‘IT’S A RELIEF’

Mercer University Returns Human Shrunken Head to Ecuador

The ceremonial artifact was used as a prop in the movie “Wise Blood.”

A Mercer University faculty member brought back a ceremonial shrunken human head from Ecuador more than seven decades ago. It sat in the Georgia school’s natural-history collection and was once loaned out as a prop in the 1979 movie Wise Blood. But now the artifact, known as a tsantsa, has finally been repatriated, The Art Newspaper reports. A team from Mercer chronicled the painstaking efforts to authenticate the head—using a CT scan—and ensure that it was not a forgery so it could be returned to the country of origin. “It’s a relief to have the specimen out of our possession,” Craig Byron, a professor of biology, told the site. “It had ‘underground’ value; it was illegal to trade or sell; it was the skin from a person’s head; we had no business holding on to this item.”