Our Versatile Vaults

When I was six years old, my mother produced her fourth child. Expecting another girl, we waited in anticipation for the emergence of our new sister. Alas, it was not to be. Out popped a strange crinkled raisin with even stranger crinkled raisins between his legs. Our baby brother, Andy, was born.

Not only did he have a strange set of genitalia and a disgusting little stump of a belly button, he also sported an intriguing soft spot at the top of his head. Since I was just a tyke with little understanding of cranial morphology, I couldn’t quite grasp that the flexible area at the top of his head, which bulged whenever he screamed and strained, was a necessary component of skull anatomy.

The soft spot, or fontanel, is the area at the top of the newborn’s head where the cranial bones have yet to join. There are actually six primary fontanels that reside between the bones of the skull; the largest is on top and usually fuses at around eighteen months.

Let’s pretend, for a moment, you were born without them. Without the fontanels, you’d probably still be dangling from your mother’s vagina, since there’s no way that giant fetal head is going to make it out without a flexible skull. Through the magic of evolution, nature has prepared us bigheaded humans for the tight squeeze that is the birth canal by postponing the joining of the cranial sutures until after we’ve cleared the lady parts.

The cranial vault is not a singular bone. It is actually composed of a number of bones that are joined via sutures. The sutures fuse over time, becoming completely obliterated, if you’re lucky enough to reach old age.

So now that we understand the basic mechanics of the vault, let’s explore some of the clever ways we humans have manipulated our malleable melons. Welcome to the magical, mystical world of cranial deformation.

Beauty comes in a variety of forms and is highly dependent upon culture - what one group finds attractive may repulse an outsider (nipple rings make me want to hurl). When it comes to adornment or decoration, the human body provides a veritable canvas upon which to express ourselves, and humans have been modifying and mutilating themselves for tens of thousands of years.

Because a newborn’s head is so flexible, it doesn’t take much to bend and shape it into a variety of strange yet eye-catching forms. For the ultimate in head-shape handiwork, let’s travel back a few thousand years to Central America and take a quick peek at the Maya, for they were rather deft at deformation. (Yes, I can spew these catchy phrases all damn day!)

The Maya were a sophisticated culture that thrived in Mesoamerica for thousands of years before experiencing a rapid decline, although their ancestors can still be found around the Yucatan. They were a learned society, with a written language and math, and they also built some pretty impressive pyramids.

And when they weren’t calculating their celestial calendars or playing their oh-so-serious ball games (the losers got death), they were sculpting their newborns’ heads into a variety of beautiful shapes and sizes.

According to the Spanish (who upon seeing such oddly shaped heads took a break from pillaging to ask a few questions), the reason the Maya constructed such elaborate shapes was to appear more handsome before their gods. They also made it easier to carry stuff. The broad, flattened variety made an ideal shelf for shuttling baskets from market to home. Very practical folks, the Maya.

Deformation was achieved via two basic techniques, which could be altered for more variation. The head could be bound with tight wrappings and the location of the binding would determine the direction and shape of the deformation. The other technique employed specially designed cradles, which squeezed the head in a desired direction. Either method could not have made for a happy baby. Imagine your young'un strapped to a board for hours on end. The crying must have been relentless. No wonder the Maya were big on human sacrifice.

Deformed heads were considered beautiful by the Maya; an indication of rank among a sea of common noggins. And many of these skulls have been recovered among the archaeological ruins of this most impressive civilization. But the Maya weren’t the only folks to dabble in deformation. Evidence of intentionally modified heads has been found on nearly every continent going back tens of thousands of years.

Sadly, the custom has fallen out of favor, for what I would have given to strap my baby brother down,  sit back with a bowl of popcorn, and watch his little head elongate into cone-headed perfection.

Here's some further reading on Mayan cranial deformation. See you next week.