Short and Sweet: Skull Stories, The Art of Ancient Surgery

No need to read the panels! Skull Stories (from the San Diego Museum of Man) is concise enough that you can easily get the point without the written material.

I know how gory this whole skulls thing sounds like. Yet, this small exhibition was a treat.

In fact, I enjoyed the different exhibits so much (trephination tools, techniques, skull specimen, trephination world map,…) that I had to force myself spending the last 5 minutes going through the writings to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

Even though recycled from other exhibitions, the display cases and other educational props were particularly valuable as they helped cover the theme thoroughly. For example, a hand-on quiz introduced the 4 basic trephination techniques; for each technique, the visitor had to pick one of the 4 appropriate skull surgery holes, and then verify answers by pulling up the small wooden panels. On the other side of the room, past a case of trephination tools, also stood a giant map illustrating the presence of skull surgery in different places of the world including South America, Africa, Europe and Asia.

This easy to understand exhibition is one of the rare to deal with the Medical aspect of Physical Anthropology and should be seen by the whole family.