Cube-shaped skull unearthed in Mexico gives new insight into lost, ancient civilization

A cube-shaped skull that was discovered in Mexico provides rare insight into a 1,400-year-old Mesoamerican civilization’s social practices — which included deliberate deformation.

The skull belonged to a man who died at around 40-years old and between 400 and 900 AD in the modern-day Balcón de Montezuma archaeological zone in Tamaulipas, according to a news release from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.

Biological anthropologist Jesús Ernesto Velasco González said in the release that the man’s skull drastically deviated from the cone-heads that have previously been recovered in the area.

Artificial cranial deformations weren’t uncommon among Mesoamerican societies. Velasco González explained that modified skulls found in Balcón de Montezuma are typically “erect”