Ecuadorian shrunken head used in 1979 movie 'Wise Blood' was real, experts say
A tsantsa, or shrunken head, that was brought to the U.S. in the 1940s has been repatriated. ...
A shrunken head from Ecuador that was brought to the United States in the 1940s (and in 1979 was loaned as a prop to the film "Wise Blood") has been authenticated and repatriated to its country of origin.
In 1942, James Ostelle Harrison — a faculty member at Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia, now deceased — acquired the object, known as a "tsantsa," during his travels in Ecuador. Harrison donated the head to the university, where it was displayed in campus museums for decades. Then, in the 1980s, the university placed the tsantsa in storage. ...
In February 2019, the scientists scanned the head using computed X-ray tomography (CT) and built 3D digital models — with and without hair. To verify that the Mercer tsantsa was both human and ceremonial, the researchers consulted a checklist of 33 criteria from prior studies of these objects. The list described features such as the color, density and texture of the skin; the structure of facial features and anatomy; and signs of traditional fabrication, including stitching style, charcoal traces in the head cavity, and a hole in the top of the head for attaching a cord.
Morphology of the ears, mouth and nose, as well as human head lice eggs in the hair, confirmed that the tsantsa was human. Attributes such as the mouth-stitching technique, overall skin texture and a hole at the top — a detail only visible on the CT scans, and something that is usually absent in synthetic or commercial tsantsas — showed that the tsantsa was made traditionally by hand and not commercially produced ...