication. Conclusively, our correlative tomographic approaches provide new insights into the determination process of whether a tsantsa was created from real human remains or not. Also, this study questions whether the previously conceptualized dichotomy of ceremonial or commercial might be better thought of as a continuum of practice. Investigating and redefining the examination and authentication procedures of tsantsas is crucial for future ethical curation, management, and repatriation efforts of this unique cultural material of the Shuar and Achuar Peoples.

Genetic characterization of a collection of Tsantsas from Ecuadorian museums.

Tsantsas are shrunken human heads originally made for ceremonial purposes by Amazonian indigenous groups of the Shuar and Achuar family, previously called Jivaroan tribes. A significant demand of these objects during the first half of the 20th century led to the manufacture of counterfeit shrunken heads for commercial purposes. For museums where these collections are held, as well as for the indigenous groups who claim their ownership, it is important to identify the origin and authenticity of these tsantsas. We hypothesized that a collection of 14 tsantsas from 3 different museum collections in Ecuador are human and aimed to characterize their sex and potential origin. We amplified the amelogenin gene and performed a high resolution melting analysis to determine their human origin and characterize their sex. We also analyzed a fragment (16209-16402) from the HVR-1 region to identify the mtDNA haplogroups present in the tsantsa collection. Our exploratory results show that all the tsantsas are human and that the collection is comprised of 13 males and 1 female. A total of seven mtDNA haplogroups were found among the tsantsa collection using the mtDNA EMPOP database. These results show a predominance of the Amerindian mtDNA haplogroups B, C and D. Additional principal component analysis, genetic distance tree and haplotype network analyses suggest a relationship between the tsantsa specimens and Native American groups.