A body burned inside a hut 20,000 years ago signaled shifting views of death
Linking the dead with human-built structures may have brought the dead and living closer
By Bruce Bower
Middle Eastern hunter-gatherers changed their relationship with the dead nearly 20,000 years ago. Clues to that spiritual shift come from the discovery of an ancient woman’s fiery burial in a hut at a seasonal campsite.
Burials of people in houses or other structures, as well as cremations, are thought to have originated in Neolithic-period farming villages in and around the Middle East no earlier than about 10,000 years ago. But those treatments of the dead appear to have had roots in long-standing practices of hunter-gatherers, says a team led by archaeologists Lisa Maher of the University of California, Berkeley and Danielle Macdonald of the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma.
The new find suggests that people started to associate the dead with particular structures at a time when groups of hunter-gatherers were camping for part of each year at a hunting and trading site in eastern Jordan. A budding desire to link the dead with human-built structures possibly reflected a belief that by doing so the dead would remain close to the living, the scientists report in the March Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.
Excavations at the ancient site, now called Kharaneh IV, in 2016 revealed a woman’s partial, charred skeleton on the floor of a hut that had been lit on fire. Her body had been placed on its side with knees flexed. Analyses of charring patterns on her bones and burned sediment surrounding her remains suggest the woman’s body was placed inside the hut just before the brushwood structure was intentionally burned. Charcoal- and ash-rich sediment borders where the hut once stood, a sign that the fire was confined to the structure. The hut’s walls apparently fell inward after being set ablaze.