48.
Ayacucho, Peru:
The town museum displays a large collection of trepanned human skulls.
These skulls often have misshapen elongated domes as well as some neatly drilled patterns of holes bored though the bone.
According to the museum information, hundreds of these skulls have been found locally.
They are thought to be the crania of pre-conquest women.
The rest of the women’s skeletons are missing. There is no evidence of healing in the bone cells surrounding the holes so these “operations” were presumably always fatal or they could have been performed post-mortum for some reason.
Perhaps they are the evidence of some bizarre human guinea-pig experiments. No one knows what the existence of these skulls means, but here they are.
A young Indian in a filthy red sweater has no information about the peculiar skulls , but he offers me his predictions about the future as he sets up his cutlery booth on the sidewalk.
He says next year will be particularly bad—even worse than this year.
To me, that seems like a perfectly safe prophecy since everything seems to be getting slowly worse.
He says he gets his information from the Spanish edition of the Jehovah’s Witness “The Watchtower” magazine.
An old Indian trots by us in the mud carrying two huge cardboard cartons on his back tied together with rope. They look heavy but he is chugging right along with a minimum of pollution.
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