Chalcolithic Sites in Palestine It was once thought that the dispersed communities of Chalcolithic Palestine—in the ×Golan Heights, the Judean and ×Negev deserts, the ×Jordan Valley and Israel’s northern coastal plain—had little contact with each other. But remarkable similarities between the artifacts discovered in the Peqi’in burial cave and finds from these other ×Chalcolithic sites tell another story. The Peqi’in cave is a veritable museum of ×Chalcolithic art; its cultic objects and grave goods exhibit artistic styles of various ×Levantine subcultures. This suggests that the Peqi’in cave served as a regional mortuary center, where people from all over ancient ×Palestine converged to bury their dead. The most abundant vessels strewn about the Peqi’in cave were ossuaries—2-foot-long stone or ceramic boxes used for secondary burials. After about a year, when the flesh had decayed from the skeleton, the deceased’s bones were placed in an ossuary. Some of these painted vessels, resembling miniature houses, are decorated with human-like features such as prominent noses, ears and hair (see the single ossuary, above). Secondary ossuary burial was also practiced at ×Chalcolithic settlements on the ×Levantine coastal plain. In 1958, for example, about 120 ossuaries were discovered in a rock-cut burial cave in ×Azor, south of modern Tel Aviv. Many of the ×Azor ossuaries (see the collection of ossuaries, below) were painted with geometric or floral patterns and had rectangular windows cut into their facades. Like the Peqi’in ossuaries, many were adorned with anthropomorphic features, such as large noses.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 06:55:09 +0000
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