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- [00:00]
A
Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com subscribe. It's 1953 and the sounds of digging and the hustle and bustle of workmen can be heard for miles around. Archaeologists are hard at work recording amazing structures and artefacts that have started to emerge from the ground in this incredible arid, yet fertile landscape. The setting is an ancient site atop a small hill in the great Jordan Valley, north of the Dead Sea. An ancient city famed from the Bible for its strong walls that ultimately came crashing down. A place with archaeology stretching back 10,000 years. One of the oldest continually occupied sites in the world, Jericho. The workers are digging deep. The soil subtly changes in color as they descend lower and lower into the ground, marking layers and layers of history. Thousands of years of archaeology. It's the last week of the excavation. Soon these trenches will be filled in and the threat of looting will descend on the site. Until the next season. But then, peeking out from the side of one trench, a skull covered in dirt and plaster with shells for striking eyes as well as other facial features carved out of the plaster. A nose, cheeks, ears. It's an extraordinary discovery and the first of many. Over time, more of these skulls would be discovered, first at Jericho and then at other sites across the Levant. This wasn't just a local prehistoric phenomenon. This bizarre tradition of plastered skulls spread as far as Anatolia. Their purpose remains a fascinating mystery. So what do we actually know about them? How were they made? What are some of the big theories surrounding their function for these early farming communities some 9,000 years ago, who did these plastered skulls depict? I'm Tristan Hughes, your host and this is the story of the Skulls of Jericho. Our guest is the award winning archaeologist and art conservator, Raven Todd Da Silva. Raven, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the show.
- [03:12]
B
It's a pleasure to be back, Tristan.
- [03:13]
A
It's been too long since we did Origins of the Inuits all that time ago. And this story of these plastered skulls and how ancient they are. Prehistoric. I'd never heard of these artifacts before. They are astonishing.
- [03:26]
B
They are, I think, my favorite ancient historical objects. I am obsessed with them a little bit and so I'm really excited to talk about them with you today and
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A
set the scene for us. First of all, how far back in time are we going with these plastered skulls?
- [03:41]
B
We are going all the way back to the dawn of agriculture. If we're going to use these hyperbolic terms, we are going about, let's say about 10,000 years ago to the PPN B, specifically the pre Pottery Neolithic B.
- [03:55]
A
Okay.
- [03:56]
B
There's a lot of these fun terms that archaeologists like to use to just make sense of time because we're dealing with such big chunks of it. So this isn't obviously a point of time that a person living 10,000 years ago would refer to them as like I'm living in the ppnb, but to this point of time in the Levant, in the near east sort of area. So we're looking at Anatolia, so Turkey area. We're looking at Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, that sort of area of the world. Around 10,000 years ago, they're starting to settle down. We're moving from this hunter gatherer way of life. For example, in the Epipaleolithic and the ppna.
- [04:38]
A
Okay, pre Pottery Neolithic A.
- [04:40]
B
Exactly. Yes. So pre Pottery Neolithic, just to give you a definition, is essentially at point of time when we don't have pottery.
- [04:50]
A
Right, that makes sense. Prefrotery.
- [04:52]
B
Yes. There is actually some pottery that we have found, but we don't.
- [04:56]
A
Okay, we'll ignore that for the moment.
- [04:58]
B
It's not very good pottery. It's very crude. It's the beginnings of pottery. But it is, you know, we just kind of use these terms. It was term coined by Kathleen Kenyon when she was digging at Jericho and she didn't find any pottery there. So that's where that name came from. Obviously we find a little bit of pottery later, but historically archaeologists aren't just going to go, oh, now we're going to change this whole definition of time and mess with everything that we've been doing. So we're in the PPN B specifically for these skulls that is around 8500 BCE to 6500 BCE okay, so almost 10,000 years ago.
- [05:34]
A
9,000, 8,000 years ago.
- [05:36]
B
Yes. And that is when we're starting to see people settle down for the first time. They're starting to change a little bit with their architecture. So we're going, as I said, from hunter gatherers to these more settled communities. We're learning to domesticate animals, we're domesticating different types of crops, we're learning how to farm. And so societies in the PPNA were living in these sort of round houses Sort of similar to tents and huts and caves. And now we're moving into this period where we're going from smaller communities to these larger communities of thousands of people.
- [06:15]
A
Thousands already. Some proto towns or proto cities.
- [06:18]
B
Exactly. So Jericho, for example, as you have done an amazing episode on. Thank you. They do love to tout that they are the world's first city. What we define as a city, of course, is a little bit difficult, but we get these sort of. We call them almost mega sites where we get these Thousands of people, 3,000 people at Ain Gazal, for example, in Jordan, just outside of Amman, and they're living in these much more closed quarters. We were seeing houses and buildings becoming denser and much more close together. We're seeing a shift from circular buildings to rectangular buildings, similar to what we would identify as a house today. So we're getting to see essentially what we would identify as somewhere where we could live. And that's where we see these plastered skulls sort of appearing.
- [07:05]
A
So that's the context for the topic today. And you mentioned Jericho there, which I feel we should start on, because this feels like the epicentre for the story of these plastered skulls. So Jericho seems to have its origins almost 10,000 years ago. So do we have a sense, do you have an idea of what Jericho looks like in its earliest years?
- [07:24]
B
Well, we have a lot of excavations done by Kathleen Kenyon, Ms. Dame Kathleen Kenyon. She is sort of the Jericho queen, I would say. She did a lot of excavating in the 1950s. So with this PPNA, PPNB Jericho, we do see that sort of architecture that I mentioned earlier forming. There's also this tower.
- [07:46]
A
The famous tower of Jericho.
- [07:48]
B
Yes, famous tower. Is it a defensive tower? We don't know. It's in the walls, so technically maybe not. There's burials underneath it. There's an internal staircase. What I love about the Neolithic is that it is just such a fun mystery and we'll just never know, which will anger a lot of other archaeologists who, especially historians who love a good written document. But I love the mystery behind this. So that's essentially what Jericho's looking at. It is quite a dense place. It is well built up. And this is where the very first skulls are discovered. By Kathleen Kenyon, 1953. The last week of excavation.
- [08:26]
A
It always seems to be the last week of these excavations, whether it's Fishbourne Roman palace or, you know, Jericho as it is that they find these absolutely astonishing artifacts. So what is the story of the discovery?
- [08:37]
B
So last week of excavation, as I said, And Kathleen Kenyon loves she to get very technical. She learned archaeology essentially from Mortimer Wheeler, who was very famous for his kind of boxed method of excavation.
- [08:52]
A
He did Maiden Castle, didn't he, in Dorset and the like. Very famous excavation.
- [08:55]
B
And that grid pattern that you see when you look up excavation methods, that's a very famous photo. And so she's excavating in these very deep trenches, in this grid pattern and in Jericho. If you are ever in a library and you want to look at her stratigraphy documentation, it is so long and so detailed. It's beautiful. All the layers of Jericho, it's stunning. Definitely would not pass any health and safety regulations today, but in one of the walls of one of the trenches, someone noticed at the very end of the season a little skull kind of poking out. And they kind of realized, okay, it's the last week. It's not going to be here next season either, due to weather, looting, any sort of circumstance. So they decide to do something unprecedented and go into the walls of this trench and start. And start to dig it out. They start to dig, most of the crew is gone. It's Kathleen Kenyon and two other people. One of them is the photographer. And there's a second skull and then a third skull. And it goes until they find a whole cache of seven of these skulls that are coated in plaster, all looking
- [10:05]
A
quite similar that they could identify that they're basically a group altogether.
- [10:08]
B
Yes, they were all. You can tell that they were all buried together. They're very close in relation to each other. It was one big pit that they were sort of put in. And I think there's a really Great show on BBC iPlayer way back from the 60s called Buried Treasure. It's black and white, fully old school. It's amazing. And there is some video footage you can see of the skulls coming out of the ground.
- [10:31]
A
Wow. They filmed it.
- [10:32]
B
Brilliant. Very, very briefly, she does more talk about Jericho itself. Kathleen Kenyon is there doing the voiceover. It's very cool. You can tell, though, that I think they just all had it by the end of the week with getting those skulls out, because you had to use almost like a dental pick to get them out. Because she was not impressed, I don't think either. During the recording of that, she went. And then we got some skulls and moved on to other things. And for me, obviously, that's the most exciting part of Jericho and the finds, because this is the first time that we're ever finding these sort of skulls.
- [11:03]
A
Yeah. And these dates. Just to clarify again, the depth that she was digging to at that time that her team were digging to. So this is PPMB, so 9,000, 8,000 years ago. So a bit after Jericho's earliest stages, but still very early on in the story.
- [11:18]
B
Very early, yes. But I think it's even post the Tower of Jericho. That was the post. The Tower of Jericho DNA.
- [11:24]
A
Yes, I think you're right. I think you're right. So that's the earliest architecture. And then you get the skulls a little later on.
- [11:28]
B
Yes.
- [11:29]
A
And were any more skulls found from Jericho over the following seasons, or is that the whole amount we have? Well, you nodded your head right there, so I'm expecting the answer. Yes.
- [11:37]
B
Now we have 10 in total from Jericho. Okay. Yeah. Just about 650 meters away. There were another two found.
- [11:43]
A
Right.
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B
And then there was a third, a tenth one also found on the site still in the 50s, in, like, a later season as well.
- [11:51]
A
So they really hit the jackpot with the first time.
- [11:53]
B
They did, yeah.
- [11:54]
A
And I've got a few pictures here of a couple of famous ones from Jericho. So this is the first one. This feels good to bring up now as we kind of talk through what they look like and what they are. So what's this particular example we have here, Ovan?
- [12:08]
B
So this is the one at the British Museum. It is famously known as the Jericho skull.
- [12:13]
A
This is the Jericho skull.
- [12:14]
B
Yes. So when people mention that, this one.
- [12:17]
A
So describe. So what can we see? Paint a picture for our audience, both, you know, who can see this, but also those who are listening in. I mean, what should we be imagining with one of these skulls and what they look like?
- [12:26]
B
Well, this one is particularly smooth. I would describe it as. There is no mouth. It's sort of just this. If you imagine just a skull without its nose and it's completely coated in this sort of blobby kind of bubbly plaster that is still quite smooth. It kind of covers the mouth. There are two shells for one of the eyes broken in half.
- [12:47]
A
Right.
- [12:47]
B
And then the other eye has just one half of the shell remaining, but you can see that dirt behind it. And the whole skull itself is actually packed with dirt inside. Not all of the skulls are like this, but this one is in particular the upper half of the skull. You can see there's no more remaining clay or plaster on that, so it's mostly just to the lower bit. When you are looking at it at the museum as well, you can notice that it's sort of built to be on a base. Like it has its own little base. So it sits and sort of looks up at you. So that's sort of the orientation that you can see it. Anyone listening at home, you can go onto the British Museum website. They've done facial reconstructions.
- [13:29]
A
Have they?
- [13:30]
B
It's amazing. And they've done a whole CT scan, so you can see inside and on the very back of the skull. You can't see it in this photo, but there's a piece missing. And at first they thought it was the archaeologist messing up or accidentally bashing it. Turns out it actually might have just kind of got lost over the years. So that's where they sort of packed in all of the dirt and sealed it up. And they actually were able to get the fingerprints from a 9,000-year-old person who packed in this dirt on the back of the skull. So it's a really amazing project that they did at the British Museum for this skull. Definitely look it up. They had an exhibit a few years ago about it as well.
- [14:06]
A
So how much of these skulls, how much is plaster and how much is bone? I mean, give us a sense of that.
- [14:12]
B
Well, the whole skull is there. This one does not have the mandible. So there is this trend. It's not every skull that the mandible is missing from the actual skull itself, because usually that stays attached to the spinal cord or different parts or just it gets lost easy. It doesn't stay attached to the skull. So that's sort of. When you see it, it has a bit of a squished face to it. It doesn't have that proper shape of a proper jaw. So it's all bone underneath. The plaster is just on top. So some of them have different layers. You can tell that it has been patched up over the years, so it has been used. But the upper half, you can see on the skull there, the upper half does not have plaster on it, so it's mostly just the lower bit from the eyebrows down under, under the chin and so on.
- [15:02]
A
So do we have any idea, then, if we've got examples like this surviving, of how they would have made one of these plastered skulls some 8,000 years ago?
- [15:10]
B
Essentially, there are different methods that they've used, depending on the different skulls that we found. So, for example, some of them have teeth and mandibles fully intact, so then you kind of just then coat plaster over top of it. Some of them, like this one here at the British Museum, was packed with dirt first. Sometimes there is a base layer of maybe like reeds or some sort of kind of coarser material to Then have the plaster stick on it properly. We even have evidence of them being able to take off the plaster. So at Aingazel, we found three plaster faces that were on skulls. So maybe we can, you know, interchange the faces like a Mr. Potato Head type thing, in less of a whimsical way. But yes. And so they were made in different segments, so you kind of pack different areas with plaster or hardened dirt or clay, and then you cover those up to get that facial definition. So the cheeks, the nose, you can see in some. They have these beautiful eyes that have been carved out of the plaster, and they look so realistic. Some of them have ears. It's amazing.
- [16:31]
A
So let's say we're in Jericho 8,000 years ago, and we want to create one of these plastered skulls. Do we have any idea about the process?
- [16:40]
B
So step one is you need a body.
- [16:43]
A
Okay, that makes sense.
- [16:44]
B
A little bit morbid. Yeah. So someone has to die, and we're not sure, essentially, is this an important person? Is this person. Is this someone who they've chosen from a young age to become a plastered skull? We're not sure. But eventually you bury that person. Sometimes you're buried under the floor of your kitchen or your living room, and then you're plastered over. And then once you become a skeleton, takes a few years, they go, all right, the canvas is ready. Dig up the skull, usually with or without the mandible, depending on the preservation of the skull itself. And then again, it's varying different techniques because it is over such a long time and a broad geographical range. Sometimes the skull is packed with dirt, as we can see with the Jericho skull.
- [17:26]
A
Stuff the inside of dirt. Okay, interesting. Yep.
- [17:29]
B
I guess give it a little bit of extra support. Sometimes you will stuff just the cavities. So the eyes, the mouth, the nose. Some of them have had their teeth removed. People have thought that that could be to try and make them look older for that ancestor, kind of look to them. Some of them actually then get their teeth refilled with plaster. So again, it's a lot of contradictions with these skulls. So you fill that all up, then you get the plaster. Varying different ways to get plaster, but think about just the typical lime plaster.
- [18:01]
A
It's a lime limestone plant, isn't it? Yes. Heating up the limestone and then you create the plaster from the diagram.
- [18:05]
B
Yeah. Do all the whole lime cycle. We all learn in school that I don't need to get into here. But you get the plaster and then you start sort of making. Sometimes there's a bit of, like, A buffer layer between. But then you sort of just build up the facial features. Think about in csi, for example, or forensics, when they're recreating a face on a, on a skull. You kind of start building up the different features. And they were quite good at doing this and figuring out the anatomy. So you kind of build up the cheeks, the eyebrows, the mouth. Again, if there's no mandible, you kind of have to recreate that bottom bit. And then you get into the finer details. You create eyes, you create a little bit of a nice nose, some of them, you have a beautiful hairl you get some ears, so you get all those details in, you create a nice base again. And mostly the bases are so that they can sit flat and kind of have this upward look to them. So once that's all sorted, you let it dry, maybe you paint it. Some of them have potential headdress things. Yeah. And there you have a plastered skull.
- [19:10]
A
That's how you make the plastered skull back, you know, some 8,000 years ago. And I've got another one here as well. And this is also another one from Jericho, isn't it?
- [19:17]
B
Yes.
- [19:18]
A
Once again, it looks, it's a clear kind of the top of the cranium, couple of teeth surviving actually in this one, which you don't see in the other one. So this is a good example of how these skulls, they differ, you know, going from one to the next.
- [19:29]
B
Yes. So this one is from the Ashmolean, and we can see that it has different eyes compared to the last one. These were cowrie shells that are horizontal, so it kind of gives him a look like he's sleeping.
- [19:42]
A
So these are shells. Okay. So they use shells for the eyes, do they?
- [19:45]
B
When they did? Yes. Sometimes they used bits of rock, sometimes they use pieces of bitumen, for example, as well, to really decorate it. Some of them have eyelashes and they've been painted as well. We see evidence of paint. And with this one you can see that there's not too much of the plaster remaining. But we do see the teeth. And it is again missing its mandible. So it has that sort of squat, almost doll like feature.
- [20:09]
A
And do we not usually have much of the plaster surviving after all this time?
- [20:13]
B
It depends on the ones that you find. Though some of them have been well loved, I like to say, so they were definitely used and handled and sort of, you know, had a function. And we even see evidence of repair work on them. And again, some of them get buried, such as the ones from Jericho. It looks like they had been Used. And then they kind of came to the end of their life and they were reburied. We have other ones, for example, at Tella Swad from Syria. To me, it looks like a sleeping person. Looks like you just kind of came across it and it was made yesterday. They're so well done. There is some evidence on some of them where, like, the nose is broken and has been repaired. But they are quite smooth and very full of plaster, I would say. Yes.
- [20:58]
A
The Jericho skull one, it looks like its nose has not survived at all. You can look straight into it, can't you?
- [21:03]
B
He even had a broken nose during his life.
- [21:05]
A
Did he?
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B
Yeah.
- [21:06]
A
That's what they found out about this figure.
- [21:07]
B
Yeah. A little rough and tumbled this guy especially. And there's also evidence of cranial modification.
- [21:14]
A
Wow. Okay. So they kind of changed the shape of his head.
- [21:18]
B
We think it's actually been during his lifetime.
- [21:20]
A
During his lifetime, yes.
- [21:21]
B
So there is some evidence of, again, not every skull, because they all haven't been investigated into the same depth as, for example, the Jericho skull. But they have this sort of head elongation. If you look at it from the side, there's a very slight dip, and it sort of has this more of a squat shape to it. A few of the other ones have this squatness or this squareness. Some of them are a little bit taller. And in order to have that happen, you need to be doing this from a young age. So there has been some speculation of, oh, have these people been chosen in advance to actually have this plastering done to them in after their death because of the way that their skull is shaped. But we have so few of them that we actually can't be sure that this is, you know, a definite thing.
- [22:08]
A
We're definitely going to explore some of those theories because I know you've done a lot of work around that. But let's go back to those eyes because I know you've done a lot of work also on the eyes. And are they usually shell or is it. It just depends on each one. Again, do they differ?
- [22:21]
B
It is very dependent. A lot of them are shell that we've seen. So there's a few from Jericho that are shell. I believe the ones from Yiftahel are also shell. And anytime you see one, essentially with eyes open, there's a few that are eyes closed.
- [22:35]
A
Right.
- [22:36]
B
So we have the ones at Telas Swad are closed. There's ones at Baisamun that are closed. The cowry shell one as well has been interpreted as someone being very sleepy or Also, you know, eyes closed. So when they do have eyes open, quote, unquote, they usually are a shell or some sort of stone or bitumen.
- [22:55]
A
And the cowry shell, that's the Ashmodean one, just to remember. Yes. And just looking. I'm looking at the Jericho skull at the moment. And I also do notice that you have in his right eye that vertical black line. So right in the center of his right eye, you know, that white shell color and then a black vertical line. Now, what do we think this is?
- [23:14]
B
You are speaking directly to my niche of interest.
- [23:17]
A
This is what we want. Yes.
- [23:19]
B
Not only do I love the skull's eyes, especially love the eyes of the skulls. So the pupil. My theory, they do look very vertical, very animalistic. We have circular pupils, as we all know. But animals that have vertical pupils are foxes, birds of prey, like vultures, for example, snakes as well, some cats as well, have a vertical pupil. And these are all these, like, predators. And so my research was looking into essentially, what does that mean? Because we've seen in examples of these skulls, people know how to. Back then, they knew how to create a face that looked almost lifelike. Right. We had the ears, we had lips, we had eyebrows, even some of them, you know, had painted. There was probably headdresses that we had it on them. Why were they choosing then? Right. Some of them, you know, might have a circular, but like this one. Why did they choose that? Were they lazy all of a sudden? What's going on here? So my theory is that there is some sort of interplay between how we used to have these communal spaces, ritual spaces for people, especially in the ppna. Think large sites like Gobekli Tepe. Okay, yes, These large sites where we'd get a lot of people gathering. And then in the ppnb, we see that sort of disappearing. Things are getting smaller, becoming more insular. We're getting ritual moved not from these communal spaces, but into the home. How are we navigating that change as a. As a species, really?
- [24:51]
A
Because Gobekli Tepe just reminds you, 10,000 years old, it has those big spaces that someone's called temples, but those big kind of communal areas that you think, and dare you say the word like, ritual and the like. So. So that's the kind of setting that we're thinking of.
- [25:05]
B
Yes, so that was a little bit before we see the skulls. And we can see that sort of shift where we're losing that monumental architecture and we're kind of going smaller because communities are getting bigger. So then when we look at these T pillars at Gobekli Tepe or other places, there's these amazing totem poles, essentially, at Navali Chauri, where there's this sort of animal, human relationship. So the T pillars are famously anthropomorphic. We had the very first face appear at Karhan Tepe recently, if anyone's looking at. I think Archeology magazine named it as one of the top discoveries of 2025. And there was a face that actually finally showed up on the end of that pillar. And so we know that these were anthropomorphic. We have arms, but at the same time, on the side of these pillars, we have animals, wild animals, being depicted. So there is that interplay between the relationship of humans and wild animals in these ritual settings. And my theory is that these sort of bits that we find in the PPNB of this animalistic feature on a human skull is. The easiest way I can put it, is going to the Zoom lecture instead of going to the conference in person, where we are now bringing that tradition and that ritual, and we're trying to translate it into a new way of life that our ancestors were doing. And how can we sort of do something like that in our new space where we can't go to these big monumental places anymore where we're not using these things? How do we then sort of bring our traditions into a new. A new way of life?
- [26:47]
A
So this potential slight animalistic feature you get in some of these skulls could be a harkening back to how, you know, they performed these, I guess, in their time, archaic rituals or whatever, you know, from generations before.
- [27:01]
B
This is my theory. Yes. It's very, very, you know, in its infancy, I would say. But that's sort of where my research is at the moment.
- [27:08]
A
But it's striking, isn't it, with every other part of these skulls where you can kind of see the very clear human elements when you look at the eyes. And either it's, you know, artistic detail or whatever it is. Clearly, you know, we love the nerdy detail on the ancients. We love going into detail. So actually, focusing on the pupils of the eyes of these shells is really interesting to hear about that theory. And, I mean, this other one here, the Ashmolean skull that we've already talked about, you mentioned, with the cowrie shell and how it's a horizontal line all the way through.
- [27:33]
B
Yes. So with that one, I haven't done too much research into that yet to see and if we can find any parallels, but I'm thinking sheep. Sheep have those horizontal pupils, right? So this is again, a time when we're domesticating these animals. What does that mean? Maybe it is something just as simple as we wanted him to look like he was asleep. We'll never know. And maybe we're reading too much into it, but there is that potential of. Again, we know that they know how to create these monumental pieces of art. They can drill a hole into a shell. We definitely know that. Why aren't they doing this?
- [28:08]
A
Is he asleep or is he a sheep? But it's very, very interesting, isn't it? And those scars from Jericho, first off, because Jericho is just the beginning. There are scars found elsewhere. And I know you've done a lot of work on particular sites elsewhere, but do we know whether those skulls from Jericho, first and foremost, were they all of men or do we know much about that?
- [28:27]
B
There was a big mix, actually, so we originally thought they were all men. This is where we get a lot of theories of ancestor cults and patrilineal societies and things. And they do look, when you look at them, they kind of look like crotchety old people sometimes, right? Especially just. They look a little worse for wear as well. But just their, their face, it's being squat like an old person. And we have. It's about. From what I've seen, it's about 50, 50. There are females, there are males, there's even some juveniles.
- [28:56]
A
Really interesting.
- [28:58]
B
So we don't really have this set of like. This is the specific person that was targeted to become a plastered skull and used in X context. It is a big mix. The one from the British Museum itself is male.
- [29:12]
A
Is male. It's like 30 or 40 years old, isn't he?
- [29:14]
B
Yeah, he's not too old.
- [29:15]
A
Yeah, he's not too old. I guess maybe quite old for the time. Do we know. Is that a misnomer?
- [29:19]
B
Decently old.
- [29:20]
A
Decently old, I would say. I don't want to get too much into, like, what's old and what's not
- [29:24]
B
back then, especially at my age.
- [29:27]
A
But let's go beyond Jericho now. So as excavations went on elsewhere in the Levant, where do they start discovering more of these plastered skulls?
- [29:38]
B
We have some at Angazal, which is a really fantastic famous site in Jordan, just outside of Amman. Well, it used to be. Now it's been. It was a rescue excavation, so it has been constructed over. But we have about three plaster faces from Ayn Gazal, which are those ones that I said had kind of were able to come off. They had been removed from the skull. And then we have six other Plastered skulls from this site. People might know Ayngazel from those amazing plaster figurines.
- [30:07]
A
Yes, those actual, like, kind of almost full body, aren't they? But they look quite alien at the same time.
- [30:11]
B
They are. They're kind of, you know, blobby again. And it's that plaster with this corn husk. Ish. Like not really corn because corn wasn't there, but that base of, you know, reeds. And they have the bitumen eyes as well. And again, they were painted sometimes there's two heads on them.
- [30:25]
A
Yes, there are a couple of two heads. You see them in the Jordan Museum today.
- [30:28]
B
Yeah, yeah. They were wearing clothes, some of them as well. So there's a lot of stuff going on at Angazel around that time period. Again, the PPNB, it's a huge site. It had about 3,000 people living in it. So we go there. There's Tel Ramad in Syria, where there's about 23 that are found.
- [30:46]
A
Okay, that's quite a lot.
- [30:47]
B
Quite a lot. In various different caches, various different contexts. Tell Aswad, as I mentioned, already has these beautiful ones that were recently found in the 2000s. There's Baisamun, which had a few. Yiftahel had this beautiful group of three with these, again, those very beautiful vertical pupils. Nahal Hamar, for example, I wouldn't call them a plastered skull, but I kind of loop them into this skull modification because there's this sort of collagen y bitumeny netting on the back of their heads. So the faces and the whole kind of front of the skull is not plastered. But they had this sort of netting that we think maybe held on some sort of headpiece. And that was found in a cave with a bunch of other. Really.
- [31:32]
A
And the headpiece doesn't survive. You just have that potential link to a headpiece on that particular example.
- [31:37]
B
And then we also have some up in Turkey.
- [31:39]
A
Okay, that's interesting. So that's going a bit further north than this concentration area we have.
- [31:44]
B
Very far away. And also happening a little bit later on in the timeline. So this is happening a few thousand years later, a few hundred years later, in what we call. Some people call it the ppnc.
- [31:55]
A
Oh, gosh.
- [31:56]
B
Okay, I know. But then most people don't say that that's even a thing anyways. It's a little bit later on. We see some in Turkey at Catalhoyuk, very famous site. That one is a woman actually, has been buried cradling one in her arms. It's quite beautiful. And then there's Koskoyuk as well, which has some skulls. I believe another one has just recently been found in.
- [32:17]
A
Just to clarify, that woman at Chatuhoyuk, she was cradling a plastered skull. Just the skull?
- [32:24]
B
Yeah. Just holding it. It's. Yeah.
- [32:27]
A
And that was just. And they all just discovered, like, in the sites themselves or in particular contexts or what do we know about that?
- [32:34]
B
It is varied throughout all the different sites. This is also something I was looking at. So, for example, at Teles Swad, there's two different caches of these skulls. They seem to be sort of foundation deposits for a cemetery, sort of demarcating that place as a place to bury your dead. We have varying different types of funerary practices during the ppnb. People are figuring out what to do. I love this time period because there's so much new that's happening. And we're just trying to figure out what works for us as a species. Right. As a newly sedentary people, where do we bury our dead? How do we bury our dead? How do we do all these other social things that we take for granted today? So there's a few cemeteries outside of where people are living. Some people are burying their dead under the floors of their houses, and then that's where they take the skulls away. There's this whole skull cult. We'll get into that later. But. So there's a few like that. There's a few sort of that were found, based on the excavation records, they were found sort of in open air, quote, unquote. So they were sort of on the floor of a building. Some of them were deposited as a foundation next to a building as well. For example, like a little foundation deposit. There's a few that were just completely buried. Like in Jericho, for example, they had finished their life, essentially, and they got kind of buried in its own special bit. There is always a lot of mortuary stuff around it, but sometimes we do see that they are in these areas where a building was used potentially for ritual purposes, not to the archaeological excuse for everything.
- [34:12]
A
It's ritual. Okay, gotcha.
- [34:13]
B
Yep, of course it is. So we're thinking that maybe they were still in use and then something was, you know, abandoned or something like that.
- [34:20]
A
Interesting. Those ones found in Turkey, a place like Catalhoyu. That sounds extraordinary, but also the fact that you say that it seems that they date to slightly later. Now, this is all theory, and we'll get into the various theories for these skulls in a moment. But does it almost seal. I mean, the possibility could be that maybe the epicenter of this tradition is like that, the Levant area. But over time, word of it, it spreads north, and then it's adopted by these people who live further north a bit later.
- [34:49]
B
It's definitely plausible. There is, you know, this term called interaction spheres that we have in archaeology, where you can kind of see what's being traded. Right. We have traces of obsidian in places where there is no obsidian, and that's coming from Anatolia down south. So we do see that there is this level of interaction that we don't normally associate with the Neolithic.
- [35:29]
A
Well, let's go on to a particular site that I know you've done a lot of work around, which is Teleswart. So the particular skulls we have from Telesoade. Can you talk us through them? Because I think this is a good example to then see how get good sense of some of the big differences that you have at a site like Telesward with ones we've covered earlier, like the Jericho skull.
- [35:49]
B
Tell us, what is my favorite one? Maybe I'm biased. They are the most aesthetically pleasing. They're absolutely stunning. When you look at a photo of them, there's two different deposits. As I said, the. If you're looking online, everyone, it's the later deposit. So there's like the first one and the second one. So the later ones is what I'm going to be talking about. Mostly it's a set of four, and they sort of been put around an unplastered skull.
- [36:15]
A
Okay, interesting.
- [36:16]
B
Right? Why? I don't know, but that's there. And then it was a foundational deposit for a cemetery. We do find a lot of body sort of buried around the skulls, and then it sort of fans out and there's fewer bodies as well around that bit. So it is sort of this radial point for people to bury their dead. And what I find really special about these skulls is that their features are just so lifelike. It does look like a sleeping person. You can see that the eyes are closed and they even put this little thin strip of bitumen between the eyelids to make almost like eyelashes. It's so the detail is fantastic.
- [36:55]
A
So what color is bitumen when it's on one of those scarves, by the way, just so we get a good idea.
- [36:59]
B
It's just black, like kind of think asphalt, right? And then it's. When it gets warmed up, it's very pliable, and then you can sort of make it into anything you want.
- [37:08]
A
And they get that from the Dead Sea area. Do we think that's normally where you associate bitumen. Okay.
- [37:12]
B
Yeah. And then there's various sources and then you can sort of put that on there, make anything you want. Some of them also have like eyeliner, they call it. You know, it's like decoration. But I love that you can even see the ears. And you can also see a very clear demarcation where the plaster is on the head. There's a very crisp line around a hairline, essentially, and they all have very good hairlines.
- [37:37]
A
I must say, I'm very jealous.
- [37:39]
B
And we think that maybe there was some sort of organic headdress or fake hair or something that they were wearing. A wig perhaps. Yeah. It hasn't survived in the archaeological record, of course.
- [37:53]
A
Imagine if it had a pre pottery Neolithic wig. I mean, words can't express what archaeologists would have thought if they found that. But that's really interesting. So almost a kind of an added piece to it.
- [38:04]
B
Definitely. And so you can see that there. And that's sort of the best example that I can find that can show you that there might have been actually something else on the head. So there could have been this hole pallava of, you know, this very elaborate piece of ritual equipment, let's call it. And what I love about the ones that tell us what as well is that people, you could tell that people knew that they were buried there even generations later, because we have this very small newborn baby who had died. And whoever was the one burying it knew that these skulls were there. Either that or they were very lucky. But they dug down around the skulls and sort of nestled the baby around these skulls.
- [38:52]
A
And it's clear that that's a later deposit that's been put there.
- [38:54]
B
It is, yes. They damaged some of the skulls by doing that. And so they kind of had it nestled inside one of the fractured skulls as well, the head bit. And so you can look at these excavation photos and see this little newborn skeleton even in the pose that like a baby would sleep in. And it's just. For me, it's very touching. It's, you know, one of those things where you don't want to put too much emotion on archaeological finds and what we imagine it as. But you can't help but actually feel something when you see that.
- [39:20]
A
Absolutely. Especially if infant mortality must have been, you know, a very, very big thing back then. So that the fact that you have this particular, you know, unfortunate newborn baby and the local community decide, well, we remember where we put those plastered skull, for one reason or another, we're going to dig down and place, you know, this Poor individual's remains there with it.
- [39:42]
B
Yeah, it's quite beautiful. And just having. Just imagining that scene 10,000 years ago and how that would have. Might have played out with everyone around. Was it very solitary moment with just the parents? You never know. And it really gets your imagination going.
- [39:57]
A
And forgive my tardiness around this a bit, you mentioned, let's say, with the case of Teleswad, where those plastered skulls, almost like the epicentre of a cemetery, in the wider cemetery, are people usually buried with their full skeletons intact. Is that what we should be thinking?
- [40:14]
B
There are a lot of full skeletons, especially in that cemetery. Again, it does vary greatly all around, even in site to site. Sometimes we get all these varying different types of burials.
- [40:24]
A
Okay. But none, not just buried with the head like the other plaster skulls.
- [40:28]
B
No, we do get these skull deposits, but sometimes you'll find a lot of headless people, for example, because they've gone back and taken the skulls out and put them somewhere else. But we do see also just a lot of regular inhumations.
- [40:42]
A
Just getting more of an understanding about the extraordinary nature of the plastered skulls themselves in the context, then. Well, okay, let's delve into the theories. So you have these plastered skulls from 8,000, 7,000 years ago in these sites all across the Levant and into Turkey in a variety of contexts as well. Differences in the design and in the detail. What are the theories as to what they're supposed to be? What is the meaning of all of this? Raven, please.
- [41:10]
B
I would love to know. I think it's been the nightmare of many an archeologist over the years. So the initial theory we touched on briefly was ancestor worship.
- [41:20]
A
Right.
- [41:21]
B
So again, that kind of crotchety old man who kind of is sitting up on the wall and maybe they're doing something with a shared collective ancestor. That has sort of always been the leading theory. I would say it's a nice blanket theory. It's a great one to just kind of give it an excuse and kind of put it away and do something else and move on to the next thing. Especially because during this time period, we are seeing a lot of new shifting dynamics. Right. And we're looking at maybe potentially something where we are, because we're all living in such close quarters now, and we're staying still, and we have multi generations in one house. Maybe we want these sort of anonymous ancestral figures to sort of, kind of bring us all together as a collective, as some sort of ritual or regular practice that sort of kind of dictates social life almost. People say it almost like in a controlling way of controlling the new of the society, of getting everyone to behave themselves and be neighborly, for example. Right. Kind of have this shared cultural tradition, similar to, I would say the best metaphor is sending Christmas cards out to, like, acquaintances, kind of giving us that larger sort of societal thing that brings you all together, or saying Merry Christmas to the person at the shop. Right. Kind of like, oh, this is a thing that unites you and I. We kind of celebrate this time of year together. We do something like this together, this collective ritual sort of with this ancestor, potentially. So that's the first one. And it did seem like the most plausible one, of course, but now we have women and children who have been plastered. It could also be, you know, different types of rituals with ancestors based on sex, age, or just, we need a skull, who knows?
- [43:17]
A
But you also have examples where those skulls are not visible to the naked eye. They've been buried or something like that.
- [43:21]
B
Right, exactly. So that's where it kind of comes in of, well, why are we using ancestors to sort of consecrate a burial ground? No one knows. We have had theories of headhunting, potentially. So there is this really great affinity that we have as a species to the human skull to our heads. Right. If you look at a headless body, you think, oh, that's just a corpse. Right. You look at a corpse potentially with a face, that is someone. Right. We're able to put that power and that individualization on something when we see a head. It's also where a lot of spirituality, a lot of power comes from in heads. So we have headhunting. You can see that it was really important. For example, in Mesopotamia, which is same area, but maybe 5,000 years later.
- [44:11]
A
It's a specific person's identity, though, isn't it? You know, the color of your eyes, your hair, you know, the structure of your jaw and everything like that.
- [44:18]
B
It's your essence.
- [44:19]
A
Yes.
- [44:19]
B
Yeah. Right. Without that, who are you? Right. That's what identifies you to everyone else. So headhunting might be a potential option that it was sort of explored where, you know, for example, you have those very famous ancient Egyptian motifs of the king carrying back all the severed heads by their hair. You have in Mesopotamia, for example, being dismembered was one of the worst things that could happen to you as a person and to your family, because you were living on in your family as well. But this ancestor stuff as well. So maybe they thought they were trophies, right. From maybe some interpersonal violence. Then there was always some other theories of Karina Krusher did an amazing look at sort of this emotional side of things. So she looked at this theory of continuing bonds and how maybe we're just being way too impersonal with the skulls, with anything in archeology. And let's throw in, well, what about people dealing with grief? Right. Is this a way for them to keep their loved ones close? There is a bit of an issue with that theory, of course, though, because it takes about three years or so for a skull to completely deflesh. And we don't really have much evidence of people scraping the flesh off of them.
- [45:35]
A
That's what we think could be part of the process. They have to wait a bit of time for that skull and then they can plaster it or paint it or whatever.
- [45:41]
B
Exactly. We do have evidence of people being buried and then having the secondary burial sort of happening where they go down, they take your head out, cover you back up with the plastered floor. Yeah. And then your skull gets put somewhere else. So there is this knowledge of, like, there's a body here under my floor of my house. In a few years, I'm going to come and get the skull. I'm going to put it somewhere else or do something else with it. Maybe put it, you know, plaster it or something like that. So there is that idea of, you know, potentially something being very emotional for someone.
- [46:17]
A
But so how can we explain the ones that are buried deep underground that you know, that they haven't been taken, the skulls haven't been taken up, and then maybe placed in someone's house as a reminder of an ancestor or something like that.
- [46:28]
B
So for the ones that were buried, for example, in Teleswad that were these foundational burials, it could be just something that is sort of supernatural or atropaic, for example. So they carry this power, this symbolism with them. And then therefore depositing that skull could then make that place something sacred. It wasn't sacred until the skull was there, for example.
- [46:52]
A
Right. So like with the cemetery, it's an idea that now that you've got those skulls in the ground, that makes it okay to bury people in that area. Is that the idea? Exactly.
- [46:59]
B
Exactly. So we have a few examples from later documentation for ugaritic texts. For example, there is this one quote in this poem where he kind of says, like, cover my head in a glaze and all this stuff and kind of go, oh, is this another?
- [47:16]
A
Is this a legacy of the plastering?
- [47:17]
B
Yeah. And it's talking about, when he's dead, do this to my skull. Maybe it just means the skull is becoming, you know, actually a skull. It's becoming skeletonized. But we can read into anything we want. Right. And so there is sort of that spiritual thing that could be the reason where we need to kind of ascribe this status to a person and say, this now is this symbol. And once we put it here, it means this. And we can do that here.
- [47:46]
A
So interesting. So those are some of the big theories, largely. Those are the main central theories. Are they? As to what these skulls could represent, what they could be.
- [47:53]
B
Yeah, let's just stick with those ones. Cause there's a lot.
- [47:54]
A
But couldn't it also be the case that their purpose could have differed between place to place? So it's not just one of those theories. It could be all of those theories to explain. And that would explain why you have the different contexts, some that are visible, some that aren't, some in houses, some in cemeteries and so on.
- [48:10]
B
That's my theory as well, because I am not a big fan of these blanket statements for all of archeology, especially when we're looking at time periods that are thousands of years long. These skulls were made over hundreds of years in a. In a very extended period, in a very extended geographic range. And just because I use one thing for one purpose doesn't mean you're going to use the same thing for the same purpose. Right? We might have differing opinions, differing interpretations. If you look at any sort of religion today, one person's going to read any sort of verse in any, you know, holy book and have a different interpretation than someone else. So these different contexts, they would definitely have different purposes and different uses and different meanings to whoever's using them. And even if you look at the last, what, 50 years of our history, how much has changed? Right? And we're looking at 2,000 years of history over there. That's the Romans to us. So much can happen, and we will just never know. That's just the time period that we put on it as archaeologists to make sense of it. But there is so much nuance that we're missing.
- [49:14]
A
Something I'd also love to ask about is the color. Because when we go this far back in time, we can picture everything as being very bland. But obviously that's not the case. The Stone Age people had color, and then you had to create color and ochre and so on. Pigments. When someone says plastered skulls, however, I do also think quite bland. I think of gray and white and the like. But do we have any evidence that some of these skulls did have paint on Them as well.
- [49:37]
B
We do.
- [49:38]
A
Interesting.
- [49:39]
B
Okay. There's some really cool ones. There's ones from Jericho that have sort of these stripes. Stripes on his head. You can see it in the Citadel of Amman in the little archaeological museum there. He's got some stripes on his head. And some people think as well that might be headdress decoration, for example, or one of the theories, as well as head binding marks, for example. And then the ones at Tele Swad, you can see there's this, like, beautiful red color on them. And of course, none of these pigments are very steadfast. They do degrade over time. There's the yellow ochre, and we do have that black bitumen as well. So they would have been decorated. To what extent, we're not quite sure, but there would have been color.
- [50:17]
A
One last thing I'd love to ask then is about can we say that these skulls, these plaster skulls, are they the earliest known evidence of human portraiture that survive?
- [50:30]
B
We do like to ascribe that to the skulls. These, you know, the first human portraits. We can't guarantee that the face that they are, you know, plastered with is the exact face because it does take a few years to, you know, to decompose. Maybe they were putting a generic face for an, you know, again, that generic ancestor that everyone can sort of get this cohesion around. But there is something to be said about just the detail that they do go into. It depends now as well, we have that Karahan Tepe face that came out that's 12,000 years old.
- [51:06]
A
So that's the latest. That's the latest skull to be discovered.
- [51:09]
B
It is very. It's not. Sorry, it's not a skull.
- [51:10]
A
So this isn't a skull.
- [51:11]
B
No, no, I apologize. The Karahan Tepe pillar that's been found recently, it's 12,000 years old. People are saying that's the first face in history. If you look at the face, it's very basic. So if we're looking for something a little bit more that we can say this is a portrait of a person potentially, then, yes, these are the ones.
- [51:30]
A
And then if you go forward from there to actually find sculpture. You mentioned Ayn Gazelle. We've mentioned it a lot of times. And of course, we also mentioned earlier that it's very famous for those more full body sculpture depictions, some. Some with two heads as well. But could that almost be the next step? Because those date a bit later, don't they? So you have the plastered skulls from this period and then a bit later from the same site in the case of Ayngazel, you then have, well, larger sculptural depictions. So could you almost see an evolution in style, in art there? Potentially.
- [52:03]
B
I think people were definitely experimenting. There is some overlap between the skulls and these Ayngazahl statues. And so again, it could be that thing of someone decided to make a skull and goes, mm, someone's like, that's not for me. I'm gonna make this strange doll thing. I'm going to prop that up against my house. For example, there is that amazing evolution that we're seeing of, oh, I can create this 3D face. Can I create a 3D person without a base of a skull, for example? This is just freeform. So we are seeing this ability to now think outside the box, be a little bit more abstract and create something from nothing, which is really cool.
- [52:39]
A
That's potentially the next story, the next part of the story, the evolution of this, this tale. Raven, this has been absolutely fantastic. What a set of artifacts to talk about going so far back in the story of, you know, who we are as people and the desire to create these objects, you know, which spreads far and wide across the Levant. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.
- [53:00]
B
I'm always happy to come and talk skulls with anyone, so thank you so much for having me.
- [53:08]
A
Well, there you go. There was Raven Todd de Silva talking through the incredible story of the skulls, the plastered skulls of Jericho and elsewhere across the Levant. What a story it is, going all the way back to the Neolithic to these early farming communities and all of the various theories surrounding why they decided to create these plastered skulls. I hope you enjoyed the episode. Thank you for for listening. You can watch a video version of this podcast where we have visuals of the skulls that we discuss on our brand New Ancients YouTube channel too. So hurry over there if you want to see the images of the skulls that we talk about too. In the meantime, thank you once again for listening to this episode of the Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favorite if you'd also be kind enough to leave us a rating as well. Well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week. Sign up@historyhit.com subscribe. That's all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.