14 DAY TRIAL // Recent studies done on trophy heads collected from funeral monuments of prominent Nazca leaders show that they did not belong to rival cultures, as it was first expected. The heads were not captured in battles, but came from the same tribes as the people they were buried with. Why this civilization collected heads is still a question that leaves scientists puzzled, but at least now they know that these people were not in the habit of severing their opponents' heads from their bodies and taking them home.
In the average tombs, the heads were suspended from woven cords, so as to be visible to all people and spirits that may have visited the tombs. There are numerous controversies regarding the matter, as the scientific community failed to come to a consensus as to why the heads were collected in the first place, and what their role was in the community.
Thus far, anthropologists and archaeologists hypothesized that the skulls could have been used for ceremonial purposes, or for fertility rites, but no one can say for sure. This is just one of the mysteries surrounding the Nazca civilization, which inhabited the high plateaus of the Nazca desert in modern-day Peru some 1,500 to 2,000 years ago.
Among their most impressive achievements are the world-famous Nazca lines, which depict all sorts of animals, from Orca whales to humming birds. These lines are not mind-boggling due to the level of detail, but because they can only be viewed from a helicopter, as they have a very large scale. How this culture managed to arrange the large etched rocks in such intricate patterns remains an unsolved puzzle to this day, when researchers are not entirely sure if such a thing can be done again.
Researchers at the Field Museum, in Chicago, alongside colleagues from Arizona State University, in Tempe, the University of Illinois, in Chicago, and the Indiana University, in Bloomington, will publish their finds in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.