Alepotrypa Cave

Alepotrypa Cave was discovered in 1958 by a Greek villager. Everyone in the village agrees that it was found because a dog followed a fox down a hole and then the owner followed the dog -- hence the name, which means "foxhole" -- but since everybody says it was his own father or grandfather who did this, outsiders are skeptical. Still, somebody discovered it. And it was immediately brought to the attention of archaeologists because the whole place is full of human bones.

The cave is more than 1000 meters long and up to 200 meters wide; the main chamber is 60 meters (200 feet) tall. It holds a lake where Jacques Cousteau once scuba-dived, hoping to film the discovery of yet more bones.

Serious archaeological excavations began in 1970. The cave was occupied in the Late Neolithic, 5000 to 3300 BCE. Besides the bones, numerous artifacts have been found, of the sorts usually found on domestic sites: pottery, obsidian tools, some copper and silver. After decades of work, the nature of the site remains controversial. In just an hour of reading I have managed to find multiple contradictory claims about what this represents.

The longtime excavator of the caves, Giorgos Papathanassopoulos, believes that the pottery was not made in the cave but brought from elsewhere, in fact from several elsewheres. He thinks the diversity of the pottery means the cave was a place of pilgrimage. He thinks the bones represent special people brought from throughout the region to be buried in this special place, which he thinks inspired Greek notions of Hades. This last bit about Hades is nonsense, since everything about the Greek notion of Hades can be replicated in other cultures around the world, but it seems to have landed the site in a lot of newspapers back in 2012. There is certainly plenty of evidence of rituals taking place in the cave, including deposits of dis-articulated bones and large fire pits, and there may be something to the notion that it served as a cult center for a wider community during at least part of its history.

But other archaeologists think the cave was an ordinary domestic site.

Archaeological investigations during the 1970s produced evidence that there was habitation of both the interior, but also of the wider cave area. Its lateral niches formed the living quarters of Neolithic families and hearths, radially defined by stones, small ovens and storage pits dug on the floor of the cave chambers, seem to have served the whole community. The study of animal bones and charred fruit indicates that animal husbandry, hunting and fishing were the main sources of diet. The practice of farming was limited since the immediate natural environment did not particularly favour its development. Among the activities of the inhabitants, pottery manufacture (vases with painted decoration, storage vases), jewellery making of bone and Spondylus sea-shell and metallurgy were carried out.

The bones have been carefully studied by Anastasia Papathanasiou, who thinks they represent a typical sample from an ordinary Neolithic community:

The Alepotrypa sample comes from primary and secondary burials as well as scattered bone, and consists of a minimum number of 161 individuals. It includes equal proportions of adults and subadults and males and females, is characterized by high child mortality, and falls within the range of other Neolithic sites in terms of age profiles and stature. The most frequent pathological conditions observed in this population are: 1) anemic conditions (cribra orbitalia and porotic hyperostosis), mild or healed in manifestation, most probably of nutritional origin, resulting from a poor diet focused on terrestrial resources such as domesticated cereals; 2) osteoarthritis and musculoskeletal stress markers, indicative of increased physical activity and heavy workloads; and 3) elevated prevalence of healed, depressed cranial fractures, serving as evidence of violent, nonlethal confrontations. 

Some of the bones had been burned, others not; some burials were single, others in groups. The cranial fractures are interesting. They were found on nine of the 61 reasonably intact skulls, which is a high percentage and indicates a violent society. On the other hand they are not especially serious; they are the sort of wound given by a baseball bat rather than a stone mace. Here's a theory for all you headline writers out there: neolithic Greeks settled their disputes by facing off against each other with wooden clubs until one or the other man was knocked down. To do this they journeyed to the spectacular cave and walked far back into the dark, holding their duels on the edge of the Sacred Lake of Judgment. . . . Perhaps this is not as spectacular as "Killer Cave May Have Inspired Myth of Hades," but at least my theory has a small chance of being true.

It all ended around 3200 BCE, when the entrance collapsed, probably during an earthquake. All the accounts say that people were trapped inside or killed by the collapse, but I haven't actually seen any evidence of that. The collapse certainly preserved all of this intact by sealing the cave off from the world for 5,000 years.