Pumapunga

Presumably you’ve already read Ellen’s latest postcard, so you know that we’re both suffering from fairly extreme altitude sickness. It’s Saturday so there is no school. Even though we didn’t know when businesses open, we left at about 7:15. Naturally, nothing was open, so we waited until 8:15 to get a bit of breakfast.

We ran into our school chum also from Minnesota Peter in the Parque Calderon. We decided to go to the Pumapunga Museum. We’d heard great things about it. Cuenca’s most extensive and impressive artistic, historical, cultural, and ethnological exhibits are housed on three floors in a large wing of the Central Bank. I haven’t seen many banks in the U.S. doing this, but as I recall, Norwest had a museum-quality collection of furniture back in the day.

Inside are the collections, including an exhibit that contains shrunken heads. Outside are Inca ruins, and exhibits of native flora and exotic birds.

Because I know you all want to see this first:

Shrunken Heads

(from Wikipedia)

The Shrunken Head Business
The decapitation of enemy dead and various uses of the heads have been common throughout history. But the practice of shrinking them is unique to the Amazon’s northwestern rain forest and the Shuar were its main practitioners. Their word for it was tsantsa.

The Shuar took heads, then put them through the shrinking process. When the practice began is lost in the mists of history, but it’s known that it was a ritual to harness the spirit of the enemy. First, the back of the neck was sliced open and the brains were scraped out. A wooden ball was used to retain the shape, then the whole head was boiled in tannin-infused water till it was reduced to the ultimate size: a little larger than a man’s fist. At the end of the process, the holder of the head had not only conquered the body, but also vanquished the soul; by this seemingly extreme housebreaking ritual, the enemy’s soul was prevented from avenging its death.

Five heads are on display and they’re mighty gnarly, known for oversized jaws, other facial distortions, and sunken sides of the forehead. But that didn’t prevent commercial interests from overtaking the religious significance, which is when the heads became a commodity. From around the 1870s through the 1940s, this part of Ecuador and Peru was known for its “headhunters” who killed to satisfy the collector demand. But that’s another story. According to the experts, the last head was shrunk in the early 1960s.