This question is a bit loaded. If you ask someone like Clyde Bellecourt, a founder to the American Indian Movement, he will say that the practice of scalping was first started by Europeans. It was a way to collect on various bounties that were offered. He often cites this as the origin of the term redskin, as during the scalping process, the blood would flow over the face, making them red.

This is an idea that is often cited among activists, especially in regards to the NFL team, the Washington Redskins. I mention this because it is a point that is becoming quite popular. A few years back, I interviewed Bellecourt for a local paper as he was giving a speech at a college. In both the interview and in his speech he mentioned the same thing. It wasn't isolated and the idea is really beginning to circulate.

Part of the reason this idea has become more popular is because there are some sources that suggest that Europeans had begun the practice thousands of years ago. Herodotus, writing in around 440 BCE, said that the Scythian soldiers would scalp their dead enemies. However, this wasn't the same sort of scalping that we think about. The Scythians would behead their fallen enemies, and then skin the head. After being cleaned and worked, that skin would be used as some sort of handkerchief. This probably is the only real example of something like scalping happening in the old world.

In what would become the United States, scalping was somewhat common, and it was quite wide spread. The biggest evidence of this are archaeological records which show victims of scalping. Some of the key evidence appears in skeletons from the Upper Missouri Basin. And in some places it was quite common (both after and before death).

Troy Case, in An Analysis of Scalping Cases and Treatment of the Victim's Corpses, did a study of 1000 skulls from the American Southwest, Midwest and Southeast, with the largest number coming from Crow Creek Canyon from around the 14th century, where nearly every individual exhibited evidence of scalping. The total number of people found was 486.

Other sites have been found in Arizona as well as South Dakota and Wisconsin, which all show signs of scalping.

According to Case, it was quite a common practice, and there is a lot of evidence that has been recently discovered that continues to show just how widespread and common it was.

When Jacques Cartier discovered the St Lawrence River in 1534. In his journals noted that the Indians would hold up the scalps they had collected to show him how powerful they were.

In 1564 the French painter Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues went to Florida and lived among the Ticumua Indians. In one of his paintings he shows the natives scalping their prisoners and in another one he shows Indians torturing their prisoners and drying scalps over a fire In his journal he wrote "they hung the bones and the scalps at the end of their spears, carrying them home in triumph."

The Jesuits kept a record of all of their correspondences between the priests in New France and their French masters. These were compiled into a series of volumes called the Jesuit Relations. In these books the priests said that the Indians had many different terms or words to describe then scalps they had. There was a word to describe the scalp of a man killed in hand to hand combat which was different than the word used to describe a man killed in battle. A prisoner's scalp had a different name than that of a child or a woman. Yet when Samuel de Champlain founded Quebec in 1608 he had no words to describe the scalps owned by the local Indians. He Champlain called them "Hair Leathers." Linguists cite early Europeans lack of descriptive words for scalps as proof that scalping was practiced before first contact.

His name escapes me at the moment even though I have his two books on my shelf at home. A Jesuit priest in the late 1600's wrote two volumes on the characteristics of the North American Indians. In his books he tells us that the Iroquois believed that their spirit and strength lay in the crown of their heads. The men would pluck their heads bald, but left a patch of hair growing from the crown. This patch of hair was sacred to its owner. An enemy who captured or killed a warrior would cut this area of scalp off in order to gain his enemies spiritual strength.