Historians, art historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists of Mexico have conclusive evidence that human and child sacrifice occurred frequently in Central Mexico, but the numbers have been far exaggerated in colonial sources. Likewise, research has demonstrated that sacrifice also occurred in the Andes and Maya areas, but in all of these areas, scholars have worked to place human sacrifice in its historical, cultural, and cosmological context. As a result, we see now that human sacrifice and cannibalism are tropes that have consistently played up the exoticism, barbarity, cruelty, and inhumanity of indigenous peoples and therefore have helped to justify the subjugation and outright genocides of indigenous peoples in the Americas.

While reading an older work by John Hemming called Red Gold, I noticed a print of a head being boiled on page 24, and just the other day, I was in an anthropology museum, which contained a display of several shrunken heads. I was wondering if scholars of Brazil or the Amazon have revised our understanding of the practice of making shrunken heads in the same way that scholars have revised, contextualized, and/or obliterated myths of other "barbaric" indigenous practices. Are these items largely only a popular myth? Do we know more about these practices and their meanings? If so, what have we learned?