Death in Peqi’in - The BAS Library

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Sometimes archaeologists come face-to-face with a site so unusual that they feel a sense of awe in its presence. That describes our experience upon entering and excavating a mortuary cave in the Galilean hills of northern Israel. Used for burials during the Chalcolithic period (c. 4500–3500 B.C.E.), this cave had been sealed for nearly 6,000 years. 054 One warm spring day in 1995, Fakhri Hasson, the local antiquities inspector in Peqi’in, received an urgent call. During construction of an access road to a new school and an adjacent youth hostel, part of the roof of a cave had collapsed, […]

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Footnotes

Ossuaries were used for secondary burials. In primary burials, the deceased was simply placed in a permanent grave. In secondary burials, the bones of a corpse were reinterred a year or so after the primary burial. Usually this involved placing the bones in a rectangular box, made of stone or clay, about 2 feet long (the length of the longest bones in the body).

See Claire Epstein, “Before History: The Golan’s Chalcolithic Heritage,” BAR 21:06.

In a number of instances, however, soot was evident inside the bowls.