The Jericho Plastered Skulls: Faces Made Over the Dead 9,000 Years Ago

In 1953 Kathleen Kenyon was digging at Tell es-Sultan, the ancient mound of Jericho, for the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem. Her team uncovered seven plastered human skulls together, each with a face built over the bone. They belong to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B, often shortened to PPNB, a name that marks a time before these communities made pottery.

The seven did not stay together. Today they are spread among several collections, and each museum dates its own example.

Other examples are held in further collections. You can read the Ashmolean's own page on its Jericho skull, and the Royal Ontario Museum skull is described in a virtual exhibit from Queen's University's Museum of Near Eastern Archaeology.

The process began after the body had decomposed. The skull was separated, and the lower jaw, the mandible, was commonly removed. Then plaster was modeled directly over the cranium to recreate the features of a face: the brow, nose, cheeks, lips and even the ears. The eyes were made with shell. On the Ashmolean skull they are cowrie shells, set into the eye sockets where the living eyes had been.

The work was done in stages, filling and modeling layer by layer. Plaster recipes and building methods were not identical everywhere; technical studies show that they varied between Jericho and other sites. The Ashmolean skull carries plaster over the front but not the back, and the museum suggests that the back may once have been covered with another material representing hair.

These were not masks made to be worn. The face was built onto the person's own skull, so every one of these objects is both a work of craft and the remains of a particular human being.

In 2009 the British Museum's Jericho skull was examined with micro-CT scanning, a way of seeing inside an object without damaging it. As National Geographic Historia reports, the scans showed that soil had been packed inside the cranium through an opening at the back. The soil supported the bone while the plaster face was added on the outside.

The scans also gave a glimpse of the man himself. He was a mature man, over 40 when he died. His teeth were badly damaged, and he had a healed injury to his nose. His lower jaw is missing, so what survives is the cranium alone with its plaster face. For a temporary exhibition, the British Museum displayed a facial reconstruction beside the original, letting visitors see a modern estimate of the face next to the one his community made for him.

The skull in Oxford belonged to an adult man as well. The Ashmolean notes evidence of artificial head shaping, possibly from binding the head during infancy, a practice that changes the shape of the skull as a child grows. The museum presents the skull as a possible early portrait of the dead individual and as a way the community may have remembered its ancestors.

That word "possible" matters. A plaster face shaped over a real skull follows the bone underneath, so it may preserve something of how the person looked. Whether the makers were aiming for a likeness, or for a more general idea of a face, cannot be read from the plaster alone.

The strongest interpretation is that plastered skulls were part of Neolithic practices for remembering the dead and, perhaps, venerating ancestors. Different scholars have weighed the evidence in different ways.

Kathleen Kenyon herself read the Jericho skulls as portraits of important people who had died. The Ashmolean, as above, presents its skull as a possible representation of the dead person and a way the community may have kept ancestors present. Alexandra Fletcher of the British Museum describes several competing interpretations: the worship of elder males, selection based on skull shape or social status, and portraits of revered members of the community. She says ancestor worship may be involved, but that no single explanation is proven. The archaeologist Karina Croucher has written about these skulls as part of the wider materiality of "ancestors" in Neolithic mortuary practice.

What all these readings share is the idea that death did not end a person's place in the community. Some PPNB villages chose certain skulls, gave them faces and kept them in a continuing social or ritual role. Who was chosen, and exactly why, is still open.

Jericho is the most famous site, but it was not alone. Plastered and modeled skulls have been recovered at a number of Neolithic sites in the Levant and beyond.

At 'Ain Ghazal, the archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat describes Skull 88-1, found in 1988 in a pit beneath a Middle Pre-Pottery Neolithic B building dated to about 7000 to 6700 BCE. At Tell Aswad, near Damascus, the group of nine modeled skulls is described by the Laboratoire Archéorient as an exceptional funerary find; Danielle Stordeur, who worked on the site, places it within the PPNB sequence but cautions that the precise phase of the skulls is uncertain. At Kfar HaHoresh, technical study found several layers of plaster, with four different plaster mixtures identified on a single skull.

Taken together, these sites show a shared idea carried out with local differences, in recipes, in methods and in how the skulls were kept.

Museums treat these skulls as the remains of people and as archaeology, not as curiosities. The Ashmolean shows its skull in the setting of the ancient Middle East and names it as a possible early portrait. The British Museum has displayed its Jericho skull in Room 59, Ancient Levant, presented as human remains and ritual equipment. The online records name the objects directly and give their archaeological setting.

If you want to see one in person, check the museum's own website before you go. Displays change, objects travel for exhibitions or rest in storage, and each museum publishes its own current hours and ticket details.

These are the questions visitors ask most often after meeting one of these faces in a museum case.

People in many places have kept the skulls of the dead close as a way of keeping them present. For another living tradition of ancestor skulls, read Asmat ancestor skulls, and for places where whole communities' bones are gathered and honored, see ossuaries around the world. The wider story of what skulls have meant across cultures begins with skull symbolism.