Keywords

1 Mesoamerican Cranial Modifications During the Postclassic Period

The onset of the second millennium was marked by the decline of many important Classic period nations, such as the Oaxaca Zapotec and the Lowland Maya. Oligarchic councils now operated in much of Central Mexico and in Yucatán and dual rulership appears to have replaced the more theocratic governments of prior Classic times. Evermore powerful, wide-ranging networks of pochteca merchants dominated the economic life towards and during the Postclassic era, while military orders gained prominence and, towards the close of the Postclassic period, culminated in the Aztec empire. Many parts of Mesoamerica experienced irrevocable social and cultural changes towards the second millennium A.D., a gradual replacement of political and economic organization, which was upheld by pan-Mesoamerican ideological shifts and a nahua-dominated streamlining of ritual life. If the unifying pressure of dominant ideology acted to assimilate the diverse worldviews, then it might have impoverished the real diversity, complexity, and even opposition of existing worldviews during the Postclassic period, as López-Austin (1989, pp. 470–471) states, for inner incongruences within ideological systems in general. This conjecture could also acquire relevance for cephalic modeling, should the increasing uniformity of techniques and cranial forms have responded to any sort of social pressure. In any case, at the end of the Postclassic, a uniform choice of short and broad head styles were produced by cradleboard devices, the type of apparatus still described by the Hispanic chroniclers during the sixteenth century. This tendency is most evident in those areas that staged diversity in headwear before the Postclassic period, such as Western Mexico and the Lowland Mayas .

1.1 Maya and Gulf Coast Cultures

Toward the close of the Classic period, the inhabitants of the Central and Southern Maya Lowlands suffered a disintegration process that would last for decades, even centuries, and which took a dramatic form in most former regional centers. Here, the so-called “collapse” at the end of the Classic period is evidenced most patently in the material record. The construction and erection of stelae halts, centers are abandoned, vandalized, and finally destroyed. At the end of this process immense territories in the interior of the Petén had been abandoned altogether .

It is noteworthy for the subject of this volume, however, that the vanishing inland populations did not appear to have changed their preferences in head models during the difficult years that surrounded and followed the demise of their Classic inland hegemonies. Also, the very last settlers appear to have continued their ancestral head splinting traditions just as their forebearers centuries earlier (Tiesler 2012a, b). Such is the case, for example, in the segment of the Río de la Pasión population of Altar de Sacrificios that was dated to the last occupational phase towards the Early Postclassic period. Its late settlers seems to manifest a continuity of preferences with twice the number of tabular oblique to erect forms, just as the majority of Altareños had performed in their offspring all along the centuries that encompass the Classic period (Tiesler and Cucina 2012). Even considered on a regional scale, our results on the scrutinized Petén series lay out a panorama not of cultural substitution, but rather continuity and permanence. Here, the head models for newborns were sustained up to the very end, until the last settlers died or left for good (Tiesler 2012a; Tiesler and Cucina 2012) .

Less affected by the collective catastrophe deep in the Petén basin were the northern lands of the Peninsula, where populations seemed to boom along the coast and connected inland (Sharer and Traxler 2006). Colonial chronicles allege that the Putun expansion reached its most important push during the domination of Chichén Itzá during the first half of the Postclassic era (Demarest et al. 2004; Sharer and Traxler 2006). Here, a new political–economic order establishes itself, linked to the cult of Quetzalcoatl and powerful pan-Mesoamerican merchant leagues (Ringle et al. 1998). This “new international order” was strongly mediated by the cultural territories that fringed the west coast of the Gulf of Mexico (Wyllie 2002). A growing importance in sea trade is expressed in the archaeological record by increased quantities of foreign materials and stylistic influences along the shores and inland Yucatán. As we have argued in the previous chapter, some of their carriers distinguished themselves by their distinctly top-flattened heads . They began to blend in with the coastal settlers of Yucatán and are also seen prominently in Chichén Itzá itself and its trader outpost, Isla Cerritos (Tiesler 2012). Also, other Postclassic period settlements around the Golf Coast, such as Isla de Sacrificios (Veracruz) or San Gervasio (Quintana Roo), show top-flattened head looks (Fig. 10.1).

Fig. 10.1
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Top-flattened crania from postclassic period Isla de Sacrificios, Veracruz (a), and San Gervasio, Quintana Roo (b). Profile view. (DAF/INAH; photo by V. Tiesler)

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Different from their inland Petén neighbors further south, Peninsular mothers seemed to have abandoned now, at the turn of the millennium, head splints in favor of cradleboarding, leading to the short and broad head form to dominate Postclassic looks almost everywhere in Mesoamerica. Mayapán, a city that after 1221 replaced Chichén Itzá as the ruling center and which in turn was abandoned during the fifteenth century, displays purely broad and short heads in its cranial record (Serafin 2010; Tiesler 2012a). This preference is already evident in Chichén Itzá itself, as well as in all examined east coast sites of our systematic survey. Such is also the case among inland dwellers fringing the eastern shore, such as Kohunlich, in southern Quintana Roo. Here, some 68 % of the inhabitants still bore tabular oblique forms (N = 16) during the Classic period. Afterwards, during the subsequent last phase of occupation, it is the erect form (69 % of N = 13) that is favored at the settlement (although the oblique modification still was known). This change in head looks is statistically significant (p = 0.038) .

In the long run, although the Maya “collapse” and its population shifts did not lead to the abandonment of head modeling itself, it did result in a homogenization of techniques and forms (Fig. 10.2). This shift is apparent when confronting Late Classic patterns with those of the Early and Late Postclassic period from our regional data base (Tiesler 2012). As seen in Table 10.1, the use of head splints of all kinds was in decline in the Maya area and was abandoned altogether toward the second half of the Postclassic period, together with the use of the constriction wraps. This cultural replacement is statistically highly significant if we compare the proportion of erect and oblique types between the Early Postclassic and the Late Postclassic periods (p = 0.001). Here, we might muse how the spread of the new pan-Mesoamerican “international order,” under the religious umbrella of the Kukulkan or Quetzalcoatl cult, might have streamlined the former tapestry of diverse preferences and their associated emblematic meanings, some of which were regionally specific (Ringle et al. 1998) .

Fig. 10.2
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Extreme frontal–occipital shortening in cranium from Argelia, Chiapas, Mexico. Profile view. (DAF/INAH; photo by V. Tiesler)

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Table 10.1 Patterns of head modification during the second millennium A.D.
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The different local expressions and trends in head modeling noted in this study are also echoed by other authors who describe and compare different cranial modifications of the Postclassic Maya series. T. Dale Stewart (1953, pp. 296–297) documents only erect shapes for the funeral population of Zaculeu for the Qankyak and Xinabahul Phases during the Postclassic era. Tabular erect models in the Postclassic mountain site of Mixco Viejo, close to present-day Guatemala City, likewise appear to be the only visible skull forms in all late skeletal population (Gervais 1989). Some of these profiles are shown with marked superior flattening, which is similar to the ones described in this survey for the coastal series from the Yucatán Peninsula .

It is also noteworthy that a full third of the Postclassic crania included in our systematic survey from the Maya area (Tiesler 2012) show a sagittal sulcus, which is almost always associated with tabular erect modifications. Similar to the preceding millennium, the proportion of individuals with sagittal grooving appears slightly higher in the coastal communities and in the Maya Highlands than among inland Lowlanders. This sagittal groove commonly describes a slight depression that visibly sets apart the parietal bones of both sides, perhaps an inadvertent byproduct of the compression crib restraints. However, in six of the 86 Postclassic grooves, this depression dramatically separates the calotte into two bipolar lobes and therefore appears to have held some form of emblematic role for practitioners and bearers (Fig. 10.3) .

Fig. 10.3
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Strong sagittal sulcus dividing parietals at the Argelia site (A-60) in the Valle de Angostura, Chiapas, Mexico. (DAF/INAH; photo by V. Tiesler)

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A trend towards homogenization is also felt among Gulf Coast cultures of Veracruz during the Postclassic period. However, here, this trend is not as clear as among Maya populations and, in fact, appears to follow different paths among Totonac and Huaxtec inhabitants, and still others, further south. Note that more than Totonac sculpture, monumental Huastec sculpture shows a marked penchant for reclined foreheads and straight occiput, as displayed by the sculpture known as the “adolescent of Tamuín (Montiel 2013).” Arturo Romano (1980) once identified this form with the conical cap of Quetzalcoatl that he believes was imitated by the tabular erect cephalic model. Our present survey of crania includes Totonacan individuals from Isla de Sacrificios and are dated to the Early Postclassic period (Romano 1965; Tiesler 2009). All but one of the crania shows tabular erect modeling both with and without superior flattening, following the trend described for coeval coastal Maya. West of this ceremonial island and towards the central Highlands lies the area of Maltrata (Mendoza and Lira 2005, pp. 258–259), which fell under Mexica power during the Late Postclassic. Here, only unconspicuous tabular erect skulls are documented, most of them slight lambdic flattenings .

North of Isla de Sacrificio, the coastline introduces to the cultural territories of the Huastec. Among its ancient occupations are the sites of Las Flores, Tamtok, Vista Hermosa, Pánuco, Isla del Ídolo, and Tamuín, all dated to the Postclassic period (Montiel 2013; Romano 1965; Tiesler 2009). These settlements delineated the vast northern fringes of Mesoamerica. Again, most, but not all, of their excavated crania display the effects of infant cradleboarding. The noticeable exception to this head look is posed by a number of skulls from Isla del Ídolo (Romano 1965, p. 11) and Vista Hermosa, which include visibly elongated specimens in intermediate and mimetic varieties (Montiel 2013). These forms are not attributable to any whole-body compressors but instead relate to ancestral head splinting traditions, by that time long forgotten in other parts of Mesoamerica. The fact that both series have been securely dated to the Late Posclassic era, make these exceptions to the general Mesoamerican panorama seem still more extraordinary, an aspect to be revisited in Sect. 10.1.3 .

What were the preferences, what the shifts in head looks on the borderlands of Postclassic Mesoamerica in general? These are important, region-breeching questions but again, there are at present no regional coverages of shaping practices to provide meaningful “food for thought” on the interethnic socio-cultural complexities typically involved. For now, I will only touch briefly upon the much debated discussion of Mesoamerican influence and possibly direct occupation on the Pacific coastlines beyond El Salvador; namely, Nicaragua and the northwestern tip of Costa Rica, identified in the literature with the Gran Nicoya (see, for example, Braswell et al. 2002; Carmack and Salgado 2006; McCafferty and McCafferty 2011; Solís and Herrera 2011). Among other questions, scholarship has pondered here on the cultural dynamics entertained by the Nicoya settlers during the Sapoá period and their potential Mesoamerican origin (800–1350 A.D.) .

Useful points of departure to further this debate from the perspective of artificially conferred head forms come from the Culebra Bay in northwest Costa Rica (Aguilar 2012; Solís and Herrera 2011). Here, recently exposed skeletal populations from the site of Jícaro display conspicuous body modifications in the form of dental filings and artificially modeled crania (Solís and Herrera 2011, pp. 13–14). These forms of physical embodiment starkly differ from other human remains of the Culebra Bay, which do not display any signs of such dental or cranial adaptation (see also Aguilar 2012). The authors note specifically the contrast in head form between ancestral contexts and sacrificial deposits (some with marks of defleshing), the latter presumed to stem from local folk with naturally rounded heads. Conversely, the skulls of the burial population presumed to accrue from Jícaro’s migrant visitors express visible head reclination and elongation, some of them in a severe (pseudo-circular tabular oblique) form. Note that the literature identifies this and surrounding coeval settlements with chorotega occupations, both archaeologically and ethnohistorically. Historical accounts hold that the chorotega folk of the Gran Nicoya originated from southern Mexico, possibly the Soconusco area. After resettling, these were forced to pay tribute to the Aztecs centuries (Carmack and Salgado 2006; Solís and Herrera 2011; see also Braswell et al. 2002; McCafferty and McCafferty 2011) .

So, who were these apparent newcomers with their ostentatious, yet anachronously elongated head shapes? Which cultural affinity, which geographic frame describes their original homelands best? At least the biocultural landscape of head modeling, which we just surveyed for the eastern Mesoamerican territories, would make Lowland Maya or Isthmic populations feasible canditades for further inquiries into this matter. It is clear that also the Pacific side of present-day Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador hosted Maya settlements during the Classic era (Cobos and Sheets 1997). Such is the case of San Andrés , in the west of El Salvador and in vicinity of Joya de Cerén, a settlement haunted by repeated volcanic eruptions during the first millennium A.D. (Cobos and Sheets 1997, pp. 38–41). Between 600 and 900 A.D., San Andrés functioned as the capital of a Maya polity with supremacy over the other establishments of Valle de Zapotitán, before losing importance during the tenth century A.D. From its central quarters, a male adult burial with strong fronto-occipital flattening and backward inclination of the forehead, was recovered, dated to the Late Classic (Cobos and Sheets 1997, p. 26). This shape is similar to the Lowland practices on the other side of the mountain ridges and to the shapes documented further east, at Nicoya’s Jícaro site . Conversely, the Postclassic Period Mesoamerican Highland areas , not to speak of any Nahua folks, appear to me less likely venues for the origins of the resettled chorrotega folk.

1.2 Mexican Highlands

As in most of the areas already discussed earlier, Mesoamerican Highlanders either retained their cradling devices in their cultural repertoire or, among those few groups used to head splinting, gradually shifted to cradleboarding. This gradual change in body practices naturally led to a loss in distinctiveness in this tradition, prompting uniformity in short and broad head looks, one that is communicated not only by the cranial record but also by Postclassic period portraiture and, in fact, by the Hispanic chroniclers who still witnessed head modeling during the sixteenth century (Bautista 2004; Tiesler 2012a; Tiesler and Zabala 2011). Note that a number of scholars also refer to a drop in the frequency and degree of morphological alteration among the Late Postclassic Mexica (Dávalos 1965; Pereira 1999). I also wonder if the homologation of Postclassic era artificial morphology is perhaps the reason behind the lack of curiosity and therefore the dearth of scholarship on head flattening for this period .

A large percentage of artificially modified skulls recovered from Postclassic archaeological sites displays tabular erect models. The hundreds of skulls curated at the National Museum of Anthropology (Romano 1974, p. 206), show almost exclusively this form during this period. More site specific, but vague, is the information conveyed by Gómez et al. (1989) on Early Postclassic Tula, all of whose artificial modifications are characterized as tabular erect (N = 11). Lagunas (1989) reports analogous trends for Postclassic Cholula and Dávalos (1951) on Aztec Tlatelolco . Of the latter series, some 52 of 127 skulls were noted to possess cultural flattening. An extended study of Aztec period head-shaping practices (N = 98) by Dávalos and Romano (1965, pp. 76–79) documents 94 erect shapes, but also four bearing head reclination. The latter are from the sites of Zumpango, Santa Lucía Azcapozalco, and sites of unknown provenance from the state of Hidalgo . A single specimen from Late Postclassic Monte Albán was scored as tabular erect by Winter (1996) and others .

Similarly, short and broad are the skulls documented in the Western part of Mexico, which uniformly exhibit tabular erect shapes. Dávalos (1951; 1965, pp. 15–19) refers to the skull series of Tarascan Michoacán with this form. Macías (1989) identifies it, too together with sagittal constriction, in her description of a Tarascan population from a Postclassic ceremonial center at Huandacareo, Michocán. Also Pereira (1999) confirms a solid preference for tabular erect shapes for the Postclassic series under survey at El Palacio and Las Milpillas, Michoacán (see also Gervais 1989, p. 165). Pereira also adds important information on the practice of obelionic flattening in Western Mexico , which he argues makes its appearance in defined Late Classic contexts and persists in the cranial record also during the centuries of the Postclassic period .

1.3 Mesoamerican Head Practices at the Time of European Contact

Although uniform, native infant head practices were still widespread at the time of European contact during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. As said, five centuries into the second millennium A.D., artificial cranial modification had evolved into a rather uniform tradition (Romano 1974; Tiesler and Zabala 2011). The written testimonies of the people who still witnessed the performance of indigenous cradleboarding during the early sixteenth century add valuable information to the cranial record for this era (see also Chap. 5). In the novohispanic territories, in particular, colonists took an interest in the native cultural repertoires during early colonial times (Tiesler and Zabala 2011; see Chap. 5). These describe cranial modification consistently as broad and short (tabular erect) and refer exclusively to cradleboards and cribs as shaping devices (Dávalos 1951; Romano 1974; Tiesler 2011, 2012a). The sacrificial deposits of the island of Tenochtitlán, imposing urban capital of the late Aztec empire, are filled with tabular erect skull vaults (Berrelleza 1990). Other Late Postclassic sacrificial deposits, like Teopanzolco in the present state of Morelos, display broad, tabular erect crania with visible lambdic planes, together with round, unshaped specimens, which should come from the fringes of Mesoamerica according to the authors (González-Sobrino et al. 2001, pp. 526–527).

Possibly an exception to this panorama is the tradition of head compression among Postclassic era Gulf Coast cultures, as discussed by Yépez (2001, p. 59). She transcribes the native terminology among natives from Veracruz, who used either attributions such as “broad and flattened” (patlachtic) or alternatively, “column-like, roll-like thing” to designate the head form in Totonac languages. Note that the second term implies head elongation rather than shortening (Yépez 2001, p. 59). This last distinction is crucial for our review, as the Late Postclassic Huastec appear to have been one of the last strongholds of head splinting if we believe the chronological assignment (see also Sect. 10.1.1 in this Chapter) .

Regarding the visible effects of compression, the reduction of the back of the head is stressed by a number of colonial writers who ascribe to it native attributions of bravery, courage, and high military rank (Anonymous 1977/1977, p. 145; Casas 1967 (sixteenth century), p. 177; Castillo 2001 (late sixteenth century), p. 99). Note that the compression effect on the forehead is described recurrently in terms not of flattening but of reduction (Hernández 2001/2001, p. 111; López de Gómara 1987/1552, p. 451). Uniformity of head form during the contact period is most conspicuous in those areas that utilized diversity in head wear before the Postclassical period, such as the Western Highlands or the Lowland Maya region (Pereira 1999; Tiesler 2012). As we have already pointed out earlier, a solid 90 % of late Postclassic Maya skulls show a tabular erect form. Now, diversity is evident only in the varieties of cradleboards and the daily performance of head shortening, and find their expressions in the different erect varieties in the cranial record. Now, the so-called tabular erect head varieties range from slight lamboid flattening to conical shapes, some few top-flattened silhouettes to extreme forms of antero-posterior reduction (Fig. 10.4; Table 10.1). An additional distinction is implied also simply by the absence of modeling, which is displayed, for instance, by some 10 % of the cranial vaults from the Maya area with none or only subtle traces of extrinsic modification .

Fig. 10.4
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Colonial rendering of Tlazolteotl priest. The partially shaved head is shown with a reclined forehead and a flattened occiput. (Adapted from Trejo 2007, p. 21; drawing by B. Ceballos)

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Given the homogeneity in artificial head shaping in most of Mesoamerica’s territories, we may assume that the cultural significance of Mesoamerican head compression was not as tightly related to its visible component during the second millennium A.D. as it had been in the first millennium in Mesoamerica, or as it still was in Inca Perú at that time (Lozada and Buikstra 2002; Tiesler and Zabala 2011). At least among Postclassic era Mesoamericans, it seems that head compression devices, more than a shaping instrument per se, functioned as protective and preventive measures implemented during the initial liminal stages of child upbringing (Duncan and Hofling 2011; Tiesler 2011). As we have argued in Chap. 6, Mesoamericans felt the concrete need to reduce the expansion of the little one’s protruding back of the head, as head elongation was thought to interfere negatively with the harmonious functioning of a person’s living essences and, therefore, was deemed harmful to health and even to life; this notion is also conveyed by the chroniclers who repeatedly associate occipital reduction to bravery and gallantry .

Apart from these fluid phenomenological and behavioral associations of cradling procedures during the early sixteenth century, flattened heads surely were imbued with more categorical notions of culturally attributed beauty and agreeability and, therefore, of Mesoamerican identity, as already argued in Chap. 6. In the centuries before Iberian contact, the broad headed “unilook” must have vaguely denoted a pan-Mesoamerican feeling of identity and personhood. Grégory Pereira (1999, pp. 167–168) brings home this point for the northwestern borderlands toward the Great Chichimeca by dissecting the Relación de Michoacán, written during the sixteenth century (Anonymous 1977/1977, p. 145). In it, the indigenus protagonists communicate the negative preconceptions that (Mesoamerican) Purepecha folk still harbored on the rounded (unshaped) head form of their incoming neighbors from the north, which they considered did not provide their human carriers with the credentials of courage and manhood .

2 Head Shaping Practices During the Colonies

Beyond doubt, the European contact and conquest led to the most dramatic shifts that the long-standing Mesoamerican traditions had ever experienced. Now also, head flattening was started to be abandoned among the natives of the sixteenth century or was gradually substituted by alternative head practices (Tiesler and Oliva 2010; Tiesler and Zabala 2011). At the same time, it is intriguing to learn of the twists that shaping practices apparently took in postcontact Mesoamerica, a welcome point of departure to speculate on the underlying dynamics of native assimilation vs. resistance and cultural resilience in the postcontact era. What were the mechanisms of oppression that effectively triggered the abandonment of head practices? What kind of transformation did cradleboard uses undergo during the “Hispanization” process in the newly founded towns of the region? Did they follow the same transformation in the rural communities? For this study, I combine historical and craniological sets of data (see also Chap. 5, by Pilar Zabala; Tiesler and Oliva 2010; Tiesler and Zabala 2011).

2.1 European Assimilation Efforts

In the years that followed the discovery and conquest of the New Continent, it is clear that the Spanish Crown remained acutely alert to native beliefs and ways of life in Hispanic America. This awareness was not quite genuine or neutral but was instrumental instead to govern and control the dominated sectors of Hispanic society. In their efforts, the Iberian conquerors also recurred to religious arguments and specifically Catholic attitudes towards the human body (Tiesler and Zabala 2011, 2013). Most of the early colonial testimonies are clearly permeated by derogatory ethnocentric rhetoric when addressing autochthonous cultural heritage (see also Chap. 5). It is unsurprising in this vein that the Spanish Empire soon openly opposed and actively suppressed infant head compression in New Spain as well as in Perú, just like most other identity forging indigenous customs. The Lima and Quito Synodes, which date to the turn of the seventeenth century, forbade native Peruvian head modifications under punishment by law (A.G.I., Patronato 189, R. 40; Toledo 1929). The eradication efforts by the Spanish Crown were a convenient argument to justify the colonization measures that were part of a strategy of forced assimilation of all non-European sectors, a despotic claim to streamline culture conveniently and transform the social fabric to the needs of the Spanish crown.

Different from Peruvian chronicles, those of New Spain focus on the Mesoamerican cradleboarding traditions not so much by their visible result in the head—which is described bluntly as short and broad, almost as a given physical attribute (Sahagún 1989)—but target instead the methods used to produce the effect and the performance itself, which many of the Iberian writers, either expressly or implicitly, regard as immoral and corrupt (Tiesler and Zabala 2013). The “arbitrary” modification of the natural head form, which “has been created by God to mirror his own image” (Cieza de León 1984, p. 227), appears in the Spaniards’ eyes as an aberration to faith. Beyond sacrilege, the Iberians were quick to name also other reasons for suppressing cradleboarding in New Spain . They highlight superstition, health hazards, and suffering. This is the sense, Friar Diego de Landa (in Tozzer 1941, p. 125) conveys to the tradition among the Maya of Yocatan, where: “the poor children’s inconvenience and hazard was so great, that some were at risk [of losing their lives] (…) and when they had finished with the torture of flattening forehead and [back of the head], they took them to the priest to know the future and the craft [of their child] and to give it the name that it would have for the time of its childhood.”

2.2 Resilience and Transformation

Despite the assimilation pressures exerted by the Spanish Crown, natives probably did not leave behind their native cultural heritage easily, including embedded traditions and old ways in general. These aspects relate to questions concerning the ways of hiding cradleboards, of accepting transformations in the body treatment of babies and their reconciliation with other elements of indigenous ideology. What persuaded natives to abandon or continue the practice of head flattening? What kind of circumstances and what types of suppression did effectively trigger the abandonment of this ancestral body tradition? Did customs undergo similar transformations in the urban settlements of Spaniards—and as swiftly—as in the native backwaters of colonization?

Instead of replying to these and other inquiries ad hoc and in a categorical manner, it is probably wise to approach the subject of native cultural adjustments by recalling some key features of native head practices at this point. Keep in mind that female caretakers, and predominantly the mothers, were in charge of the daily handling of their little ones’ heads (Tiesler 2011; Tiesler and Zabala 2013). From this perspective, it is clear that the routine of daily head compression was subscribed to the female domain. A secluded domestic environment that separated societies by gender, such as the Andean or Mesoamerican nations, could easily conceal the practice from the eyes of the male-dominated spheres of European colonizers. For colonial Perú, Latcham proclaims for instance that “the Indians were very secretive in all these things [ritual ceremonies] and hid them from the Spaniards; not admitting anyone [to assist them] except for the family members of their blood line” (Latcham 1929, p. 544; Tiesler and Zabala 2013).

Paradoxically, there is also a strong public element involved in head compression, which relates to the visible head formation that the carrier would exhibit for the rest of his or her life, given its permanent nature of cultural head modifications. The colonial onlooker would surely grasp such features by perceiving the abundance of people with noticeably different shaped heads in a given location or region. In case there was, they would also recognize the diversity of the natives’ head forms, as we may argue was the case in Inca Perú. This aspect institutes the second facet that is the key in evaluating the colonial impact on native head compression. This resides in the question of whether the visible morphological results of head flattening were important or not for the native practitioners. Put in context with Mesoamerican infant head practices, the lack of diversity and visibility, in general, may explain why the historic record soon falls silent on the custom and fails mention it in the colonial records after 1570.

A dozen postcontact skeletal collections from the Maya and Isthmus territories supplement the missing written information (Tiesler 2012a; Tiesler and Zabala 2011; Table 10.2). Although scarce and isolated, the cranial data at least does appear to echo the obliteration in the Iberian chronicles. The proportion of modeled skulls drops from over 90 % during the late Postclassic period (93 % of N = 127) to less than a third (31 % of N = 77) among native skeletons dated to colonial times. This decline in frequency is highly relevant statistically when both eras are compared in a pair-wise chi-square analysis (with p = 0.000). When present at all, colonial-period flattening appears less visible than before the contact and less diverse with only moderate expressions with or without sagittal grooves. Translated into the enactment of this body tradition, the combined evidence hints at the continued but declining use of cradleboards both in rural and urban settings during the sixteenth century.

Table 10.2 Frequencies and types of cultural cranial modifications in colonial series in and around the Maya area
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The expression of head modeling among individuals buried at an early colonial churchyard in central Campeche, on the Yucatán Peninsula, is especially telling. This Hispanic cemetery was excavated in the year 2000 after revealing the foundations of Campeche’s primitive church below its historical central plaza (Tiesler et al. 2010). The make-up of the multiethnic skeletal population includes natives, mestizos, and European and African newcomers (Price at al. 2012). In those individuals who were identified by dental morphology as natives or mestizos, only 3 out of 11 (27.3 %) still exhibited visible front-and-back flattening in their skull vault. If we take into consideration the direct interaction between natives and other sectors within the dense living quarters of this Hispanic sea town, we may assume the sense of rejection which the visible native head insignias must have caused in public. Here, the relevance and cultural identity that was once expressed by cranial flattening would have been destined to undergo a radical mental transformation in the oppressed carriers’ eyes to denote exclusion and “otherness” in the Hispanic social fabric.

This connotation introduces a third element involved in native head practices, one that certainly played a strong role in the process of acculturation: the compulsory notion of exodus and cultural failure that surely dominated the minds of many Native Americans during the first two centuries of colonization. Forced migration, aculturation, and a progression of deathly diseases doomed these people to catastrophic demographic decline and cultural breakdown. This reduced self-esteem surely worked in favor of the Spanish assimilation efforts, at least in the urban strongholds of the newly established Hispanic society (see Chuchiak 2006). The reduced proportion of modeled skulls during colonization demonstrates that the popularity of this head flattening was also in decline in Yucatán (Tiesler 2012a). A cemetery sample that is similar to that of Campeche, but dated more recently, was documented in the colonial atrium of the Cathedral of Mérida, excavated by an Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) team (Tiesler et al. 2003). The approximately 20 burials recovered from the atrium did not show any signs of either of the two practices in spite of the indigenous ancestry that the majority of the skeletons, as represented probably represent by way of dental morphology.

Despite our inability to generalize on the results owing to the lack of more precise chronological information and sufficient sample size the urban populations stand out against the ratios from the native backwaters of colonization. There, studies of colonial Maya populations denote the continued presence of cranial modification (Havill et al. 1997; Saul 1980; Tiesler and Zabala 2011). It will be certainly necessary to expand the framework of these studies in order to assess more specific cultural and social trends, in particular between rural and urbanized Maya populations and between Mesoamerican and Andean populations in general. Naturally, this shift from public to private enactment is not only noticeable in head practices but also includes all visibly performed and expressed corporeal practices, such as religiously motivated human sacrifice before and after Iberian contact (Duncan 2005; Tiesler and Cucina 2010).

2.3 Last Strongholds of Native Head Practices in and Around Mesoamerica

Up to this point, we have discussed the transformations that native head practices underwent during early colonization and have confronted the indigenous roles of this tradition with the assimilation interests of the Iberian colonizers. But what do we know about the practitioners in the vast jungle stretches that remained isolated and out of reach of Hispanic opression and control well into and beyond the colonies? As we have learned from the cranial record of the rural backwaters of New Spain , here the abandonment of the practice should have occurred later than in the Iberian controlled urban areas (Tiesler 2012). Although in colonial townships, such as Mérida or Campeche, head shaping should have been eliminated within two or three generations, at the most, and then vanished gradually in their surrounding native communities, the impenetrable jungle of Southeastern Mexico continued to provide strongholds for the practice. The Lake Petén Itzá persisted, for example, as an independent native state until it was conquered in 1697 (Jones 1998). Here lies the Itzá site of Zacpetén , which was excavated as part of the Proyecto Maya Colonial during the 1990s. Skeletal screening documented the practices of tabular erect shaping in a Late Postclassic bone assemblage from this site (Op.1000; see Duncan 2005, p. 144; Duncan 2009, p. 350), and we presume that head flattening should have continued here well past the Iberian contact in the sixteenth century, especially given the independence of the Itzá sphere.

Also the Lacandon maintained a nearly independent lifestyle for centuries past the European contact. Back then, Lacandon folk still dwelled in isolated nomadic hamlets deep in the impenetrable forested areas of the Usumacinta Valley and further east within the Petén. Here, the continued practice of cradleboarding is confirmed until the turn of the twentieth century by Alfred C. Maudslay, who calls the attention to the receding foreheads among elderly locals. Maudslay specifies that “the extremely sloping forehead [of elder Lacandon males] was not quite so noticeable in the younger men, and it may be that the custom of binding back the forehead in infancy, which undoubtedly [was] obtained amongst the ancients, is being now abandoned” (Maudslay and Maudslay 1899, p. 236; see also Palka 2005). Still further west, also native Mixe from Coatlán in the Mexican state of Oaxaca are portrayed around that time with a similarly inclined forehead and a flattened occiput (Shattuck 1933, p. 29; Trias de Bes et al. 1928, p. 84).

Our recent ethnoarchaeological study of sacred rock-shelter shrines around Mensabak in the northern Lacandon area in Chiapas adds to this panorama. These ancient rock shelter sanctuaries were mapped between 2010 and 2013 as part of the ongoing Mensabak Archaeological Project (Palka 2005). The shrines accrued also human skeletal remains among which we documented some 20 crania, all of them with signs of cradleboard use. Given the relatively recent nature of the bones from the Lacandon cave sanctuaries, at least part of which is dated to after European contact, it is telling that all skulls still appear artificially shaped from cradle board use.

In closing, the colonial and postcolonial transformations in head flattening, either in the form of continuing and hiding, substituting, transforming, or abandoning it altogether, did not progress uniformly within the complex cultural tapestry of New Spain . As only one dominant head look persisted here at the time of contact, the Spaniards disapproved of not so much the distinct effect (as they did further south in Hispanic Perú), but targeted cradleboard use (see also Chap. 5 in this volume). Unsurprisingly, given the relative lack of emblematic meanings of Postclassic indigenous head modeling, the transformations that infant head practices suffered here after the Iberian conquest do not relate to their visible morphological outcome, which they probably did not hold in the centuries before either. Instead, we hold that the postcontact transformations in head compression should have targeted to supplant the protective role that cradleboard practices had always held. Now, swaddling rituals, the fire of the hearth, hot baths, cinder, wraps, covers, and massages of the newborn’s body were deemed appropriate substitutes to retain the little one’s heat, to stabilize its spiritual health, and guarantee its transformation into the person to be. Needless to say, many of these measures are still in place and part of today’s rich Mesoamerican indigenous heritage (Duncan 2009, pp. 187–188; Guiteras 1986, p. 102; León-Pasquel 2005, pp. 128–136; Tiesler 2011; see also Chap. 5).