Cernavodă – Columbia D puzzle : the Skull Complex

Abstract

This paper focuses on the re‐ analysis of a feature from the Late Neolithic Hamangia cemetery at Cernavodă – Columbia D (Constanţa County, Romania), excavated at the middle of the last century. The analysis took place in several stages : processing of archaeological information, anthropological re‐ evaluation, combination of the two sets of data, and interpretation. The sample of the re‐ analysed human osteological material includes 11 fragmentary crania and several dozens of other cranial and postcranial remains. Two of the crania present interesting characteristics : one was cut, broken, with a postmortem trepanation, and was polished, while the other bears the traces of a benign tumoral cyst. Another skull fragment bears traces of postmortem burning. In addition to human remains, this feature yielded a pig mandible, freshwater mussel shells, a bolder, a pottery sherd and a fragment of a stalactite/ stalagmite.

Why Keep the Old Dead Around?

“…We can propose the existence of a link maintained between cemeteries and settlements through the circulation of dead bodies between the two. On the one hand, archaeologists have documented that at some point after the decomposition of bodies, a group/the community opened some graves in the cemeteries and selected the cranium/skull, and sometimes other anatomical elements (see Chapman 2010;Koga ˘lniceanu et al 2016;Koga ˘lniceanu, Simalcsik 2018). There is also evidence of redepositions of such fragments in the cemetery area, in new deposits either as careful 'packages', or in groups of individuals.…”