9,000 Year Old Decorated Skulls

[Donna]

DAMASCUS (AFP) - Archaeologists said they had uncovered decorated human skulls dating back as long as 9,500 years ago from a burial site near the Syrian capital Damascus.

Does anyone know more about this other than what was written in the article? Who were these people, does anyone know? I looked for other information on them but didn't have much time. I wish they had published a picture.
Donna

[oldarchystudent]

Very similar to the site discussed in the "Nazareth" thread. Could be a regional pre-ceramic cult.

[Minimalist]

http://www.archaeology.org/online/news/glue.html

The oldest glue in the world, carbon dated to 8,310-8,110 years before present, has been found in Nahal Hemar Cave, located on a cliff near the Dead Sea just northwest of Mt. Sedom in Israel. Excavated in 1983 by Ofer Bar-Yosef of Harvard University and David Alon of the Israel Antiquities Authority, the cave yielded objects for daily use such as rope baskets, embroidered fabrics, nets, wooden arrowheads, and bone and flint utensils, and ritual objects including stone masks and decorated human skulls

Near the Dead Sea.

http://inic.utexas.edu/menic/ghazal/intro/int.html

The beginning of the Neolithic period is arbitrarily defined by the appearance of agriculture, which appeared in the Levant at ca. 8,300 bc. 'Ain Ghazal was not founded until almost a thousand years later, and because of the local ecological combinations and the persistent presence of water (the permanent stream of the Zarqa River and the copious spring of 'Ain Ghazal itself), it continued to exist as a permanent settlement until around 5,000 bc or perhaps even later (cf. Rollefson et al. 1992: Table 1). This long duration of constant occupation - more than 2,000 years - is one of the most important aspects of 'Ain Ghazalís archaeology, for it permits us to examine how the residents of 'Ain Ghazal adapted themselves to the changing environment around them, changes that were strongly driven by the unwitting actions of the people of 'Ain Ghazal themselves.

Central Jordan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevali_Cori

Nevali Cori is an early Neolithic settlement in the upper Euphrates valley, eastern Turkey, around 490 m high. It is located near the steeply cut Kantara Cay, a tributary of the Euphrates.

The settlement is dated back to around 8000 BC. In this period ( PPN B) pottery was still unknown, but in Nevali Cori several hundred small figurines (about 5 cm high) of burnt clay have been found that are interpreted as votive offerings. They have been burned at temperatures between 500-600° C. The rectangular buildings and houses of the settlement have dry-stone walls and terrazzo-floors made of burnt lime. The largest building measures 16m x 7m. Rectangular stone pillars were set into the walls, two freestanding pillars, 3 m high, were placed in the middle of the room. The stelae show reliefs of human hands. The construction shows close parallels with the older round buildings in Göbekli Tepe.

A deposit of human skulls was found beneath the floor of one of the houses.

Anatolia, Eastern Turkey

This idea seems to have gotten around.

[oldarchystudent]

And to think when I was around 6-7 years old I told my Mum I wanted to be an archaeologist but I was afraid everything would be dug up by the time I was old enough to do it. Something new every day!

[Minimalist]

Kind of puts a hit on the idea of looking at the neolithic as isolated groups developing on their own, though.

[oldarchystudent]

I wondered about that in terms of material culture - how far do "Mousterian" or "Upper Paleolithic" lithic assemblages go geographically and how was a new technique shared?

But the skulls raise a question of a ceremonial process being shared over a wide area. Makes you wonder about contact, trade and shared ideologies. The evidence here would seem to say there was more than I thought at least - maybe the experts had a better handle on it already.

[stan]

THey must have known each other....
Whether there was a central organized religion....or just an animistic
belief accepted by everyone at the time?

In tribal Africa now, "animism" is practiced...at least that's what
the anthropologists call it. For example, they bury the skulls or bodies of their ancestors under the floors of their houses, as these neolothic cultures did. And they pour libations on the ground all the tme to
to "propitiate" the ancestors.
But the nature gods of these various tribes, similar though they may be, have different names....Sounds like the shared mythologies of the ancient mid -east.

[Minimalist]

Would "ceremonial practices" be shared, though? If someone has a better way of notching a stick to make a better spear, that's one thing and I could see it being easily adopted. But people tend to hang on to their own mythologies with a tenacity that is truly mind-boggling.

Could these disparate groups have spread out from a common center and already had the same belief system?

[oldarchystudent]

Would "ceremonial practices" be shared, though? If someone has a better way of notching a stick to make a better spear, that's one thing and I could see it being easily adopted. But people tend to hang on to their own mythologies with a tenacity that is truly mind-boggling.

What are you getting at here Min?

Could these disparate groups have spread out from a common center and already had the same belief system?

That seems most likely to me. I doubt there were prosletyzing missionaries running around converting the wicked. The further you get from the original centre the more variance you would see, the way you do with language. I'm just speculating out loud here.....

[Minimalist]

LOL....no. That was not a shot at Arch. Although.....................

[stan]

If you assume the same origin for all these people, I suppose you could argue that they already had these beliefs.If they shared beliefs, maybe they had other culturla bonds as well, maybe mutual defense pacts. Maybe they even spoke the same language and had tribal or familial relationships.. The culture of decorated skulls may have diffused from some other place, but these cities in Turkey aren't that far apart...so what about the effect of the proximity?

But people's beliefs and practices do change.
How do cultural/religious practices spread laterally? Conquest?
Simple imitation?

[oldarchystudent]

Ideologies spread through any number of factors, conquest, conversion, mimicking, diffusion. It’s hard to know what happened in a pre-historic society. As more sites exhibiting this kind of practice are found and dated it may become possible to determine a timeline for the spread of the practice and may give a clue to the origins and dispersal patterns. I don’t know if there’s enough to go on to make that kind of analysis with any confidence yet

[Starflower]

Stan, from everything I have read over the years it seems that most of the time the changes are by conquest or assimilation. You see it a lot in the British Isles and also with the Native American Indians:
[url]ttp://www.twofrog.com/rezsch.html[/url]

I would like to believe it was different in pre-history, so I will until proven wrong.

[oldarchystudent]

There's a process called "aculturation" in which the indigenous people are gradually drawn into the lifestyle and beliefs of the incoming society. Again, no way to tell yet if that's the case here.

[Donna]

When I read the article what occured to me was how did the people back that long ago even have the time to decorate dead bodies? I thought given the time frame just the basics of living were all consuming for them. Like I said, I have never studied this in depth, just curious and interested. The more I read about what is found the further back it seems that humans had a much more developed belief system, whatever it may have been, and more skills than they have been given credit for in the past.

"Kind of puts a hit on the idea of looking at the neolithic as isolated groups developing on their own, though. "

Didn't these groups usually consist of 25 to 100 people?
Donna