Trepanation in Mesoamerica

Among New World societies, trepanation is most commonly found in the Andean civilizations such as the Inca,[3] where it is frequently associated with pre-existing cranial damage, indicating that it had a use as a reasonably-successful medical procedure— by one estimate, more than 70% of the patients survived the operation.

This was a reasonably widespread tradition, illustrated in pre-Columbian art which on occasion depicts rulers adorned with or carrying the modified skulls of their defeated enemies, or of the ritualistic display of sacrificial victims.

The earliest archaeological survey[7] published of trepanned crania was a late 19th-century study of several specimens recovered from the Tarahumara mountains by the Norwegian ethnographer Carl Lumholtz.

[10] A 1999 study of seven trepanned crania from Monte Albán showed a combination of single and multiple elliptical holes drilled or worn into the cranial cap, performed exclusively on the upper Parietal bones.

Most of the skulls in the study showed signs of earlier cranial damage, indicating (as with the Andean examples) that the operations were an attempt to repair or alleviate this head-trauma.

950–1400), and include specimens found at Palenque in Chiapas and recovered from the Sacred Cenote at the prominent Postclassic site of Chichen Itza in northern Yucatán.

It was widely adopted however, to the point where one particular study[13] which examined over 1,500 skulls drawn from across the Maya region determined that at least 88% exhibited some form of intentional cranial deformation.