The custom of decapitating the dead has not yet found a satisfactory and exhaustive explanation. It appeared at the end of the Natufian period, when deteriorating climatic conditions obliged the semi-settled communities to return to the nomadic lifestyle of their ancestors.
At that time, decapitation might have been a manner to apply funeral practices to an individual who had died far away from the village, without having to carry the body all the way back to the camp. This interpretation would explain why no children’s skulls have been recovered, children remaining near the camp. It could also justify the simultaneous use of decapitation in primary and secondary funeral practices. In the first case, when the group was far from the camp, decapitation had to happen immediately after death (primary practice). But those who died at the camp were first buried, and later unearthed and decapitated in the presence of the whole community (secondary practice).
This custom, however, evolves when the process of sedentarization starts again, after the interruption caused by the Younger Dryas. With time, variations appear in the way skulls are arranged and in the treatments they undergo.
They are sometimes buried individually, sometimes in group [6]. Whereas one finds a plastered and painted skull under the floor of a house between the hands of a deceased woman in Çatalhöyük (Turkey), a skull was placed inside a basket on a bench against the outside wall of a house in Tell Aswad (Syria). Elsewhere, several skulls formed a circle, all oriented toward the inside, while in another place, they formed a line, all looking in the same direction. Skulls were recovered in pits, under houses, placed in a niche or inside a wall [7], etc. Some of these emplacements were marked by an assemblage of stones or a monolith, but it is impossible to know if they represent an exception or if all sites were, at the time, systematically marked.
The manner skulls were treated also varies from one site to the other: some were left intact, some painted, some plastered, while others had their ocular cavities filled with a shellfish, giving the skull an expressive look.
Besides, whereas some skulls were individually plastered, others were plastered as a group, sometimes ten skulls at a time. Another important variation is that the decapitated of ’Ain Ghazal (Jordan) apparently deserved the tidiest funeral, whereas in Jericho (Palestine), headless bodies were thrown on a heap of rubbish. Finally, although skulls of the two sexes and of all ages were recovered, decapitation was generally practiced more on women than on men.
All these variations in the treatment of skulls have led to many different interpretations of its function. Some have read a final homage to the deceased, whereas others see it as a last stopover on the path of some posthumous life. But no reason has yet been found that would explain why one treatment was applied instead of another. It seems that plastering, introduced later, became with time the most popular treatment. The realism it brought to the skull and the features it preserved (fig. 4) must have excited people’s imagination.
It is during excavations at Jericho that Kathleen Kenyon discovered the first plastered skulls. She compared them to the masks that some tribes in the Sepik valley (New Guinea) use to honor their forebears, and concluded that the plastered skulls revealed the presence of an ancestor cult in the Middle East. However, this idea has recently been abandoned. Among the arguments that contradict it, is the fact that 28% of the adults buried in Jericho and 35% of those buried in ’Ain Ghazal did not undergo this treatment. This implies that in these two communities, one person out of three was not eligible for this practice. While people without children or those being foreign to the community might have been excluded from this custom, decapitation was, however, frequently used on young people who didn't have children, or whose children were too young to perform a similar ritual.
Other arguments have been brought forward that exclude the existence of an ancestor cult:
- However rarely, this custom has also been used on children [8]
- Headless bodies were rejected on a heap of garbage in Jericho
- In Kfar HaHoresh (Israel), headless cadavers of gazelle and aurochs have been found too [9]
- In Mureybet (Syria), bucrania were buried under the floor or in the wall of houses
- At ’Ain Ghazal, the ‘vogue’ of plastered skulls was relatively short-lived, appearing around 7,100 and disappearing definitively in 6,300
- Most funeral traditions of the Neolithic were abandoned during the PPNC: it seems impossible to justify the disappearance of such traditions if they were related to something as important and timeless as an ancestor cult, in which lineages founding the community took their source
Finally, a few authors have concluded that decapitation was reserved to enemies and that the treatment of their skulls was accompanied with magic incantations. The fact that most skulls were those of women contradicts this interpretation.
In the first part, we have seen how different rituals had been conceived to guide the spirit of a dead person toward its new function, and that some of these rituals were destined to stop the spirit from coming back to haunt the place where it lived. This could also explain the presence of skulls in houses: decapitating, painting and plastering the skull could have acted as many guarantees the spirit would not return to haunt the body it had lived in.
Elsewhere, at ’Ain Ghazal for example, it could have been to welcome the deceased's spirit, for which skulls and statuettes were indifferently used, the spirit choosing its residence, just as was the custom on the Timor Archipelago.
The variety of interpretations and the absence of standardized rituals show that different customs cohabited in this region, justifying the fact that a headless body could be thrown on a heap of garbage at one place while deserving a more exclusive sepulture at another.
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