I · THE OBJECT · BRITISH MUSEUM

The Jericho Skull

Pre-Pottery Neolithic B · c. 7100 BC · Jericho, Levant

▶ Listen · narrated

Nine thousand years ago, people in Jericho did something with their dead that had never been done before: they brought faces back.

At a glance

Date: c. 7100 BC
Culture: Pre-Pottery Neolithic B
Location: Jericho, Levant
Material: Human bone, plaster, shell

Look closer

The jaw is missing
The mandible was removed before the plaster was applied. This was not damage from burial or handling — it was deliberate preparation. Removing the lower jaw leaves the upper skull stable and gives the plaster something to grip. It also changes the proportions: without the jaw, the face becomes rounder, less individual in one sense, more masklike. Whether this was practical necessity or ritual transformation is unclear, but it was consistent. Nearly all plastered skulls lack the mandible.
Shells for eyes
Two cowrie shells sit in the orbits, white and smooth against the textured plaster. They do not represent closed eyelids. They stare. Cowries were not local to Jericho — they came from the Red Sea or the Mediterranean, which means they were carried inland, probably traded. Using them here was a choice that cost effort. The shells are roughly the right size and shape to fill an eye socket, but they make the face look outward in a way that bone alone does not.
Signs of handling
The plaster surfaces on several skulls show wear — smoothed areas, small losses, patterns consistent with repeated touch. They were not made and immediately buried. They were kept above ground for some period, handled, perhaps displayed. How long is not known. The wear is real, but what it meant to hold one of these objects, or to see it in a room, is interpretation.

The story

The plastered skulls from Jericho belong to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, a period when people in the Levant were settling into permanent villages, cultivating plants, and beginning to live in ways that would lead, eventually, to cities. They had architecture, storage, trade networks. They did not yet make pottery. And they did something with their dead that leaves a direct, unsettling trace: they removed certain skulls from burials beneath house floors, cleaned them, and rebuilt faces onto them in plaster.

The process was careful. After the mandible was removed, wet plaster was applied in layers over the bone. It was shaped while workable — the cheeks filled out, the brow and nose modelled, the surface smoothed. Cowrie shells were pressed into the eye sockets. The result was not a lifelike portrait in the way a Roman bust is lifelike, but it was not abstract either. It was a face, recognisably human, staring.

These skulls were found buried again, often in groups, beneath the floors of houses. But the wear on their surfaces suggests they were not made and immediately interred. They were kept, handled, perhaps looked at. Then, at some point, they were buried. Why the sequence happened in that order is not recorded. The skulls themselves are evidence of the practice, not of its meaning.

The usual interpretation is ancestor veneration — that these were the heads of important or beloved dead, kept close, perhaps consulted, perhaps honoured. The fact that they were buried under homes supports this. So does the care taken in the modelling. But the evidence does not tell us whether every household did this, or only some. It does not tell us if the person whose skull was chosen was a parent, a founder, a leader, or someone else. The shells, the plaster, the removal from the grave and the return to it — all of this happened, but the why is scholarly consensus, not recorded fact.

What is certain is that this practice was geographically concentrated and chronologically brief. Plastered skulls appear in Jericho and a few other Levantine sites during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, and then they stop. The practice lasted perhaps a thousand years, maybe less. It represents one of the earliest known instances of humans reshaping the dead into something meant to be seen.

Why it mattered then

Jericho in the seventh millennium BC was not a city in the later sense, but it was a settlement of some permanence and complexity. People built houses, replastered floors, buried their dead beneath where they slept and ate. The decision to retrieve certain skulls and remodel them suggests a need to keep specific individuals present in some form — not as memory alone, but as object. If these were ancestors, then the practice implies inheritance, lineage, continuity. Houses were rebuilt on the same plots over generations. Burying the dead below the floor tied the living to the place and to the people who had lived there before. Bringing a skull back up, giving it a face again, and keeping it in the house would intensify that connection. It would make the past visible. The effort involved was not trivial. Plaster had to be prepared, shells obtained, the work done with enough skill to produce a recognisable face. This was not a universal practice — not every burial was treated this way. Selection implies significance. Whether that significance was social, familial, or religious is not clear, but the act of selection itself tells us that some dead mattered more, or differently, than others.

Why it matters now

The Jericho skulls are among the oldest known examples of humans making images of the dead. They predate writing, pottery, metal, and most of what we think of as civilisation. They show that the impulse to preserve a face, to hold onto a person after death, is older than almost any other cultural practice we can trace. They also show how much we do not know. We can describe what was done — the plaster, the shells, the handling — but we cannot hear the words said over them, or know what it felt like to live in a house with one of these objects in it. That gap between evidence and interpretation is always present in archaeology, but it is especially stark here, because the skulls are so direct. They are faces. They look like they should tell us something. And they do, but not everything. The practice stopped. Whatever need these skulls answered, it was not permanent. Later cultures in the same region did not continue it. That impermanence is worth noting. We sometimes assume that once a ritual begins, it persists, but these skulls are evidence of a practice that started, lasted, and ended, all within a relatively brief window of prehistory. They are not the beginning of a tradition. They are the tradition, entire.

The surprising detail

The skulls were found in caches, buried together in groups, and each group shows a consistent style — the way the plaster was applied, the way the features were shaped. This suggests that different households, or different generations, had their own methods. The faces were not made to a single template. Each group of skulls looks like the work of the same hand, or the same teaching, but different groups look different from one another. This implies that the practice was local, transmitted within families or small communities, not standardised across the settlement. It was a shared idea, but not a uniform one.

What is disputed

The interpretation of these skulls as ancestor veneration is widely accepted but not certain. The evidence — burial beneath homes, careful modelling, signs of handling — is consistent with that reading, but it does not prove it. We do not know if the individuals whose skulls were chosen held specific roles, or if the practice was familial, communal, or religious. The shells, the plaster, and the effort are facts. The meaning is inference.

Remember this

Faces rebuilt in plaster, kept and handled, then buried again — one of the first times humans made images of the dead.

Test yourself

Why is the fact that these skulls show signs of wear significant for interpreting their purpose?

Go deeper

Image: Gary Todd, CC0. Licence: CC0. Source.

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