The Proto-Neolithic Cemetery in Shanidar Cave

In distant prehistory, along a branch of the Tigris River, a group of humans once lived in a community "on the threshold of the Neolithic Revolution." Near their open village at the river, Shanidar Cave, nestled in the Zagros Mountains, several as a base camp and also sheltered a burial site. Eleven thousand years later, archaeologists excavating the cave have discovered artifacts and skeletal remains that offer impressive evidence about this site's prehistoric culture and, specifically, about the origins of agriculture and trade. The thirty-five bodies in twenty-six burials and the associated artifacts recovered from the cave's upper levels are systematically catalogued and described in this well-illustrated and carefully explicated report. Associated with the burials was a special assemblage of funerary goods and human remains that provide new clues to he familial relationships and lifestyles of these people of the ninth millennium B.C. The only prehistoric cemetery site of its kind east of the Mediterranean area, Shanidar Cave adds a new geographic perspecti

Anagnostis P. Agelarakis is a professor of anthropology and an archaeologist specializing in bio-archaeology and anthropological archaeology, with a focus on human paleopathology and currently serves as director of the Environmental Studies Program at Adelphi University.