 Inside Kurtz’s Compound: Headhunting and the Human Body in Prehistoric Europe These round knobs were not ornamental but symbolic; they were expressive and puzzling, striking and disturbing—food for thought and also for the vultures if there had been any looking down from the sky; but at all events for such ants as were industrious enough to ascend the pole. They would have been even more impressive, those heads on the stakes, if their faces had not been turned to the house. Only one, the irst I had made out, was facing my way. I was not so shocked as you may think. The start back I had given was nothing but a movement of surprise. I had expected to see a knob of wood there, you know (Conrad 902: 94). Introduction In Conrad’s unsettling passage, his protagonist Marlow describes the grisly decorations set around the demonic Kurtz’s colonial compound on the River Congo. The heads are symbolic of Kurtz’s descent into savagery, a central motif of the novel. Indeed the most obvious reading is that these “rebel” heads have been taken and displayed as trophies; a statement of power and a warning to others. The prominent display of the decapitated heads of traitors is a familiar trope in medieval and post-medieval Europe. Such exhibits, like Kurtz’s fence-posts, are usually seen as essentially functional, intended to discourage prospec- tive challengers to the established order. Their symbolism relates predominantly to the power of the state to destroy and denigrate those judged to have grossly transgressed, exposing their remains to public scorn and denying them the proper rites of burial. The resultant head, however, has little ongoing symbolic power. Such interpretations imply a certain Cartesian dualism; a sharp conceptual separation of mind and body. The trai- tor’s head, stuck high up on a gate, may be a handy mne- monic device, reinforcing the power of the state, but it re- tains no essence, life-force or spiritual power of its own. It is a husk, divorced from the soul, the latter bound now for heaven or hell, depending on one’s politics. This seems a not unreasonable stance when dealing with relatively recent European societies (although it is by no means be- yond challenge). It becomes more problematic, however, when we attempt to project this conceptual separation into the more distant past. A similar vision has, for example, been extended to headhunting in Iron Age Europe where we have detailed literary descriptions of headhunting among the Iron Age peoples usually grouped together as the “Celts.” The following description from Strabo draws from the writings of the Stoic philosopher Poseidonius, who visited southern Gaul sometime around 90 BC, and who seems to have seen the fruits of headhunting at irst hand: In addition to their witlessness they [the Celts] possess a trait of barbarous savagery which is es- pecially peculiar to the northern peoples, for when they are leaving the battle-ield they fasten to the necks of their horses the heads of their enemies, and on arriving home they nail up this spectacle at the entrances to their houses . . . they embalmed the heads of distinguished enemies with cedar-oil, and used to make a display of them to strangers, and were unwilling to let them be redeemed even for their weight in gold (Strabo Geographia IV.4.5, translation from Tierney 1960). As John Collis (2003: 215–216) has recently pointed out, this passage (along with others equally well-quoted) makes no reference to any deep religious or spiritual mo- tivation for Celtic headhunting, but rather suggests that it is a simple by-product of warfare. In fact Collis goes on to suggest that Celtic headhunting is an essentially secular activity “connected rather with social display and insult- ing one’s enemies” (2003: 215–216). And this indeed was probably how Poseidonius and most of his Greek and Ro- man contemporaries themselves understood it. Despite Collis’ scepticism, however, the combination of literary and archaeological evidence for the Iron Age has long suggested to many archaeologists that the Celts (however problematic they may be to deine, e.g., James 1999; Collis 2003) held the human head in particular re- gard (e.g., Ross 1992). Laing has suggested that “if any single belief can be claimed to pervade Celtic superstition it is the cult of the severed head” (1981: 113), while Pow- ell’s classic work described headhunting as a “horrifying Ian Armit School of Archaeology and Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast