Archaeological excavations at Gbekli Tepe, a transitional Neolithic site in southeast Turkey, have revealed the earliestmegalithic ritual architecture with characteristic T-shaped pillars. Although human burials are still absent from thesite, a number of fragmented human bones have been recovered from fill deposits of buildings and from ad- jacent areas. We focus on three partially preserved human skulls, all of which carry artificial modifications of atype so far unknown from contemporaneous sites and the ethnographic record. As such, modified skull fragmentsfrom Gbekli Tepe could indicate a new, previously undocumented variation of skull cult in the Early Neolithic of Anatolia and the Levant
|
