The Ancient Maya idea of beauty differed radically from our own, as evidence from art and human bones show. Shown here is medical anthropologist Vera Tiesler, who has examined thousands of bones from the Maya Classical Era (250-900 CE) and found fascinating patterns in the practice of skull-shaping.
The Maya used stiff boards to flatten their infants’ heads so that they would grow into preferred shapes. Predilections appeared regionally, so that some communities wanted “vertical, pear-shaped” styles, but others emphasized a sloped tubular shape. Ultimately, a preference for having wide and flattened skulls emerged from the Caribbean coast and dominated the whole Maya culture, as the second slide depicts. Tiesler also noticed that the particular shapes that families wanted favored their maternal lines.
Skull flattening was about more than beauty, but also had to do with religious belief. Thinking that babies were not quite human, the Ancient Maya sought to protect their very young by keeping their skulls in a certain shape, and in doing so they could prevent their “essences” from escaping from their heads.
Source(s): @nature.com, 12 February 2019, “Maya bones bring a lost civilization to life,” photo credit Pim Schalwijk, ” By Erik Vance.
