Might I introduce to you Monsieurs and/or Madames skulls “D 111” and “D 112”? For such boring names, these heads – carefully plastered, tended to (de-mantibled), and decorated (check out the eye shells) — are some of the best evidence we have for how some early cultures thought about death, ancestor worship, and property.
D 111 and D 112 are two of fourteen plastered skulls discovered in the ruins of the Neolithic community of Jericho (modern Palestine). Dating back to between 9,000-6000 BCE, this site appears among the earliest permanent settlements of humankind. And, you will be wanting to know, these were not the only skulls found there — there were 45 in total, but a bunch of the others weren’t plastered. They were sometimes decapitated, other times clustered in special directions, and other times showed clear signs of being exhumed, redecorated, and reburied. WTF.
WTF is, in fact, something the archaeologists have been asking ever since Kathleen M. Kenyon’s team excavated Jericho in the 1950s. A lot of labor went into these plastered skulls you see here — D 112 was recently CT scanned, which let us know the head had once belonged to a probably male adult with bad teeth. Moreover, his skull seemed to have been deliberately shaped in childhood by binding up part of the top. D 111 also showed evidence of having deliberate skull shaping in his/her early life.
So, maybe these skulls show the emerging importance of ancestors — perhaps for worship, but maybe also as markers of lineage. If some people’s heads were intentionally shaped in infancy, they were noticeably different, it “specialer” than others. And by carefully cultivating their skulls, perhaps it was a way for family lines to broadcast their rights to ancestral property.
Sources: D111 is Ashmolean Oxford Accession number AN1955.564, notes@collections.ashmolean.org, “Plastered human skull with cowrie shells (Jericho skull). D 112 is British Museum, 1954,0215.1, @blog.britishmuseum.org, “What lies beneath: new discoveries about the Jericho skull,” Alexandra Fletcher, 3 July, 2014. Lorenzo Nigro, “Beheaded ancestors. Of skulls and statues in pre-pottery neolithic Jericho,” conference paper, Jan 2017, Sapienza University of Rome, in Scienze dell’Antichità 23.3 (2017), pp. 3-30
