by David Braun
Bettina Arnold
archaeologist and co-director of a field excavation at the Heuneburg hillfort
So Well Preserved
The unusual preservation of the oak floor—caused by waterlogging of the 8-meter-long (26-foot-long) burial chamber—was key to providing an accurate date for the site, Ebinger-Rist said. Analysis of the wood indicates that oak trees used for the chamber’s construction were felled 2,620 years ago, making this royal Celtic grave one of the earliest ones known.
Supported by 14 large steel pipes and a surrounding steel frame, the burial chamber was moved so that researchers could sift through the find in microscopic detail under laboratory conditions. Already the lab team has recovered minute fragments of leather and clothing and traces of corroded copper alloy plates covered in engravings, according to Ebinger-Rist. “This is amazing—out in the field we have no chance of detecting such objects,” she said.
FIRST SHAMAN’S SEND-OFF
Ancient Sorcerer’s “Wake”
First Feast for the Dead?
Evidence found in the resting place of an ancient shaman indicates that perhaps the world’s first villagers fostered peace via partying.
Some 12,000 years ago in a small sunlit cave in northern Israel, mourners finished the last of the roasted tortoise meat and gathered up dozens of the blackened shells. Kneeling down beside an open grave in the cave floor, they paid their last respects to the elderly dead woman curled within, preparing her for a spiritual journey.
Tortoise shells surround the shaman’s body. (Photo Credit 1.9)
They tucked tortoise shells under her head and hips and arranged dozens of the shells on top and around her. Then they left her many rare and magical things—the wing of a golden eagle, the pelvis of a leopard, and the severed foot of a human being.
A Spiritual Site
Now called Hilazon Tachtit, the small cave chosen as this woman’s resting place is the subject of an intense investigation led by Leore Grosman, an archaeologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Already her research has revealed that the mystery woman—a member of the Natufian culture, which flourished between 15,000 and 11,600 years ago in what is now Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and possibly Syria—was the world’s earliest known shaman. Considered a skilled sorcerer and healer, she was likely seen as a conduit to the spirit world, communicating with supernatural powers on behalf of her community Grosman said.
A study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Grosman and Natalie Munro, a zooarchaeologist at the University of Connecticut, reveals that the shaman’s burial feast was just one chapter in the intense ritual life of the Natufians, the first known people on Earth to give up nomadic living and settle in villages.
“From the standpoint of the status of the grave and its contents, no Natufian burial like this one has ever been found. This indicates the woman had a distinct societal position.”
Leore Grosman
archaeologist, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
First Feasts for the Dead
In the years that followed the burial, many people repeatedly climbed the steep, 492-foot-high (150-meter-high) escarpment to the cave, carrying up other members of the community for burial as well as hauling large amounts of food. Next to the graves, the living dined lavishly on the meat of aurochs, the wild ancestors of cattle, during feasts conducted perhaps to memorialize the dead.
New evidence from Hilazon Tachtit, in northern Israel’s Galilee region, suggests that mortuary feasting began at least 12,000 years ago, near the end of the Paleolithic era. These events set the stage for later and much more elaborate ceremonies to commemorate the dead among Neolithic farming communities.
In Britain, for example, Neolithic farmers slaughtered succulent young pigs 5,100 years ago at the site of Durrington Walls, near Stonehenge, for an annual midwinter feast. As part of the celebrations, participants are thought to have cast the ashes of compatriots who had died during the previous year into the nearby River Avon.
The Natufian findings give us our first clear look at the shadowy beginnings of such feasts, said Ofer Bar-Yosef, an archaeologist at Harvard University. “The Natufians,” Bar-Yosef said, “were like the founding fathers, and in this sense Hilazon Tachtit gives us some of the other roots of Neolithic society.” Study co-author Grosman agrees. “The Natufians,” she said, “had one leg in the Paleolithic and one leg in the Neolithic.”
Just This Once …
For the burial wake of the shaman, the Natufian people feasted on aurochs and wild tortoise, but their day-to-day diet was less extravagant. As a result of transitioning from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer culture to a sedentary, agriculture-based lifestyle, the food they ate reflected both ways of life and included wild cereals, legumes, almonds, acorns, gazelle, deer, beef, wild boar, ibex, duck, and fish, depending on the area of settlement.
Exploring the Cave
Perched high above the Hilazon River in western Galilee, Hilazon Tachtit cave was long known only to local goatherds and their families. But in the early 1990s, Harvard’s Bar-Yosef spotted several Natufian flint artifacts scattered along the arid, shrubby slope below the cave and climbed up to investigate.
Impressed by the site’s potential, the Harvard University archaeologist recruited Hebrew University’s Grosman to take charge of the dig, and she and a small team began excavations there in 1995.
First Grosman and her team had to peel back an upper layer of goat dung, ash, and pottery shards that had accumulated during the past 1,700 years. Below this layer they found five ancient pits filled with bones, distinctive Natufian stone tools, and pieces of charcoal that dated the pits to between 12,400 and 12,000 years ago.
(Photo Credit 1.10)
The Shaman’s Body
At the bottom of one pit lay the 45-year-old shaman—quite elderly for Natufian times—buried with at least 70 tortoise shells and parts of several rare animals. Analyses showed that this woman had suffered from a deformed pelvis. She would have had a strikingly asymmetrical appearance and likely limped, dragging her foot.
Grosman examined historical accounts of shamans worldwide and found that in many cultures shamans often possessed physical handicaps or had suffered from some form of trauma. According to Brian Hayden, an archaeologist at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby Canada, “It’s not uncommon that people with disabilities, either mental or physical, are thought to have unusual supernatural powers.”
Opened Graves
After burying their spiritual leader 12,000 years ago at Hilazon Tachtit, Natufians returned to the cave for other funerary rituals, eventually interring the bodies of at least 27 men, women, and children in three communal burial pits, researchers say.
On some later visits, Natufians opened the communal graves and removed certain bones, including skulls, for possible display or burial elsewhere, according to Grosman.
Until now, removing bones from burials for use in rituals was thought to have begun during the Neolithic era at sites such as the West Bank’s Jericho, dating to about 11,000 years ago. A similar practice has been found at the later Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. In both places mourners coated human heads with plaster and kept them for ceremonial purposes.
On the Menu
“We think that there were scheduled visits to Hilazon Tachtit,” said study co-author Grosman, who received partial funding from the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration for her work at the Natufian site.
Natufians seem to have made the steep climb laden with joints of mountain gazelle and aurochs. In what might have been one sitting, the mourners devoured an estimated 661 pounds (300 kilograms) of aurochs meat, according to the study.
But they did not bring all this food for a picnic. In their daily lives, Natufian families seldom dined on aurochs, for the wild oxen were relatively scarce at this time. And given the species’ power and speed, hunting an aurochs likely required a communal
effort.
The celebrants chose to feast on aurochs for reasons above and beyond their nutritional value. “In later times we know that the aurochs become ritually important in the area,” zooarchaeologist Natalie Munro said. Indeed, some later cultures seem to have regarded aurochs as sacred animals, even symbols of fertility.
For example, at the massive, 11,600-year-old Gobekli Tepe ritual site in Turkey—seen by some as the world’s oldest temple—hunters and gatherers dined lavishly on aurochs.
Buried Treasure
Among the artifacts buried with the Natufian shaman:
1. Tortoise shells
2. Leopard pelvis
3. Complete articulated human foot
4. Wild cow tail
5. Fragment of a basalt bowl
6. Marten skulls
7. Eagle wing bone
8. Forearm of a wild boar
Good Food Makes Good Neighbors
Munro thinks that the grand ritual feasts at Hilazon Tachtit served an important purpose besides mourning lost loved ones. Living for the first time in settled communities, Natufian families had to find a way to ease all the friction that would build up from continually rubbing shoulders with their neighbors, she says. Unlike other Paleolithic hunters and gathers, the Natufians could no longer split up and move on easily when trouble arose. They had become so populous that they could no longer find unoccupied territory in their region.
The Natufians devised a way of dealing with the strain—throwing big communal parties to celebrate important ritual events, the researchers say. “When people feel like they are part of the same group, they are more willing to share and to compromise to resolve conflict,” Munro said.
TRUTH:
THE WORD “SHAMAN” WAS COINED IN SIBERIA, BUT THE CONCEPT IS COMMON IN CULTURES AROUND THE WORLD.
The new finds suggest that the deep roots of communal feasting and the curation of human remains for ritual—found later at sites like Gobekli Tepe, Jericho, and Stonehenge—originated centuries before the advent of agricultural societies.
These rituals played an important role in smoothing the transition of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to a farming life, researchers say. “Hilazon Tachtit,” archaeologist Ofer Bar-Yosef said, “gives us a good window into these kinds of special activities. And I think that’s really important.”
TRANSPORTATION FOR THE AFTERLIFE
Ancient Chinese Chariot Fleet
Uncovered in a tomb pit, these millennia-old chariots and horse skeletons may have been part of an elaborate funeral rite for a wealthy nobleman.
Five chariots and 12 horse skeletons were found in a tomb pit unearthed in the city of Luoyang in central China. Archaeologists believe the tomb was dug as part of the funeral rites of a minister or other nobleman during the Eastern Zhou dynasty period, about 2,500 years ago.
Got Wheels?
Chariots were important vehicles of war during the Zhou dynasty and were driven by nobleman-warriors wielding halberds or spears, said David Sena, a China historian at the University of Texas at Austin who was not involved in the discovery.
“During this period, there wasn’t a distinction between the military class and an educated aristocratic class,” Sena said. “People with aristocratic backgrounds were expected to do both, and riding a chariot was one of the skills that a nobleman was expected to have.”
War Machine
The chariot was the world’s first war machine, originally used in Mesopotamia and then in Asia Minor and Egypt. It was an early version of a tank, from which arrows were shot as it raced through the battlefield.
“Chariots were kind of the main units of warfare during” the Zhou dynasty, he added. “Later, chariots were still used, but their effectiveness was reduced, because you got larger armies composed mostly of commoners, so warfare became much less of an aristocratic affair.”
A worker sprays water onto some of the recently unearthed chariot horse skeletons to help them retain moisture. (Photo Credit 1.11)
Tricked-Out Chariots
Many chariots used by noblemen during the Eastern Zhou dynasty were adorned with valuable metals and materials, such as bronze and ivory though reports of the Luoyang find make no mention of precious materials. Valuable chariot parts and accessories were often gifts from the Zhou dynasty’s ruler himself Sena explained.
“Many bronze inscriptions describe a kind of political ritual where a nobleman is invested with a title or duty or some land, and that’s always accompanied by gift giving. Chariot parts and accoutrements were a very important part of that.”
The Story in the Tomb
Archaeologists believe the 12 deliberately arranged horses were slaughtered prior to being buried. Arranged with the horses’ bodies were several dogs. Dogs performed important work and were sacrificial animals in ancient China, so their presence in the chariot tombs is not unusual, Sena said. “We often see them in the bottom of pits of human tombs” as well, he added.
It’s unclear whether the chariots and horses found in the recently excavated pit were expected to be of use to the buried aristocrat in the afterlife or whether the practice underscored a family’s importance and wealth in life.
It may have been a combination of both, Sena said. “I think we can make the inference that these [chariots and sacrificed horses] spoke to some need that the dead would have in the afterlife.”
Luoyang is currently undergoing rapid expansion, so “archaeologists are really kind of under the gun to save as much of this material before it’s destroyed or covered over by industrial growth,” Sena said. “It’s very nice to see that they’re able to save these things and document them for scholars and for posterity.”
BURIAL RITES
New Death Ritual
Found in Himalaya
Found in cliffside caves in Nepal, the remains of 27 ancient men, women, and children bear cut marks that point to a previously unknown Himalayan death ritual, experts say.
The newly discovered corpses—many of which had been stripped of flesh—were placed in the high mortuaries some 1,500 years ago. Nearly 67 percent of the bodies had been de-fleshed, most likely with a metal knife, say the researchers, who found the remains in 2010.
After the de-fleshing process, the corpses had been neatly laid to rest on wide wooden shelves, the researchers speculate. But due to centuries of exposure to the elements, the bones and bunks—and much of the caves themselves—had collapsed by the time the team entered the chambers. Also in the jumble: goat, cow, and horse remains—perhaps sacrificial offerings for the dead, though their purpose remains a mystery.
TRUTH:
THE HIMALAYAN MOUNTAINS GROW A HALF INCH TALLER EACH YEAR.
Cliff Caves
Dug into characteristically reddish cliffs of the Upper Mustang district, the human-made caves lie at 13,800 feet (4,200 meters) above sea level, high above the village of Samdzong.
A climber removes a skull from a cave in Nepal’s Mustang region. (Photo Credit 1.12)
In ancient times, rock outcrops and probably ladders would have eased access to the caves. Since then, however, erosion has rendered the chambers accessible to only expert climbers, such as seven-time Everest summiteer Pete Athans, who co-led the team.
“Clues to when these caves were built, and by whom, are melting before our eyes,” Athans said in a press statement. “The cave tomb we found is under great threat. It is situated in a fragile rock matrix that has already collapsed some time in the past. I don’t believe the tomb would’ve lasted one more monsoon.”
Treated With Respect
Little is known about the three ancient Himalayan groups that de-fleshed and entombed their dead in the high Mustang caves, making the motives behind the rite even murkier. The team has, however, ruled out cannibalism.
“When you’re going for meat, you process a skeleton in a very different way than if you were trying to strip the flesh off,” explained project leader Mark Aldenderfer, an archaeologist at the University of California
, Merced.
“In cannibalism, the base of the skull is often smashed [to get at the brains], and bones are broken and twisted, usually for marrow. There’s nothing like that in any of the bone parts that we recovered …
TRUTH:
A CAVE IN CROATIA HAS A 1,683-FOOT-DEEP PIT, THE DEEPEST HOLE ON EARTH.
“This was done in a respectful fashion,” added Aldenderfer, who received partial funding from the National Geographic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration.
Preliminary DNA analysis of some of the bones suggests the de-fleshing subjects were related. “I would imagine that many of these mortuary caves are for large extended families,” Aldenderfer said.
“This would be their traditional burial place, and another family would have their own.”
Secondhand Rite?
Aldenderfer and his team think the practice of de-fleshing corpses and entombing them in caves might be a previously unknown bridge between two other known death rituals.
DEATH RITUALS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
AIR SACRIFICE, MONGOLIA
After a traditional ceremony, the body is laid on open ground and village dogs are released to consume the remains.
SKY BURIAL, TIBET
The deceased is dismembered by a rogyapa, or body breaker, and left outside to the natural elements.
