Bestansur (Iraq) : Unusual 'House Of The Dead' About Earliest Farmers
Kristina Killgrove
Skeletons from Space 50, Building 5, at the Neolithic site of Bestansur. Roger Matthews / University of Reading
When humans first figured out how to farm during the Neolithic period, this brought about changes not only in food production but also in society and culture. At the 9,700-year-old site of Bestansur, archaeologists have discovered evidence of a very early and elaborate burial ritual in which more than 65 people had been defleshed and rearranged within a special 'house of the dead.'
The spring 2017 excavations at Bestansur, in Iraqi Kurdistan, were directed by Roger and Wendy Matthews of the University of Reading, with the support of Kamal Rasheed Raheem and Kamal Rauf Aziz of the Sulaimaniyah Antiquities Directorate. Work has been carried out at the site since 2012 in an investigation of the economy and society of Early Neolithic humans, focusing on how people first made a transition from foraging to farming in the Middle East in the Neolithic period (12,000-8,000 years ago).
The Central Zagros Archaeological Project has made many discoveries in the past five years. Excavations in a building revealed stone tools and bowls, while outside of it there were remains of food preparation, which suggested that the people living at Bestansur were eating snails, domesticated and wild animals, and crops such as lentils. Another archaeological trench exposed a settlement area with plaster surfaces decorated with ochre. Yet another building yielded beads, an alabaster bracelet, small clay objects, and fishing net sinkers.
While these finds are important, they did not prepare archaeologists for what they would find under Building 5, in a large room known as Space 50: dozens of human skeletal remains in a variety of permutations and groupings.
Building 5 at Bestansur is quite large, consisting of red and white mudbricks set in grey mortar, with plaster on the inside walls. The building has been radiocarbon dated to 7700 BC.
Underneath the floor of Space 50 in the building were the skeletons of at least 65 people – at least another half dozen are still awaiting excavation. While intramural burial – that is, interring the dead within the walls of a building – is not terribly unusual for the Neolithic in the Middle East, the sheer quantity of the burials is. This is much higher than expected for a single household, which means these may represent one or more extended communities.
Neolithic burial at the site of Bestansur with evidence of red pigment .Roger Matthews / University of Reading
Another unusual aspect of the burials is the variety. Professor Roger Matthews tells me that "the mode of burial is elaborate, with bodies disarticulated and arranged in distinctive ways – groups of skulls, separate limbs, scattered bones." At least two of these skeletal bundles involved people of different age groups. One included a red pigment between the bones, and another had traces of white mineral plaster as well. Another group was made up mostly of small children. This is intriguing, as child skeletons are often rare in an archaeological context, so the fact that the researchers found many more infants compared to adults is particularly interesting.
Professor Matthews says that they have called this a "'House of the Dead' because architecturally it looks like a house, but there’s no convincing evidence for it being lived in." Rather, it may have been something like a charnel house, which is an area for post-mortem body processing as part of a burial ritual. Matthews notes that "some of the bodies have either been exposed for a time in order to decay, or have had flesh carefully removed, or have been buried elsewhere and then later brought to this final resting place."
Full analysis of the skeletons found to date is being done by Sam Walsh. Working as a Wainwright Fellow at the University of Oxford for the next six months, Dr. Walsh will address questions about diet, health, and migration, as well as kinship and relatedness. In this way, the research team will be able to better interpret the possible relationships among the dozens of people buried at Bestansur and between these people and other Neolithic populations in the region.
The burial treatment evident at Bestansur demonstrates an early concern with keeping the dead close to the living, a practice seen at other Neolithic sites such as Çatalhöyük, which is 1,400 km away in Turkey and later in date. As early farmers settled down, their dead piled up in what may have been the earliest cemeteries. Excavations at sites such as Bestansur therefore give us new information about the cultural changes that accompanied the first farmers.
Matthews and the rest of the CZAP team plan to return to Bestansur in future seasons to continue their excavation of these extraordinary burials and buildings.