The plastered skulls
The dead are buried under the floor, their skulls removed, refleshed in plaster and given shell eyes.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 2.5 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 300 years
- Era
- Neolithic, Holocene
Across the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Levant — Jericho, Ain Ghazal, Kfar HaHoresh — bodies are buried beneath house floors, and after decomposition selected skulls are retrieved, modelled over in lime plaster to restore facial features, and inset with shells for eyes. They were kept above ground, handled and displayed. It is the clearest evidence anywhere of an ancestor cult, and it suggests that the dead remained members of the household in a fairly literal sense.