Source Compilation on Head-Shaping Practices in Hispanic America, by Pilar Zabala

Abstract

The interpretations of this chapter are founded largely on Hispanic historical accounts, which are compiled and commented upon here. To this end, some 100 individual text citations on this area are assembled—an anthology that covers five centuries (fifteenth to twentieth) of directly witnessed head-shaping practices. This extensive body of written testimonies comes from the geographical sphere first controlled by the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Perú, including the Caribbean region, and provides primary source material for further research on head practices after European contact. The historical extracts give a voice to native body practitioners, Iberian eyewitnesses, government analysts, conquerors, adventurers, and naturalist bystanders, and lastly, to modern anthropologists who describe waning head traditions still being applied in the Amazon Basin and parts of Mesoamerica during the twentieth century. Most colonial documents come from the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid and the Archivo General de las Indias in Seville. The majority of transcriptions on head shaping, dated to postcolonial times, derive from the recompilation of historical sources by T. Eric Dingwall (Artificial cranial deformation; a contribution to the study of ethnic mutilations, 1931). Care was taken to examine each historical transcription critically within its particular historical context to avoid oversimplification and interpretational biases.