Description from auction house: An autochrome lantern slide of a shrunken head of a Native Colombian Man.Head-shrinking has been the proper domain not of Africa but rather of the denizens of South America. In pre-Columbian times, the art of shrinking heads was widespread in the Andean area. Early chronicles have given us excellent descriptions of shrunken heads and the methods of their preparation among the Indians of the Ecuadorian and Colombian Coast.
In the post-Columbian period, it has been most famously the practice of a tribe of indigenous people commonly called the Jivaro or Jivaro-Shuar. The evidence suggests that the Jivaro-Shuar are merely the last group to retain a custom widespread in northwestern South America. In both ceramic and textile art of the pre-Columbian residents of Peru, the motif of trophy heads smaller than normal life-size heads commonly recurs; the motif is seen even in surviving carvings in stone and shell.
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