12,000-Year-Old Shaman Funeral Reflects Natufian-Period Changes Natufian-period funerary ritual in the Southern Levant

Hebrew University archaeologists uncovered a 12,000 year old grave inside a cave in northern Israel. (Photo credit: Naftali Hilger)

One of the earliest funeral banquets ever to be discovered reveals a preplanned, carefully constructed event that reflects social changes at the beginning of the transition to agriculture in the Natufian period

The woman was laid on a bed of specially selected materials, including gazelle horn cores, fragments of chalk, fresh clay, limestone blocks and sediment. Tortoise shells were placed under and around her body, 86 in total. Sea shells, an eagle's wing, a leopard's pelvis, a forearm of a wild boar and even a human foot were placed on the body of the mysterious 1.5 meter-tall woman. Atop her body, a large stone was laid to seal the burial space.

It was not an ordinary funeral, said the Hebrew University archaeologist who discovered the grave in a cave site on the bank of the Hilazon river in the western Galilee region of northern Israel back in 2008 (LINK). Three other grave pits have been found at the site of Hilazon Tachtit since 1995, and most contained bones of several humans. Nevertheless, the unusual objects found inside the grave, measuring approximately 0.70 m x 1.00 m x 0.45 m, point to the uniqueness of the event and the woman at its center.

Eight years after the discovery, Prof. Leore Grosman from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Prof. Natalie Munro from the University of Connecticut, have identified the sequence of events of the mysterious funeral ritual that took place 12,000 years ago.

"We've assigned the event to stages based on field notes, digitized maps, stones, architecture and artifact frequency distributions and concentrations," said Prof. Grosman, adding that, "The high quality of preservation and recovery of a well-preserved grave of an unusual woman, probably a shaman, enabled the identification of six stages of a funerary ritual."

The research, published in the journal Current Anthropology (LINK), details the order of the six-step sequence and its ritual and ideological importance for the people who enacted it.

It began with the excavation of an oval grave pit in the cave floor. Next, a layer of objects was cached between large stones, including seashells, a broken basalt palette, red ochre, chalk, and several complete tortoise shells. These were covered by a layer of sediment containing ashes, and garbage composed of flint and animal bones. About halfway through the ritual, the woman was laid inside the pit in a child-bearing position, and special items including many more tortoise shells were placed on top of and around her. This was followed by another layer of filling and limestones of various sizes that were placed directly on the body. The ritual concluded with the sealing of the grave with a large, heavy stone.  

A wide range of activities took place in preparation for the funerary event. This included the collection of materials required for grave construction, and the capture and preparation of animals for the feast, particularly the 86 tortoises, which must have been time-consuming.

"The significant pre-planning implies that there was a defined 'to do' list, and a working plan of ritual actions and their order," said Prof. Grosman.

The study of funerary ritual in the archaeological record becomes possible only after humans began to routinely bury their dead in archaeologically visible locations. The Natufian period (15,000-11,500 years ago) in the southern Levant marks an increase in the frequency and concentration of human burials.

"The remnants of a ritual event at this site provide a rare opportunity to reconstruct the dynamics of ritual performance at a time when funerary ritual was becoming an increasingly important social mediator at a crucial juncture deep in human history," the researchers said.

This unusual Late Natufian funerary event in Hilazon Tachtit Cave in northern Israel provides strong evidence for community engagement in ritual practice, and its analysis contributes to the growing picture of social complexity in the Natufian period as a predecessor for increasingly public ritual and social transformations in the early Neolithic period that follows.

The unprecedented scale and extent of social change in the Natufian, especially in terms of ritual activities, make this period central to current debates regarding the origin and significance of social and ritual processes in the agricultural transition.

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem is Israel’s leading academic and research institution, producing one-third of all civilian research in Israel. For more information, visit http://new.huji.ac.il/en.

Citation: Leore Grosman and Natalie D. Munro, "A Natufian Ritual Event," Current Anthropology57, no. 3 (June 2016); DOI: 10.1086/686563. Link to Current Anthropology:http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/686563.

Located in northern Israel, the Hilazon Tachtit Cave was where the Natufian-period burial was discovered. Photo: Leore Grosman.

Archaeologists discovered in a cave in western Galilee the Natufian-period grave of a shaman.Photo: Naftali Hilger.

12,000-Year-Old Shaman Funeral Reflects Natufian-Period Changes

Natufian-period funerary ritual in the Southern Levant

Twelve thousand years ago in what is now northern Israel, a petite woman was laid to rest in a grave pit layered with seashells, red ochre, chalk, whole tortoise shells, ash, flint and animal bones. The woman, who was positioned in a child-bearing pose and was likely a shaman, had lived in western Galilee at a time when the people of the Southern Levant were transitioning from a foraging lifestyle to a sedentary one centered on farming. The unusual burial, say researchers Leore Grosman of the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Natalie Munro of the University of Connecticut, reveals the social changes that accompanied the agricultural transition during the Natufian period (15,000–11,000 years ago).

The excavation of the burial at Hilazon Tachtit Cave was first published in 2008 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Since then, Grosman and Munro have reconstructed the funerary ritual conducted for this shaman, recently reporting their analysis in Current Anthropology.

The Natufian-period ritual, which Grosman and Munro believe occurred in six stages, concluded with a large stone placed over the 2.3 by 3.3 by 1.5-foot grave. That an enormous amount of energy was spent on this funeral, from the gathering of material for the grave pit to the preparation of the funerary banquet, indicates this was no ordinary burial.

“The remnants of a ritual event at this site provide a rare opportunity to reconstruct the dynamics of ritual performance at a time when funerary ritual was becoming an increasingly important social mediator at a crucial juncture deep in human history,” explain Grosman and Munro in a Hebrew University of Jerusalem press release.

“This unusual Late Natufian funerary event,” the press release continues, “provides strong evidence for community engagement in ritual practice, and its analysis contributes to the growing picture of social complexity in the Natufian period as a predecessor for increasingly public ritual and social transformations in the early Neolithic period that follows.”