ROTH] DEFORMATION, DECORATION, ORNAMENTS, CLOTHES 413 
nary appearance. This form of head is a manufactured one, being 
produced by the application of two flat pieces of wood to the sides 
of the head of the infant Maopityan immediately after its birth. 
There the wood is firmly bound, until the head becomes flattened at 
the sides and, of course, heightened at the top (BB, 246). Again, 
among the Taruma, this same traveler speaks of seeing two more 
fiat-headed Maopityan, a man and a woman (BB,249). It is said 
that the Maopityan, who called themselves Mawakwa, were so named 
from the Wapishana words mao, a frog, and pityan, folk or tribe 
(SR, 1, 472). But in connection with the mention of Taruma it is 
interesting to note that Schomburgk some 30 years previously had 
recorded a side-to-side flattening of the head among this same people, 
but was careful to make the statement that the deformity was not 
artificial (SR, 1, 470-471). Outside of the Guianas, strictly speak- 
ing, the nearest people that practiced head compression would seem 
to have been the Agua (as they called themselves) or Omagua (as 
they were named by the Spaniards) of the Putumayo River. As soon 
as their children are born, they put them in a kind of press, forcing 
nature after this manner with one little board, which they hold 
upon the forehead, and another much larger which they put behind 
the head, and which serves them for a cradle; and all the rest of the 
body of the new-born infant is, as it were, inclosed with this piece of 
wood. They lay the child upon its back, and this board being bound 
fast to that which is upon the forehead, they make the head of the 
child almost as flat as one’s hand (AC, 118). The name of Omaguas, 
in the Peruvian tongue, as well as that of Cambevas given to them by 
the Portuguese of Para, in the language of Brazil, signifies Flat- 
head; and in effect these people have the odd custom of squeezing, 
between two boards, the foreheads of their newborn children, to make 
them of this strange shape, that they may the more resemble, as they 
say, the full moon (LCo, 36). 
502. On the Cotinga, at Fort Sao Joaquim, Schomburgk reports 
seeing the Portuguese stockmen’s Indian women with their incisors 
filed to a point (SR, mu, 162), while not far from the mouth of the 
Rupununi, on its south bank, Brown came across a small settlement of 
Brazilian Indians, a curious looking lot, having their teeth filed into 
points like those of a saw (BB, 146). I have seen many a Wapishana 
boy on the Upper Rupununi with his teeth filed to points, and often 
watched him keeping them sharpened. The same tribe extract the 
two upper incisors of their young girls (Cou, 1, 313): the fathers 
are said to do this. In Cayenne the girl is said to have her teeth filed 
down by the piai at her puberty initiation (LAP, 1, 267). Among 
the Guajajara Indians on the left bank of the mouth of the Amazon 
the upper incisors, in both sexes, are filed (Zeitsch. f. Ethnol., 
