This episode contains discussions of violence and post-mortem body modification.

If that's not something you want to hear about, this might be a good episode to skip.

I'd also like to apologize in advance for my pronunciation of the Shuar language.

I'm not a native speaker, and there aren't many resources online that aid in pronunciation.

My apologies.

Humans are fascinated by gore and violence, but even more so the mysterious and unsolved.

Interest in these disturbing and unpleasant subjects is called morbid curiosity,

and it has gripped hundreds of people throughout the ages.

I am one of those people.

My name is Halley, and this is the Morbid Curiosity Podcast. My first visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford was incredibly memorable.

While I marveled at all the skeletons of animals tightly packed together in the large,

brightly lit atrium, I was also drawn to the cultural material in the slightly less bright and definitely more crowded

second room. Somewhere in the middle of what felt like piles of curiosities was a large glass

display case labeled treatment of dead enemies. Inside were several decorated skulls, as well as a few

small misshapen heads with long, glossy

hair. While I'd read about these specific cultural items, I'd never seen them up close. Shrunken

heads. Shrunken heads are known as Sansa by the Shua, the indigenous people of Ecuador and Peru, who originally made them.

While this practice was banned in the 1960s, trade in Sansa's continued for some time afterwards,

with most of the heads ending up in museums and private collections outside of Ecuador and Peru.

This is due to the intense fascination held by Western settlers in Ecuador, who traded metal tools and guns for them. Thanks to this

fascination, these ritually shrunken heads became a trade commodity for the Shuar. Even today,

to Westerners, they're still what the Shua are

...