Treatment of Head Wounds in Pre-Columbian and Colonial Peru

As is frequently the case, art objects often depict the life in a particular civilization, thus giving a visual record of a people where the people themselves have disappeared. Peru is one of the areas of the world where art depicts the life of the people while the people themselves are present in the form of mummies to confirm much of what is seen in art. A number of ceramic vessels have been found depicting one man working on the skull of another with a knife. That such actions were possibly surgical was documented in 1865 when Squier was given a skull with a trephined opening made during life. Continued documentation of such operations has been reported in the literature, but the best studies are in Spanish. This paper is a study of the material existing in the Regional Museum of Ica, Ica, Peru, and a review of selected authors’ interpretations of these operations