ABSTRACT
One important factor in the relationships between peoples and ethnic groups throughout the early Middle Ages is the phenomenon of artificial skull deformation due to the wearing of headbands and/or small slats during the very first months of life as the skull was developing. In France, Mortillet discovered, at the end of the last century, at Guiry-en-Vexin, four Neolithic skulls showing an oblique fronto-occipital deformation, and several other Neolithic examples have been observed in Aveyron. The protection of the skull and in particular of the fontanels from cold and bruising, by covering the head with headbands, seems to have been one of the determining factors in the multiplicity of deformations in regions like southwest France in the 18th and the 19th centuries. In France post-Merovingian deformations are mostly of the circular type, but one straight fronto-occipital case from between the 9th and the 11th centuries has been described at La Charite-sur-Loire in Nievre.
