Plastered ancestral skulls of the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B
- Date
- c. 10,500 – 9,000 years ago (c. 8800–7000 BCE)
- Category
- Religion & ideology
- Region
- Levant (Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
During the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) in the Levant, villagers developed a striking mortuary practice: removing the skulls of selected dead, modelling lifelike faces over the bone with lime plaster, inlaying the eye sockets with shell, and sometimes painting skin and hair.
These plastered skulls — first recovered by Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho and later found at sites such as Ain Ghazal, Beisamoun, Tell Ramad, Kfar HaHoresh and Nahal Hemar — were often curated within or beneath house floors, sometimes in caches of several individuals. They are widely interpreted as evidence of an ancestor cult, in which remembered forebears were kept among the living to bind households and communities together amid the social pressures of growing sedentary villages. As among the earliest examples of sculptural portraiture, they also reveal a sophisticated artistic engagement with the human face. The practice illustrates how Neolithic ritual increasingly centred on the body, memory and lineage, reflecting new ideas about identity, kinship and continuity in early farming society.
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Related religion & ideology events
- Construction of the White Temple and Anu Ziggurat at Urukc. 3500 BCE
- Mungo Lady: the earliest known human cremationc. 42,000 years ago
- Neanderthal mortuary behaviour at Shanidar Cavec. 75,000 – 60,000 years ago
- The Löwenmensch (Lion-Man): earliest figurative sculpturec. 41,000–35,000 years ago
- Composition of the Rigvedac. 1500-1200 BCE
- Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna periodc. 1348 BCE
Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Religion
Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.
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