From 5-12 October 2025, a delegation of Shuar leaders, elders, students and professors from Ecuador will spend a week visiting the British Museum, Science Museum Group and the Pitt Rivers Museum as part of the on-going Proyecto Tsantsa.
This visit marks a unique moment in the project’s history, bringing Shuar representatives and UK curatorial teams together for the first time to see and discuss collections in-person, including tsantsas (also known as shrunken heads) and hundreds of other Shuar objects in UK collections.
The visit will include collection viewings, workshops and sessions designed to shape the future care and understanding of these cultural materials. This public event will conclude the visit and will be a significant opportunity for the public and media to engage with Shuar perspectives on these collections and the collaborative work of the project.
Proyecto Tsantsa is a partnership established in 2017 between the Pitt Rivers Museum (University of Oxford), the Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ) and Shuar federations, including the Federación Interprovincial de Centros Shuar (FICSH) and the Federación Shuar de Zamora Chinchipe (FESH-ZC), who in 2023 signed a Memorandum of Understanding agreeing to work towards sharing knowledge and expertise, identifying Shuar collections across continents and finding ways for Shuar expertise to be taken into account when discussing and describing Shuar cultural knowledge and heritage.
