An Analysis of Scalping Cases and Treatment of the Victims Corpses in Prehistoric North America

Excerpt:
Swanton (1946) goes a step further and states that among the Creek, the taking of a woman's or child's scalp was considered a sign of even greater valor than the taking of a scalp on the battlefield, because it indicated that the warrior had penetrated all the way into the enemy's village, a feat which required great skill. Thus, it seems clear that the scalps of women were also highly prized as trophies among some Native American groups. Perhaps the 20-25% difference in the sex ratio of the victims found simply reflects the difficulties in penetrating an enemy village. Another possibility is that women may have had value as slaves as well as value as providers of scalp trophies, and therefore, were sometimes taken captive rather than scalped. A final possibility is that many more men were scalped when they were away from the village and their bodies were either never found, or else they were found, but burial within the village was somehow seen as unnecessary or even dangerous. Whatever the case, it seems clear that Native American groups who practiced the scalping custom during the prehistoric period had no proscription against scalping women, even women who were pregnant (Brooks 1994).

Just as being a woman was no protection from scalping, being a child also appears not to have always been a deterrent to becoming a victim of this custom. The youngest prehistoric victim of scalping found in this study was a child between the ages of five and seven years, and another was a subadult between 13 and 15 years old (Hollimon & Owsley 1994; Allen et al 1985). The five to seven year old from the Fay Tolton site in South Dakota may have provided trophies in two different raids. The presence on the cranium of a characteristic scalping lesion with some bone remodelling indicates that the child survived an intial scalping event by at least two weeks before being killed in yet another raid. Obviously there was no scalp left on this child to take as a trophy, but both hands appear to have been removed by breaking the radii and ulnae toward their distal ends, and these hands were probably kept as trophies, along with the head of another individual from the site who was quite obviously decapitated (Hollimon & Owsley 1994).
An Analysis of Scalping Cases andTreatment of the Victims Corpses in Prehistoric North America