The Chalcolithic Burial Cave at Peq'in, Israel

The burial cave at Peq'in in northern Israel was discovered during road construction in 1995 and excavated by Zvi Gal. In the Neolithic period the cave had been used as a dwelling by people who left pottery and stone tools scattered about. Then in the Chalcolithic, around 5000 BCE, it became a burial place. Dozens of sets of human remains were placed in the cave in clay ossuaries.

Burial in this cave was the end of a long and possibly complex ritual process. The bodies were first buried until most of the flesh was rotted away. Then they were dug up and the bones were cleaned and placed in a clay ossuary like this one. You can see that the ossuary was built of clay slabs and then partially fired or kiln dried before the lid was separated from the rest by string cutting. Then it was fired again to harden it more.

Some of the ossuaries had vaguely human forms, with heads.

A few sets of bones were placed in jars or bowls like these.

None of the burials had rich grave goods. Instead there was a large variety of small clay idols, along with clay disks and other not-very-expensive or hard to make items. The structure of this society, Ghassulian as it is called, seems to be the subject of debate among Israeli archaeologists. Some think these people lived in tribes with powerful chieftains but others think the society was more egalitarian, and they point to the absence of differentiation among the graves of sites like Peq'in and Azor as evidence.

After the burials ceased, somebody went into the cave and trashed the place, smashing many ossuaries and hurling them all about. We know this happened thousands of years ago because the resulting mess of broken pots and bones then ended up covered with lime dripping from the cave ceiling. The mess was so great that the initial publication on the cave did not even include an estimate of how many ossuaries or sets of remains there had been.

I find these Chalcolithic societies fascinating partly because they disappeared before writing was invented, leaving almost everything about their beliefs a mystery. We can only guess, based on these works of art and what we know about primitive farming societies around the world.