In every epoch, people develop their own rituals for burying their loved ones. While burials or cremations are common today, burials were rather unconventional in some places a good 7000 years ago: the head of the deceased was severed – and often also hands and feet – and buried around their own settlement. This discovery was made by archaeologists led by Martin Furholt from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU) in Vráble, Slovakia, as reported in a press release from the university.
During their excavation in the summer of 2021, the researchers, together with colleagues from Nitra, Slovakia, uncovered several headless skeletons. The human remains had apparently been dumped carelessly in a ditch that ran around a Neolithic settlement. In fact, the excavators discovered a kind of pattern: the skeletons often lay in pairs at the passages in the ditch system. In addition, the body parts were only severed after death. The archaeologists were not able to definitively clarify whether the deceased were laid out in a different place before their decapitation or whether they were dug up again for this purpose. It also remains unclear where the skulls went to.
Skull cult and corpse dismemberment in the Neolithic
The headless skeletons were neither victims of violence nor were they criminal outsiders of the community. Rather, the burial place in Vráble testifies to an ancestor cult. “The cult of the skull and the dismemberment of corpses were widespread in the Neolithic Age and linked to magical or religious ideas,” explains prehistorian Johannes Müller from the CAU. The bereaved would have made death masks from the skulls of their deceased relatives or arranged them in skull nests. In this way, the dead witnessed the everyday life of their descendants even years after their death. The burial ritual probably also served another purpose: “The depositing of the bodies in the ditches can be seen as an expression of a message to nature or deities,” explains team leader Furholt. »With their ritual acts they tried to give structure to their environment and to influence it.«