Archaeologists Entered an Ancient Building—and Found 15 Abandoned Skulls Under the Floor
Archaeologists discovered the skulls and jawbones of 15 individuals located in a pile of what was long ago a Stone Age village.
The experts believe the skulls were used as part of a ritual practice and could have been reused for centuries.
The skulls were dated to around 5,400 B.C.
Discovering one skullc is spooky. Discovering two skulls is scary. Discovering 15 skulls? That downright, dare we say, bone-chilling.
So keep in your thoughts the group of archaeologists who discovered a heap of broken skulls and jaw bones from about 15 individuals at the site of the Neolithic village Masseria Candelaro, located in what is now Puglia, Italy. In a study published in the European Journal of Archaeology, the team wrote they believe the skulls were likely collected over the course of close to three centuries and used in some sort of ancestral ritualistic practice.
At an excavation site, the bones were found inside a prehistoric building dubbed Structure Q. Thanks to other layers of artifacts found alongside the bones, the experts dated the location to between 5500 and 5400 B.C., although dating the roughly 400 bone fragments themselves showed they ranged from 5618 B.C. to 5335 B.C., suggesting the bones had been accrued over three centuries of deaths and represented up to eight generations of ancestors.
The finding of the skulls inside a building and not a cemetery was a unique discovery, Jess Thompson, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. Furthermore, they were found under a only a top layer of soil, hinting that they were abandoned and not buried. The researchers concluded that “Structure Q was thus probably a multi-functional space later repurposed for ritual activities.”
The lengthy span of time that the cranial cache represents shows, according to the study, “a collection that was constantly changing” and one that endured a tradition of use. That may help provide answers to the “motivations for the curation of cranial bone” and just how the interaction with bones may have played a key role in how people related to their ancestors.
The skulls, deemed mostly male, were void of marks of violence, meaning that they probably weren’t war trophies. There were breaks in the bones, though, consistent with being removed from burials and touched over and over. “We certainly think that human bone had a specific kind of meaning,” Thompson said, “and perhaps was understood to be an efficacious or potent substance, given the regularity with which it was interacted with.”
The authors guess that the final resting place of the bones mark not a culminating ritual, but rather the end of their ritualistic use and were placed there as a sort of “post-use-life decommissioning.”
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