The British Museum

The Trustees of the British Museum

The Trustees of the British Museum



The Trustees of the British Museum

The Trustees of the British Museum

The Trustees of the British Museum

The Trustees of the British Museum

The Trustees of the British Museum

To flesh out the features on the so-called Jericho Skull, archaeologists at the British Museum have worked for more than two years to reconstruct the face of a man whose skull had been reshaped by ritual throughout his long life. While he was an infant, his head had been bound tightly with cloth to change its shape. After he died at a ripe old age, his skull was then plastered, decorated, and put on display. This Jericho Skull gives us a glimpse of life in the Levant long before the rise of religions that describe a great battle at the city's walls.

Jericho, located today in Palestine, dates back more than 11,000 years and is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. It's very likely that this man lived behind the earliest versions of Jericho's infamous walls, built more than 9,000 years ago, but that doesn't mean he lived a hardscrabble existence threatened by war. Recent archaeological investigation of Jericho's Neolithic walls shows that they were not used for defense. Based on layers of silt that collected around them, researchers surmise that Jericho's first walls were built to prevent the city from being flooded during the rainy season.

In 1953, celebrated Biblical archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon excavated at Tell es-Sultan in Jericho, and she was the first person in the world to unearth the earliest layers of the city. There, she found the Jericho Skull, buried with seven other plastered skulls that are all between 8,500 and 9,300 years old. Each skull went to a different museum, and the British Museum's Jericho Skull is still the oldest item in its collection. In the images above, you can see what it looked like when it first arrived at the museum. The skull had been filled with soft dirt and then plastered and painted. The eye sockets were filled with shell. The clay at the base of the skull was flat, like the base of a sculpture. This suggests the skull was decorated and displayed, a common practice among Neolithic peoples of the Levant.

Two years ago, archaeologists used an X-ray machine to see the skull beneath the plaster, and they also borrowed time on the micro-CT scanner at the Natural History Museum in London. As a result, the group discovered that the skull likely belonged to a man. His lower jaw was missing, but based on the tooth decay and abscesses in his upper teeth, the archaeologists believe he lived to be fairly old. His nose had been broken at least once. And when he was an infant, his head had been "bound" to change its shape, another ritual that was typical among Neolithic peoples.

British Museum curator Alexandra Fletcher explains:

It is possible to alter the shape of a skull by binding or bandaging the head during childhood. When we looked at the outside of the Jericho Skull we could see a slight dip in the surface running over the top of the head from ear to ear which suggested that something like this had been carried out. The X-rays and the CT scans showed changes in the thickness of the skull bone and, as such alterations can only be made while bone is forming and growing, this must have happened from an early age.

Speaking recently to Seeker, she added, "In this case, the bindings have made the top and back of the head broader—different from other practices that aim for an elongated shape. I think this was regarded as a 'good look' in Jericho at this time."

Fletcher and colleagues also found a hole cut in the back of his skull after death, which is likely how it was filled with soil. This infill would have protected the skull from collapsing when it was plastered and painted. Skull plastering was a sign of honor, indicating that our Jericho resident was probably of high status. Archaeologist Ian Hodder, who has studied skull plastering at Ҫatalhöyük (another Neolithic site in the Levant), has suggested these skulls were a way for people to remember their ancestors. It might not have been a form of ancestor worship but rather an early effort to chronicle history.

This was an era long before today's dominant organized religions, so it's difficult for us to imagine exactly what Neolithic people would have believed. But these skulls suggest that they braided historical memory and reverence for ancestors together into a system of belief that united families and communities.

Listing image by The British Museum