There’s nothing like having a shrunken head on your wall to get conversations with visitors flowing.

I’d made a note back when Iberia Performing Arts League was doing South Pacific to write a bit about the shrunken head in my office but never got around to doing it.

But I stumbled across a story recently on the Web about a New York shop that sold “antiquities and oddities” including shrunken heads, and was reminded of this potential column topic.

The shop in New York is Obscura Antiquities and Oddities, described as “… a cabinet of curiosities.” A store owner says they deal with “… the strange, the bizarre, the unusual and the uncommon.”

The shrunken head hanging in my office for the past 25-plus years hung in my grandfather’s office as publisher of the Bastrop (La.) Enterprise for I’d guess at least 30 years.

Nathan Bolton loved to travel, and he and my grandmother eventually traveled to all parts of the world, including China, Antarctica, the old Soviet bloc countries, and more.

He brought home this shrunken head from an early trip to South America, as I recall the family story, and it hung in his office when I was a youngster (please withhold comments about how old that makes it).

Some years ago, I read that travelers who bought shrunken heads in the late 1960s or after probably had fake ones, made to sell to tourists. I believe this one was from the early ’60s or earlier, and it sure looks real — for sure real enough to get most any visitor to ask about it.

A Web site at www.head-hunter.com (there’s at least one for most any subject) says that although there were many headhunting cultures throughout the world, only the ancient Jivaro clan of Ecuador was involved with actually shrinking human heads.

The Head-Hunter.com site said the Jivaro warriors would take the head from those defeated in battle to complete their victory, seeking to benefit from perceived good fortune they’d get for having it and to please the spirits of their ancestors. And acquiring more heads meant acquiring more power. Killing an opponent and taking his head meant taking the opponent’s soul, and personal power.

Possessing the opponent’s head was a “deadly” (don’t think a pun was intended) insult to the opponent and his whole tribe.

Besides shrunken heads, Obscura in New York displays the works of a man who paints in his own blood, and has plans to display a two-headed cow, deformed pigs and other oddities.

And there’s a performance planned by a Tibetan who plays the “thigh-bone trumpet.”

I’ve got no clue what that sounds like.

Wikipedia says there are still some splinter groups, descendants of the old Jivaro group, in the Amazon region that are thought to still practice taking and shrinking heads.

More civilized descendants of the tribe instead make fake shrunken heads which are still popular among the tourists today.

There’s the old adage about building a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.

Wonder if that applies to making a better artificial (we hope) shrunken head?

WILL CHAPMAN is publisher of The Daily Iberian.