An examination of the American monuments shows (see figure on page 269) that the people represented were in the habit of flattening the skull by artificial means.  The Greek and Roman writers had mentioned this practice, but it was long totally forgotten by the civilized world, until it was discovered, as an unheard-of wonder, to be the usage among the Carib Islanders, and several Indian tribes in North America.  It was afterward found that the ancient Peruvians and Mexicans practised this art:  several flattened Peruvian skulls are depicted in Morton’s “Crania Americana.”  It is still in use among the Flat-head Indians of the north-western part of the United States.

In 1849 a remarkable memoir appeared from the pen of M. Rathke, showing that similar skulls had been found near Kertsch, in the Crimea, and calling attention to the book of Hippocrates, “De Aeris, Aquis et Locu,” lib. iv., and a passage of Strabo, which speaks of the practice among the Scythians.  In 1854 Dr. Fitzinger published a learned memoir on the skulls of the Avars, a branch of the Uralian race of Turks.  He shows that the practice of flattening the head had existed from an early date throughout the East, and described an ancient skull, greatly distorted by artificial means, which had lately been found in Lower Austria.  Skulls similarly flattened have been found in Switzerland and Savoy.  The Huns under Attila had the same practice of flattening the heads.  Professor Anders Retzius proved (see “Smithsonian Report,” 1859) that the custom still exists in the south of France, and in parts of Turkey.  “Not long since a French physician surprised the world by the fact that nurses in Normandy were still giving the children’s heads a sugar-loaf shape by bandages and a tight cap,

Stucco bas-relief in the palace of Palenque.

while in Brittany they preferred to press it round.  No doubt they are doing so to this day.” (Tylor’s “Anthropology,” p. 241.)

Professor Wilson remarks: 

“Trifling as it may appear, it is not without interest to have the fact brought under our notice, by the disclosures of ancient barrows and cysts, that the same practice of nursing the child and carrying it about, bound to a flat cradle-board, prevailed in Britain and the north of Europe long before the first notices of written history reveal the presence of man beyond the Baltic or the English Channel, and that in all probability the same custom prevailed continuously from the shores of the German Ocean to Behring’s Strait.” ("Smithsonian Report,” 1862, p. 286.)

Dr. L. A. Gosse testifies to the prevalence of the same custom among the Caledonians and Scandinavians in the earliest times; and Dr. Thurman has treated of the same peculiarity among the Anglo-Saxons. ("Crania Britannica,” chap. iv., p. 38.)

Peruvianskull.

Chinook (flat-head), after Catlin.