Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found

by Frances Larson

  Karl Pearson and G.M. Morant, ‘The Wilkinson Head of Oliver Cromwell and its Relationship to Busts, Masks and Painted Portraits’, Biometrika, vol. 26, no. 3, 1934, pp. 1–116.

  Sarah Tarlow, ‘The Extraordinary History of Oliver Cromwell’s Head’, in D. Boric and J. Robb (eds.), Past Bodies: Body-Centred Research in Archaeology, Oxford: Oxbow, 2008.

  Introduction

  Lesley Aiello and Christopher Dean, An Introduction to Human Evolutionary Anatomy, London: Academic Press, 1990.

  Daniel Arasse (trans. Christopher Miller), The Guillotine and the Terror, London: Penguin Books, 1989.

  Sean Coughlan, ‘Museum offered head for shrinking’, BBC News website, 22 May 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/6679697.stm

  Basiro Davey, Tim Halliday and Mark Hirst (eds.), Human Biology and Health: An Evolutionary Approach, Buckingham: Open University Press, 2001.

  Graeme Fife, The Terror: The Shadow of the Guillotine, France 1792–1794, London: Portrait, 2004.

  Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots, London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1989 (1969).

  Anna Gosline, ‘How does it feel to die?’ New Scientist, no. 2625, 13 October 2007.

  Elizabeth Hallam, ‘Articulating Bones: An Epilogue’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 15, no. 4, 2010, pp. 465–492.

  Daniel E. Liberman, The Evolution of the Human Head, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

  Michael Marshall, ‘Death Rattle of a Decapitated Brain’, New Scientist, no. 2799, 9 February 2011.

  Laura Peers, ‘On the Treatment of Dead Enemies: Indigenous Human Remains in Britain in the Early Twenty-First Century’, in Helen Lambert and Maryon McDonald (eds.), Social Bodies, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009.

  The description of the Oxford University cranial collections is taken from a report of the Committee on Sites to the University Hebdomadal Council, 3 March 1939, p. 103, held by Oxford University archives, reference UR 6/PRM/1, file 1. A significant proportion of the cranial collection was transferred to the British Museum after the Second World War.

  Chapter 1: Shrunken Heads

  Shrunken heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum:

  Coughlan, ‘Museum offered head’, 2007, op. cit.

  Andrew Ffrench, ‘Should shrunken heads stay in museum?’, Oxford Times, 14 February 2007.

  Melanie Giles, ‘Iron Age Bog Bodies of North-Western Europe. Representing the Dead’, Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, pp. 75–101.

  Laura Peers, Shrunken Heads, Pitt Rivers Museum information leaflet, 2011.

  Laura Peers, ‘Considerations for the display of shrunken heads’, unpublished report for the Pitt Rivers Museum, 2009.

  Kate White, ‘Museums and Ethical Trade’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, vol. 13, pp. 37–47.

  See also the Pitt Rivers Museum website at www.prm.ox.ac.uk and the online catalogue at www.prm.ox.ac.uk/databases.html

  The accession numbers of the Shuar shrunken human heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum are: 1884.115.2, 1911.77.1, 1932.32.92, 1923.88.363, 1936.53.42 and 1936.53.43. The accession numbers of the shrunken animal heads at the Pitt Rivers Museum are: 1884.115.1, 1923.88.364, 1936.53.44 and 1936.53.45.

  Shuar headhunting:

  Jane Bennett Ross, ‘Effects of Contact on Revenge Hostilities Among the Achuarä Jívaro’, in Brian R. Ferguson (ed.), Warfare, Culture and Environment, New York: Academic, 1984, pp. 83–124.

  Michael J. Harner, The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls, London: Robert Hale and Company, 1972.

  Michael J. Harner, ‘Shrunken Heads: Tsantsa Trophies and Human Exotica by James L. Castner (book review)’, American Anthropologist, n.s., vol. 107, no. 1, 2005, pp. 144–145.

  Rafael Karsten, The Head-Hunters of Western Amazonas: The Life and Culture of the Jibaro Indians of Eastern Ecuador and Peru, Helsingfors: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1935.

  Steven Lee Rubenstein, ‘Circulation, Accumulation, and the Power of the Shuar Shrunken Heads’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 22, no. 3, 2007, pp. 357–399.

  Steven Lee Rubenstein, ‘Migrants and Shrunken Heads Face to Face in a New York Museum’, Anthropology Today, vol. 20, no. 3, 2004, pp. 15–18.

  Daniel Steel, ‘Trade Goods and Jívaro Warfare: The Shuar 1850–1957, and the Achuar, 1940–1978’, Ethnohistory, vol. 46, no. 4, 1999, pp. 745–776.

  F.W. Up de Graff, Head Hunters of the Amazon: Seven Years ofExploration and Adventure, New York: Duffield and Company, 1923.

  Maori headhunting:

  J.B. Donne, ‘Maori Heads and European Taste’, RAIN, no. 11, 1975, pp. 5–6.

  Joseph D. Hooker (ed.), Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks Bart., K.B., P.R.S.: During Captain Cook’s First Voyage in HMS Endeavour in 1768–71 to Terra Del Fuego, Otahite, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch East Indies, Etc., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896 (2011).

  Wayne D. Orchiston, ‘Preserved Human Heads of the New Zealand Maoris’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, vol. 76, no. 3, 1967, pp. 297–329.

  Wayne D. Orchiston, ‘Preserved Maori Heads and Captain Cook’s Three Voyages to the South Seas: A Study in Ethnohistory’, Anthropos, 1978, pp. 798–816.

  H.G. Robley, Moko; or Maori Tattooing, London: Chapman Hall, 1896.

  Scientific head collecting and its legacy:

  Joseph Barnard Davis, ‘Preserving Specimens’, in Notes and Queries on Anthropology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1874, p. 142.

  John Beddoe, ‘Constitution of Man: Form and Size’, in Notes and Queries on Anthropology, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1874, p. 4.

  Vicki Cassman, Nancy Odegaard and Joseph Powell (eds), Human Remains: Guide for Museums and Academic Institutions, Altamira Press, 2008.

  John George Garson and Charles Hercules Read (eds.), Notes and Queries on Anthropology, 2nd ed., London: Harrison and Sons, 1892, p. 5.

  Liz White, Giving up the Dead? The Impact and Effectiveness of the Human Tissue Act and the Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums, doctoral thesis, International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies, Newcastle University, 2011.

  The Report of the Working Group on Human Remains, London: Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 2003.

  Early additions to the Pitt Rivers Museum are listed in the following issues of the Oxford University Gazette: vol. XX, no. 677, 13 May 1890, p. 397; vol. XXIV (supplement), no. 806, 12 June 1894, p. 575; vol. XVI, no. 558, 22 June 1886, p. 635.

  Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology online catalogue, http://maa.cam.ac.uk/maa/category/

  collections-2/catalogue. Artefact accession numbers: Z6854, E 1893.149, Z 11206, Z 11207, Z 11208 1916.20, Z 7086, 1886.66.

  The James Jameson scandal:

  Raymond Corbey, ‘Ethnographic Showcases, 1870–1930’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 3, 1993, pp. 338–369.

  Felix Driver, ‘Henry Morton Stanley and His Critics: Geography, Exploration and Empire’, Past & Present, no. 133, 1991, pp. 134–166.

  Laura Franey, ‘Ethnographic Collecting and Travel: Blurring Boundaries, Forming a Discipline’, Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 29, no. 1, 2001, pp. 219–39.

  Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.

  J.A. Richardson, ‘James S. Jameson and Heart of Darkness’, Notes and Queries, vol. 40, no. 1, 1993, pp. 64–66.

  Sadiah Qureshi, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

  ‘The late Mr. Jameson’s trophies of travel’, The Times, 29 November 1888, p. 8.

  Letters to The Times:

  Assad Farran, ‘Our life at Yambuya Camp, in Africa, from June 22, 1887, to June 8, 1888’, The Times, 14 November 1890, p. 9.

  C.G., ‘Letter to the Editor of The Times’, The Times, 19 November 1890, p. 4.

  Percy White, ‘Letter to the Editor of The Times’, The Times, 19 November 1890, p. 4.

  ‘Mr.
Bonny and the cannibal story’, The Times, 14 November 1890, p. 10.

  ‘Mr. Jameson’s own story’, The Times, 15 November 1890, p. 11.

  Alfred Cort Haddon, Charles Hose and collecting in the Pacific:

  A.C. Haddon, ‘Stuffed Human Heads from New Guinea’, Man, vol. 23, 1923, pp. 36–39.

  A.C. Haddon, Head-Hunters Black, White and Brown, London: Methuen & Co., 1901.

  Charles Hose, Fifty Years of Romance and Research in Borneo, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994 (1927).

  Mercedes Okumura and Yun Ysi Siew, ‘An Osteological Study of Trophy Heads: Unveiling the Headhunting Practice in Borneo’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, vol. 23, 2011, pp. 685–697.

  Robert Pringle, Rajahs and Rebels: The Ibans of Sarawak Under Brooke Rule, London: Macmillan, 1970.

  J. H. Walker, Power and Prowess: The Origins of the Brooke Kingship in Sarawak, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002.

  Perceptions of foreign headhunters in South East Asia:

  R. H. Barnes, ‘Construction Sacrifice, Kidnapping and Head-Hunting Rumors on Flores and Elsewhere in Indonesia’, Oceania, vol. 64, no. 2, 1993, pp. 146–158.

  Richard Allen Drake, ‘Construction Sacrifice and Kidnapping Rumor Panics in Borneo’, Oceania, vol. 59, no. 4, 1989, pp. 269–279.

  Maribeth Erb, ‘Construction Sacrifice, Rumors and Kidnapping Scares in Manggarai: Further Notes from Flores’, Oceania, vol. 62, no. 2, 1991, pp. 114–126.

  Gregory Forth, ‘Construction Sacrifice and Head-Hunting Rumors in Central Flores (Eastern Indonesia): A Comparative Note’, Oceania, vol. 61, no. 3, 1991, pp. 257–266.

  Gregory Forth, ‘Heads under Bridges or in Mud: Reflections on a Southeast Asian “Diving Rumor”’, Anthropology Today, vol. 25, no. 6, 2009, pp. 3–6.

  Janet Hoskins, ‘On Losing and Getting a Head: Warfare, Exchange and Alliance in a Changing Sumba, 1888–1988’, American Ethnologist, vol. 16, no. 3, 1989, pp. 419–440.

  Janet Hoskins, ‘Predatory Voyeurs: Tourists and “Tribal Violence” in Remote Indonesia’, American Ethnologist, vol. 29, no. 4, 2002, pp. 797–828.

  Chapter 2: Trophy Heads

  Headhunting in Borneo during World War II:

  Judith M. Hiemann, The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

  Gavin Long, Australia in the War of 1939–1945, Series One: Army, Volume 7: the Final Campaigns, Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1963, p. 490.

  Malcolm MacDonald, Borneo People, London: Jonathan Cape, 1956.

  James Ritchie, The Life Story of Temenggong Koh, 1870–1956, Sarawak: Kaca Holdings, 1999.

  Jim Truscott, Voices from Borneo: The Japanese War, published online at http://clarsys.com.au/jt

  Allied troops and trophy-taking during the Pacific Campaign – diaries and memoirs:

  Richard Aldrich, The Faraway War: Personal Diaries of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific, London: Doubleday, 2005.

  James J. Fahey, Pacific War Diary, 1942–45: The Secret Diary of an American Soldier, New York: First Mariner Books, 2003 (1963).

  Arthur Goodfriend, The Jap Solder, Washington, DC: Infantry Journal, 1943.

  John Hersey, Into the Valley, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

  Sy M. Kahn Between the Tedium and the Terror: A Soldier’s World War II Diary, 1943–45, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

  Dean Ladd and Steven Weingartner, Faithful Warriors: A Combat Marine Remembers the Pacific War, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2009.

  Thomas J. Larson, Hell’s Kitchen Tulagi 1942–1943, Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2003.

  Charles A. Lindbergh, The Wartime Journals of Charles A. Lindbergh, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

  Mack Morriss, South Pacific Diary 1942–1943, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996.

  Bruce M. Petty, Saipan: Oral Histories of the Pacific War, Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2009.

  E. B. Sledge, With the Old Breed, London: Ebury Press, 2010 (1981).

  ‘Hunting License Issued by U.S. Marines’, New York Times, 1 April 1942, p. 8.

  Allied troops and trophy-taking during the Pacific Campaign – historical analysis:

  Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare, London: Granta Books, 1999.

  Ben Cosgrove, ‘Life Behind the Picture: “Skull on a Tank”, Guadalcanal, 1942’, Life magazine online.

  John W. Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, New York: Pantheon Books, 1986.

  Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

  Jonathan Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.

  Simon Harrison, ‘Skull Trophies of the Pacific War: Transgressive Objects of Remembrance’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., vol. 12, 2006, pp. 817–836.

  Simon Harrison, ‘War Mementos and the Souls of Missing Soldiers: Returning Effects of the Battlefield Dead’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, n.s., vol. 14, 2008, pp. 774–790.

  Simon Harrison, ‘Skulls and Scientific Collecting in the Victorian military: Keeping the Enemy Dead in British Frontier Warfare’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. 50, no. 1, pp. 285–303.

  Simon Harrison, ‘Bones in the Rebel Lady’s Boudoir: Ethnology, Race and Trophy-Hunting in the American Civil War’, Journal of Material Culture, vol. 15, no. 4, 2010, pp. 385–401.

  Simon Harrison, Dark Trophies: Hunting and the Enemy Body in Modern War, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2012.

  M. Johnston, Fighting the Enemy: Australian Soldiers and Their Adversaries in World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

  Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1997.

  James J. Weingartner, ‘Trophies of War: US Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941–1945’, Pacific Historical Review, vol. 61, no. 1, 1992, pp. 53–67.

  James J. Weingartner, ‘War Against Subhumans: Comparisons Between the German War Against the Soviet Union and the American War Against Japan, 1941–1945’, Historian, vol. 58, no. 3, 2007, pp. 557–573.

  The Pacific War Online Encyclopedia at http://pwencycl.kgbudge.com

  Life Picture of the Week scandal:

  Weingartner, ‘Trophies of War’, 1992, op. cit.

  ‘Letters to the Editors’, Life, 12 June 1944, p. 6.

  ‘Picture of the Week’, Life, 22 May 1944, pp. 34–35.

  Vietnam:

  James Adams, interviewed in Mark Lane, Conversations with Americans, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.

  Arthur E. ‘Gene’ Woodley, Jr., interviewed in Wallace Terry, Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by Black Veterans. New York: Random House, 1984.

  Forensic studies of World War II trophy skulls:

  W.M. Bass, ‘The Occurrence of Japanese Trophy Skulls in the United States’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 28, no. 3, July 1983, pp. 800–803.

  Simon Harrison, ‘Skull Trophies’, 2006, op. cit.

  Paul S. Sledzik and Stephen Ousley, ‘Analysis of Six Vietnamese Trophy Skulls’, Journal of Forensic Sciences, vol. 36, no. 2, 1991, pp. 520–530.

  Chapter 3: Deposed Heads

  Beheading videos during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

  Lisa J. Campbell, ‘The Use of Beheadings by Fundamentalist Islam’, Global Crime, vol. 7, nos. 3–4, 2006, pp. 583–614.

  Deborah Fallows and Lee Rainie, ‘The Internet as a Unique News

  Source’, Pew Internet and American Life Project, 8 July 2004, available at http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/

  2004/Internet-as-Unique-News-Source.aspx

  Martin Harrow, ‘Video-Recorded Decapitations – A Seemingly Perfect Terrorist Tactic that Did Not Spread’, Danish Institute for International Studies working paper, Copenhagen, 2011.


  Ronald H. Jones, ‘Terrorist Beheadings: Cultural and Strategic Implications’, Strategic Studies Institute report, US Army War College, Carlisle, PA, June 2005.

  Evan Maloney, The Brain-Terminal.com blog, at www.spectacle.org/0604/evan.html

  Jay Rosen, Pressthink blog, at archive.pressthink.org/2004/05/16/berg_video_p.html

  Lynn Smith, ‘Web Amplifies Message of Primitive Executions’, Los Angeles Times, 30 June 2004.

  Duncan Walker, ‘Who watches murder videos?’, BBC News Online Magazine, 12 October 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/

  magazine/3733996.stm

  Gabriel Weimann, Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges, Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace, 2006.

  Barbie Zelizer, About to Die: How News Images Move the Public, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

  ‘Beheading videos fascinate public’, Washington Times, 18 October 2004.

  ‘Italian hostage “defied killers”,’ BBC News website, 15 April 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/

  middle_east/3628977.stm

  Nick Berg top ten search terms are listed at http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/45844/

  History of spectators at state executions:

  Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People 1770–1868, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  David Johnston, ‘Ashcroft calls seeing McVeigh die a way to help victim’s kin’, New York Times, 13 April 2001.

  Sara Rimer, ‘A City Consumed in Plans for McVeigh’s Execution’, New York Times, 19 April 2001.