Defining a ‘Good Candidate’ for Skull Surgery: A Comparison of Cranial Fractures With and Without the Trepanation Treatment in the Ancient Andes (ca. 500-1000 CE)

Summary

This is an abstract from the "(De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Trepanation---creating holes in the cranial vault by boring, scraping, or cutting---has been documented archaeologically in numerous societies worldwide, but it is best-studied in the pre-Hispanic Andes. Early research on trepanation, conducted by Ephraim George Squier and later expanded upon by Julio C. Tello, was crucial to establishing that ancient Andeans prioritized care and practiced sophisticated, effective health treatments. The best-supported and most widely accepted interpretation of trepanation posits that it treated traumatic head injuries by relieving intracranial pressure caused by swelling in the brain---yet most cranial trauma was not treated with trepanation. We ask: what constituted a ‘good candidate’ for trepanation as a treatment for cranial fracture? Using a sample of 611 individuals from the Middle Horizon (ca. 500-1000 CE) in the south-central Andes, our preliminary findings identified 186 individuals with some form of cranial trauma, but only 43 of these individuals (23%) exhibited trepanation. The group with both fractures and trepanation skews older and more male with a higher rate of cranial vault modification than the group with fractures alone, and this study will further explore how fracture type, dimension, and location contributed to the likelihood that it would be treated with trepanation.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• (De)Pathologizing the Past: New Perspectives on Intervention and Modification as Care in the Americas

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50083