Human Taphonomy Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The Jungfernhöhle cave is located near the village of Tiefenellern, in Bavaria. Soon after its discovery in 1951 an illegal digging took place, followed by a rapid –to say the least– excavation campaign during which the cave was entirely emptied. More recently, in 2008, it was decided to conduct further research on the site, in front of the cavity entrance. The finds uncovered during these campaigns and the radiocarbon dating show that the cave has been occupied on several occasions, from the end of the Mesolithic to at least the Iron Age. Three of these occupations include human deposits, dating from the Late Mesolithic, the end of the Linear Pottery period (the most significant one) and around the middle of the 4th millennium BC.

The present paper wishes to present a review of the data concerning the Linear Pottery human assemblage, which has so far produced contradictory studies, but which is nevertheless mentioned on a regular basis to illustrate the various types of funerary or social practices at the end of the Early Neolithic. It should be noted that this review came up against several problems, in addition to those inherent to this type of series where the human remains cannot be attributed to individuals anymore and where immature remains are in a very high proportion: the lack of field records on the one hand, and the poor quality of the excavations on the other hand, during which many bones were lost, and above all a mixing of bones belonging to different occupations. Even though the scope of the conclusions that could be drawn from the review is of course limited, this study provides a certain amount of information, which can reasonably be considered characteristic of the Linear Pottery assemblage.

The human remains discovered during the 1950s excavations represent a total of at least 49 individuals, 13 adults and 36 immatures. This is consequently an abnormally young population. And this is all the more true since the determination of the age at death of the adults shows that among the thirteen, at least five are under thirty, four of them being under 25. Moreover, the gender determination for adults and adolescents reveals a high proportion of females, one male only being assuredly identified. The palaeodemographic analysis confirms the under-representation of adults, with selection of the dead or natural mortality among an already selected population. It shows also, and this is a more common thing, a lack of very young children, in particular under one year. One the other hand, there is no argument in favour of non-natural mortality.

The quantitative analysis carried out on the remains testifies to an averagely preserved assemblage, regarding not the state of preservation of the bones, which is very good, but the conditions of excavation: most anomalies can be explained by losses due to the lack of sieving, and besides some of the missing elements have been found in the spoils. So, nothing proves that the complete bodies were not introduced as such in the cave.

The study of bone modifications shows a few marks caused by animals, some burning traces, cut marks on one single element, and above all a large amount of scraping marks, which predominate on large long bones from adults and immatures alike. The study also proves the existence of fresh bone fractures, of deliberate human origin. Fractures concern almost exclusively adult bones and are mostly predominant on large long bones and on the skull, which makes us think that at least for adults fracturing and scraping could be related.

All these observations raise one first question: how can we be sure that they concern the Linear Pottery population, since the human remains from three different periods were all mixed up? Truly, we cannot, but given the information provided by radiocarbon dating on the proportion of remains belonging to each period in the assemblage, this is by far the most likely possibility. The problem comes rather from the fact that the mixing may have minimized or hidden some facts, regarding the demography in particular, but the risk of being wrong thinking that the observations refer indeed to Linear Pottery practices is very low.

None of the two explanations put forward in the former studies can reasonably be accepted: on the one hand, there is no conclusive argument in favour of armed violence, let alone of cannibalism, and on the other hand the arguments which backed up the hypothesis of two-staged funerals are not admissible any more. But this is not a reason why we should reject the funerary nature of the Linear Pottery human deposits: there is no argument against this theory, even though this makes of the Jungfernhöhle the only identified example of funerary cave for the whole Linear Pottery culture. This is not the only uniqueness to this site: even though there are at the end of the Early Neolithic some demographic profiles close to this one, or examples of bones cut up and fractured, no series gathers all the characteristics existing at Tifenellern, and some aspects have no exact equivalent. Should the funerary hypothesis be admitted, what must be kept in mind above all is that the Tiefenellern cave depicts a long overlooked variability of the Linear Pottery funerary practices; this variability seems to increase dramatically at the end of the period, for reasons currently debated, but which will be fully understood only if we make the effort to place all the treatments of the dead at the same level, without rejecting what seems too weird to be of any interest.