Siillk'aii — Toiigan Somatology 247 



The results summarized in Tables II and III show that the Tongans are 

 among the tallest groups of mankind. The men aA'erage 173 centimeters or about 

 5 feet 8 inches in height. On the average the women are 10 centimeters, or 

 4 inches, shorter. The head is both long and broad yielding an average index of 

 81. 1 for the men and 81.6 for the women. There is no assurance, however, that these 

 are the natural diameters of the Tongan head. In the skeletal material brought 

 back by Gifford and JMcKern, seven crania were in a fair state of preservation. 

 With the single exception of one cranium of a young child all of these crania 

 showed a moderate to a pronounced degree of occipital flattening accompanied by 

 marked asymmetr}-, pointing clearly to the fact that they had been artificially 

 deformed. The cranial length-breadth indices were 82.7, 84.5, 86.0, 86.0, 88.2, and 

 93.7. These average 86.8. 



At my request inquiries were made by Gifford and McKern as to the preva- 

 lence and methods of head deformation. The information shows that the Tongans 

 in the past and to some extent at the present time shape the heads of children, but 

 the description of the methods employed throws no light on the deformation seen 

 in the crania. According to several informants the child was laid on a piece of tapa 

 with the top of its head placed against a heavy block of squared wood, the pressure 

 tending to flatten the top of the cranium. The deformation described above is 

 decidedly not of this type. Since this procedure is said to have been continued for 

 one month only, its effect may be considered as negligible. It is difficult to imder- 

 stand how it would have any appreciable efl'ect even if continued indefinitely, since 

 the amount of pressure involved must ha\'e been very slight. 



In the Tongan skeletal material that I examined, the tops of the crania show 

 no evidences of flattening. The deformation on these Tongan crania is very simi- 

 lar to that observed in the crania of many groups of Indians in the southwestern 

 United States. Occipital flattening is usvtally thought to be accidental — at least in 

 origin. When the efifect of it was once recognized, conscious effort may have been 

 made in certain grotips to duplicate by artificial means the results obtained by 

 accident. The hard beds and wooden pillows that are still in use among the 

 Tongans suggest a possible explanation of the occipital flattening, as it is known 

 that a certain amount of deformation or flattening is easily brought about by hard 

 pillows, particularly in persons who are naturally short headed. Examples of such 

 accidental flattening of the occiput are numerous among the Chinese, Japanese, and 

 Koreans. The only difficulty involved in this explanation is to account for the 

 difl^erence between the degree of deformation found in the living series and that in 

 the cranial series. It is known that the crania are not modern. The average 

 length-breadth index of these crania is nearly 6 points higher than the same index 

 in the living. On the whole, while the implication is that deformation is not so 

 prevalent at present as in the past, it seems better to base no generalization on the 



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