Plastered Houses and the Dead: A Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Burial Site at Nahal Yarmuth 38, Central Israel
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Architecture Beneath the Plaster: The Buildings of Nahal Yarmuth 38
The article reveals Nahal Yarmuth 38 as a place where architecture and burial practice are tightly intertwined. Instead of towering houses or grand temples, the site offers a series of low, lime-plastered, square buildings that seem to hug the bedrock rather than rise above it. These structures form the quiet stage on which the drama of the burials plays out.
Square Rooms on the Rock
Excavation exposed five rectilinear stone buildings, four of them almost complete in plan. Each one began life as a single, undivided square room, roughly the size of a modern small living room: between 5 × 5 metres and 6.5 × 6.5 metres. Their walls were surprisingly modest, built of undressed fieldstones, 0.6-0.8 metres thick, but preserved to only about 0.4 metres high. Importantly, very few fallen stones were found around them, suggesting these walls never carried tall stone superstructures. Whatever rose above them was light, perishable and now gone.
In two buildings, archaeologists noticed slight changes in wall orientation between different construction phases. These small shifts hint at re-planning and re-use. The architecture was not frozen in time, but something people adjusted over generations, perhaps as new burials were inserted or as ritual needs changed.
Lime-Plastered Floors: White Surfaces Over the Dead
The most striking feature of these buildings is their floors. The article describes broad, continuous floors of white lime plaster covering the entire interior of each structure, gently curving upwards to meet the walls. The plaster itself is substantial, between 3 and 15 centimetres thick. Underneath lies an engineered foundation: a layer of fist-sized angular stones forming an infrastructure fill. Above that, plaster after plaster was laid. In some structures, up to six separate plastering phases could be traced, one over the other.
This is not casual repair work. It speaks of repeated returns to the same rooms, re-plastering and renewing the working surface again and again – each time sealing what lay beneath. Those "beneath" are the individuals buried under the floors. The lime plaster was not only a practical solution for a clean surface; it became a literal skin over the dead. Graves were cut into earlier floors, the bodies placed within, and then a fresh plaster floor laid over them. The floors show clear evidence of being opened and re-closed, like trapdoors: patches, joins and scars where the living broke into the surface to inter someone and then carefully sealed it again.
Burial Practices and Mortuary Patterns
Nahal Yarmuth 38 presents a small but extraordinarily rich window into the world of the first farming communities in central Israel, around ten thousand years ago. The excavation has revealed a tightly packed realm of the dead: adults laid carefully in small pits, children in rare and striking poses, and a few burials accompanied by precious objects. The article estimates a minimum of about forty individuals from the Pre-Pottery Neolithic layer alone, a large number for such a small site.
The majority are single adult burials, laid in tightly flexed positions with knees drawn up to the chest. A few burials stand out dramatically: two adults were found buried together, face-to-face in mirror positions, and one child was discovered in a seated position. Notably, children are under-represented overall, suggesting a more selective practice, perhaps limited to certain individuals with particular roles or status.
Several burials were missing their skulls, part of a known pattern in the Neolithic Levant, where skulls were sometimes removed from burials after a time, perhaps for display, plastering, or reburial elsewhere. The missing skulls at Nahal Yarmuth 38 hint at rituals beyond the excavated area, perhaps carried out in other buildings or even at different sites.
Material Culture and Technology
The inhabitants of Nahal Yarmuth 38 favoured high-quality, colourful stone for their tools. The toolkit centred on long, straight blades struck from carefully prepared stone cores. Among the most striking items are the arrowheads belonging to well-known Neolithic forms from the Levant: slim, symmetrical points ideal for hunting wild goat and gazelle. The blades were also worked into finely toothed sickle knives whose edges carry a clear polish from cutting cereal stalks or reeds.
Alongside the sharp flint tools, large, heavy grinding stones served for crushing seeds into flour. Personal adornment is a particularly vivid aspect of the finds: stone pendants, many types of stone beads, cylindrical bone beads and worked marine shells. Marine shells appear in their hundreds, most from Mediterranean clams but also including shells from the distant Red Sea. Some ornaments were discovered in direct association with burials, including a rare anthropomorphic stone figure – a human-like figurine placed as a grave good.
Perhaps most surprising is a broken stone gaming board, suggesting that structured games were part of life for the people connected with Nahal Yarmuth 38. Such boards in early farming societies may have served as pastimes, teaching tools, or supports for ritualised play connected with decision-making or divination.
Animals, Shells, and the World of the Dead
The faunal assemblage is dominated by wild animals: gazelle, wild goat, fallow deer, wild boar, and occasionally aurochs and red deer. This mixture paints a picture of a community deeply engaged with hunting. Many of these animal bones were found close to burials, suggesting that the creatures that fed the living also had a role in rituals surrounding the dead. Meat offerings, selected body parts, or symbolic deposits may have accompanied particular individuals into the grave.
Shells tell a wide-ranging story, arriving from land, river, and sea environments. Mediterranean bivalves dominate the sea-shell collection, alongside marine gastropods and even exotic Red Sea shells. Worked marine shells were found among the grave goods of certain individuals, not as mass offerings but carefully selected companions in death. The presence of shells with the dead demonstrates long-distance connections, personal identity, and perhaps symbols of status or family ties.
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